Specifically, it was about what can happen if you fail to check to see that the phone number is correct. And how easy would that be to miss? It’s like your mailbox – you see it all the time, but do you ever notice if a number has fallen off?

Anyway… the first story was about a marketer who spent a bundle on glossy-print, 100-page catalogs. She had laid it out perfectly, included attention-grabbing copy, and was primed for that catalog to bring her sales and more sales.

When it went into the mail and her copy arrived, she took one look, pulled out her wastebasket, and threw up.

There on every one of those 100 pages was the WRONG phone number. Fortunately, she was able to buy the phone number that was printed so disaster was averted.

In another example, a bank had a billboard made… and that phone number wasn’t just wrong, it was the number for an “adult” phone service.

OOPS!

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…