So that means the webship has to know where I live and what kind of shipping I want. Granted, Amazon probably already knows this, but when I use a new webshop, they can't know this, and I don't want to have to tell them before I can see the price of their items.
It's better than not knowing the price until I tell them where I live.
> It seems to me that what you’re really saying is that they need to know where you live and what kind of shipping you want before they can show you the real price.
If they want to include shipping in the price, then yes, they need to know where I live before they can tell me the price. So either they can't tell me the price, or they will change the price after they learn where I live, or they won't change the price and lose money on it, or they may refuse to ship to me. None of these options are in any way reasonable, except maybe not telling me the price, but that's extremely annoying.
Better to not include shipping, tell me shipping is not included, and add shipping later. That way, shipping cost can be the real shipping cost, rather than shipping cost for 1 item times the number of items, which is likely to be more than the real shipping costs.
Not at all, how that price is built up is extremely relevant. If an item is cheap but shipping is horrendously expensive, I go look if I can find it at another webshop that has more reasonable shipping. Shipping is part of the total price. Pretending it's not is taking information and choice away from the customer.
There are exceptions to this. For example, I trust McMaster-Carr to charge me whatever they get charged for shipping, which is good because they won’t tell you in advance what it will cost. But in general it’s just another number. It’s a really common scam to have a cheap item with expensive shipping in order to trick people who aren’t paying close enough attention.
Put it this way: store A is selling widget X for $40 with “free shipping,” store B sells it for $35 plus $5 shipping, and store C is $15 plus $25 shipping. Who do you buy from?
For example, if C sells something else that I want that's also much cheaper than a the other shops, and it won't increase shipping costs much, then that's the better option. If not, I may continue to shop around until I find a shop that combines low item price with reasonable shipping cost.
As you say, your store preference depends on various factors. If C’s shipping costs are structured one way, you’ll prefer them. Another way, you won’t. You have to know all those details before you can choose. That’s my point: ultimately, functionally, there is no difference between a random store that won’t show you prices until you give them your location, and a ransom store that shows prices immediately but won’t give you shipping costs until you give them your location.
Consolidating the S&H into the item cost makes sense for a subset of situations sure, but there's a huge set where it's exploitive.
Amazon orders for example often can amortize S&H costs by shipping a single package containing multiple items sharing a common origin. I'd argue that's true for a huge portion of Amazon orders. It's simply not a good generalization.
Having a fixed per-item shipping costs lowers overhead drastically, especially for smaller sellers. Large sellers obviously have different customers and I doubt they get away with just multiplying PER_ITEM_SHIPPING_COST X NUMBER_OF_ITEMS (I didn't think that was the focus on the OP though).
I also disagree that it does not generally apply. Given two items, A & B, you might have the following total:
A_shipping + A_price = A_total
B_shipping + B_price = B_total
AB_shipping + A_price + B_price < A_total + B_total
A_shipping < AB_shipping
B_shipping < AB_shipping
"Why am I paying for prime?"
Yes, this is why these tactics work. The human brain is being hacked by shady practices.
- If you return the item you will be refunded the total purchase price instead of the price of the item sans shipping.
- You know how much it will actually cost to own the item when its in your cart instead of hiding the cost until the last second when you've already committed.
An industry that works on 3% margins already.
I actually prefer this. It's much better than shops that activity try to hide shipping costs until the last moment. Also it makes comparing prices quicker.