{"id":44,"date":"2013-06-16T14:54:27","date_gmt":"2013-06-16T04:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"\/journal\/?p=44"},"modified":"2023-09-05T07:39:59","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T07:39:59","slug":"shipping-charges-and-the-user-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/?p=44","title":{"rendered":"Shipping Charges and The User Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Shipping<\/figure>\n

I’ve recently made a few online purchases where the shipping was free. I’m talking next day delivery too. Admittedly, the purchases were in categories where there’s a decent markup, so a sub $10 expense for the vendors isn’t going to send them under.<\/p>\n

But this got me thinking. What would you think of a brick’n mortar retailer who added charges on top of the advertised price of their goods. Charges like store rent, or their inbound shipping costs. Or pro-rata staffing costs.<\/p>\n

Yet that’s exactly what most e-tailers do when they add shipping charges; they pass their expense onto you. And it’s been happening for so long, that we all think it’s completely normal.<\/p>\n

Yes there are businesses out there for whom free shipping is core to their business model. Think Apple<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, Zappos<\/a>, Asos<\/a>, Incu<\/a>, etc. Here’s why they do it:<\/p>\n

The 2013 Pulse of the Online Shopper study<\/a> reports that 88% of those surveyed said they’d abandoned carts, and of those who did, 54% said the reason was shipping had pushed the total price higher than they expected. Bye bye sale.<\/p>\n

So what did free shipping do for me? <\/p>\n

Well, it was better than getting a discount, but more than that, there was no stuffing around having to look-up, calculate, or otherwise search for what the shipping charge would be.<\/p>\n

In short, it dramatically improved my buying experience.<\/p>\n

Yes, there’s exceptions to free shipping. International shipping is the big one. But for local e-tailers, there really is no excuse unless you’re selling super-low margin things like milk, in which case, low-cost delivery by automated quadcopter drones, is just around the corner<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve recently made a few online purchases where the shipping was free. I’m talking next day delivery too. Admittedly, the purchases were in categories where there’s a decent markup, so a sub $10 expense for the vendors isn’t going to send them under. But this got me thinking. What would you think of a brick’n […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":809,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.raoulwegat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}