Postage costs and your mail order business
I have to confess – I’ve become addicted to murder mysteries. Not all of them, just those written by a few select authors – like Rex Stout, Emily Brightwell, and Agatha Christie. And therein lies the problem: I’ve run out of books!
While my favored authors have written a lot more, our local library has only a tiny sampling. I’ve borrowed and read all that belong to friends, and now I check out the used book shelves and yard sales at every opportunity.
What does that have to do with mail order and postage?
Well, I thought I’d just go to half.com and buy a bunch. These are generally short paperback books. I can read one in a day, or two at the most. Since they’re old and not very fashionable, most of them can be found for under a dollar each.
But the postage! When you add nearly $4 worth I have trouble justifying the cost for one day’s reading. So I thought maybe I could find one seller who had a collection. I did, but the only break on postage offered was to drop it down to about $3 per additional book.
I think that some smart seller could corner the market if he or she offered to charge actual postage for orders with multiple books. Maybe even add a dollar or two for handling to the entire order rather than to each item.
Could you do that in your business? If someone orders 6 widgets at a time, can you put them all in one box, save on postage, and pass that savings to your customers?
Something else – from a psychological point of view,I think it would be wiser to add the “handling charge” into the cost of the item instead of adding it to the end. When I’m shopping I tally things in my head and know what I’m spending. But then when I’m faced with both shipping and handling at the end I quite often abandon the shopping cart – deciding that it really isn’t worth that much.
I do the same thing with catalogs in the mail. And now, knowing that I do that, I check the order page before I even leaf through the catalog. If the shipping and handling is too much, I toss the catalog unopened.
Just something to think about…
Posted: May 7th, 2008 under handling charges, handling fees, mail order, postage costs, psychology of buying, shipping.