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Display weight left in current shipping tier
Following our recent discussions here, I am considering to force tracked shipping for a few problematic countries. However, tracking often costs some €20 extra, which kind of kills the sale. Unless of course the buyer will decide to compile a large package, because PostNL has a single price for it all the way up to 2 kg. For a large package, the shipping charges are a pretty good deal. But.... the buyer will not find out until they actually have reached the point where they are finished compiling such a large order...
Which leads me to the following suggestion!
I think it would be great if buyers could see in their shopping cart how much weight is left until the next tier of a shipping method. This has a few advantages:
- The buyer will get a better deal for their money, as they can add to get the most out of it
- The seller will sell a bit extra if the buyer adds a little to fill up to the limit
And mostly:
- If it's some major parcel/tracked rate, the buyer will understand when it is valid all the way up to a large order size, OR when the seller's shipping is just plain expensive. You simply don't know which one of the two it is, until you continue adding, which you probably are not going to invest your time in if you simply don't know!
I would not be surprised if I missed out on a few major orders because of this not being apparent. If I would be a buyer and I would need a single windscreen piece (which is parcel rate up to 2kg at Dutch shops, or even up to 10kg!!! domestically), I would either decide against it if I see shipping will cost dozens of Euros.... OR, if the shop is big, I will sit down and compile a €100 order to make it count.
(If any seller would have a reason to be against this, it could always be made optional per store.)
Which leads me to the following suggestion!
I think it would be great if buyers could see in their shopping cart how much weight is left until the next tier of a shipping method. This has a few advantages:
- The buyer will get a better deal for their money, as they can add to get the most out of it
- The seller will sell a bit extra if the buyer adds a little to fill up to the limit
And mostly:
- If it's some major parcel/tracked rate, the buyer will understand when it is valid all the way up to a large order size, OR when the seller's shipping is just plain expensive. You simply don't know which one of the two it is, until you continue adding, which you probably are not going to invest your time in if you simply don't know!
I would not be surprised if I missed out on a few major orders because of this not being apparent. If I would be a buyer and I would need a single windscreen piece (which is parcel rate up to 2kg at Dutch shops, or even up to 10kg!!! domestically), I would either decide against it if I see shipping will cost dozens of Euros.... OR, if the shop is big, I will sit down and compile a €100 order to make it count.
(If any seller would have a reason to be against this, it could always be made optional per store.)
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So notionally I'd 100% agree and love this if we knew all the system part weights were reasonably bang on. But I know from lost $$ that they are not. I do submit weight updates when I run into the items, but with so many unique lots, it'll be years before I've verified it all. :-)
at least 95% of the cases. I don't really need part weight to be more accurate than what I have experienced so far, because it is much less fluctuation than what is caused by varying envelope size, the presence/absence of a customs declaration, etc. I at least never noticed any discrepancies that were of a higher magnitude than these things, which are quite minor.
If nothing else it's always possible to adjust the tiers so that you sometimes win a bit and sometimes lose a bit. You can tweak it until you overcharge as much as you overcharge per, say, year.
I do understand the concern that if this feature is in place, you'd get more orders at the upper weight limit. But your issues sound like they're not exactly about limit issues but structural problems with the item weight itself, which could cause trouble regardless. Because even when an order should officially be far from a weight limit, a small weight error in the database times 100 can still ruin the plan entirely. To have to rely on the invisibility of the weight limit to remedy this problem is a pretty miserable fix, but I think we agree :)
I don't mean to make seller's lives miserable by forcing them to piece orders together like nano scientists to fit within volume and weight bounds, I hope that with a comfortable amount of padding we can all be happy :D
There is one small issue concerning volume. The cart can indicate there is some 100g of space left, but after adding 50g the buyer finds out the order qualifies for a different shipping method because of not the weight but because of the volume. Maybe a small disclaimer about this is in order. I don't know how big of an issue this is for other country's shipping methods, but I think it would be a great shame if that dilemma would torpedo the entire proposal, which I think is otherwise greatly helpful. As a buyer I'd rather have the small unpleasant surprise that in rare cases the cart switches to another shipping method, than the unpleasant surprise that as I am investing more and more time in putting together my cart, the shipping costs seem to grow out of control with no way to gauge them.
Leopard, let me see if I have access to my past submissions to Lawrence - when I find a weight issue, I submit it the calibrated weight to fix and he generally accepts them pretty immediately.
Tyson.
> @Teup, just be careful not to 'force' something on some EU countries that you don't force on others. EU rules forbid discrimination between consumers because of their nationality or where they live. This means you may not refuse or accord different treatment to prospective customers from other EU countries unless you have a valid reason to do so. For example, a business cannot elect to ship only to France and Germany and must ship EU-wide, unless their reason for shipping only to France and Germany is that they use their own delivery vehicle and are based on the France/Germany border. I'm not sure you'd get away with insisting on tracking for all Italian customers simply because of long-standing rumours about how dodgy the Italian post system is :)
>
I think that's pretty extreme - that should mean you must always do business with ALL EU countries or none, and under all the same conditions, maybe even the same postage prices? I think it's the business' own choice to decide how to deal with different countries. McDonalds can ask a different price for a hamburger in Italy than in Sweden. From what I understood discrimination is only on the level of the individual (race, religion), policies for countries I think are legitimate. They would also apply to your country fellow men if they were ordering from that location.
You don't have to trust me, it's easily searched online. I've just had a lot of professional experience with EU consumer laws so I try share what I know when it's relevant.
Here in the US, I'm pretty sure you can sell to/ship to whichever states you want - so long as you are going by state, and not discriminating based on consumer obviously. But since we have a Federal postal system (national), I imagine very few businesses limit to specific states (excluding those that ship to their own, perhaps for tax purposes) unless there are legal reasons. For example, I see commercials on TV all the time such as "offer excluded for X states" due to state-level laws that prohibit their operations, e.g., maybe a gambling service site. My own state (California) has some stricter business laws than others, which limit money lending services (some of those are pretty horrific floating around out there), gambling outside of native american tribal lands, etc.