I just used a website that had a simple form at the bottom of the cart. It had one text input for the postal code, and a button to get the rates to that postal code based on what was in my cart. IMHO, this is how it's done right, since all you need to know is general location and weight.

Maybe I haven’t done enough online shopping recently, but as far back as I remember this used to be the norm: enter postcode to calculate shipping, get precise final price without even adding to cart. Is it not the case anymore?

On many websites it still is. But recently many smaller independent stores use the Shopify platform where shipping is the penultimate step, before billing. You have to give address, email(!), phone number(!, mandatory), etc. before getting the price. I normally just use a fake email and number to get shipping price, and then do the actual checkout in incognito. Pretty sure if you do enter your real info and don't continue with the purchase then you'll get email spam telling you to buy stuff.

Also increasing conversion rates via the sunk-cost fallacy. If I see up front that the air conditioner I'm ordering costs $30 to ship, I'll check another site. But if I already decided on this one and I just did all the work to go find my credit card, enter my billing info - maybe I'll just say "ehhh. Fine." and purchase it anyways.

Phone number is required or otherwise highly encouraged by some shippers, like FedEx.

I'm pretty sure most sites (eg. Amazon) does the same thing. Probably for the reason you mentioned: so they can have your contact information to send you spam later.

My girlfriend uses this as a pretty effective tactic to get discounts - you just have to wait a couple of days and they'll send you an email with a lower price to keep down abandonment rates

Haven't received any "items in your cart" emails from Amazon peronally, but I will end up seeing Ads for the products later on.

Is that US only? You need country too.

For commercial scale products you need more than that. The full address. Is the address residential vs commercial with a loading dock? That and more factors impact the shipping price a lot! Logistics companies have people who have to research an address and look at Google Earth photos of the property to answer these questions.

I will bail from the purchasing process on sites that are unwilling to give me a final price before I enter payment information.

A postal code should suffice, and I'm not providing more personal information if the site is unwilling to say what I'll be charged upfront.

Isn't that most of them? Unless you assume they eat variable shipping by 'fronting' you a fixed price. Apologies if I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

It is still typical (for which I am thankful), but that seems to be shifting a bit.

A relatively common example would be shops using the Shopify platform.

Yeah that's true. But from a UX perspective there are ways to make this less opaque. Perhaps a call to action at the top of the listing with an entry box to enter the Zip Code so an approximate final price can be calculated.

Any good UX designer can come up with a solution for this in a couple of hours or less. There's just no motivation to make it happen because this obfuscation of data is particularly optimized and useful for the sellers.

Amazon just lists it as a "subtotal," which I think is probably the best way to do it. I don't know about the "UX designer in a couple of hours" line: automatic shipping is a nightmarish bag of worms and isn't really a UX problem. What do you do if they order multiple SKU's that don't pack nicely into one box or are warehoused in different locations? Or if there is something weird about their shipping address? What do you use for box size and weight, and what approximation did you use for dunnage?

You can approximate UPS/FedEX costs by fitting a trend line, they are decently modeled by a linear (base charge + K*distance) function, but when you go to buy the label you might be way off. This puts you in the lose-lose-lose of either eating the difference of wrong estimates, overcharging for shipping and losing conversions, or just making people hate you by increasing the shipping over the estimate. Making a shipping API call is noticeably slow, so most people require an interaction after the address is entered.

Tim Sweeney's hot take was that "the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and shopping carts!"

e-commerce sites seem to be asking for my location all the time anyways.

If they're doing that anyways, they should have everything they need to hazard a pretty good guess (and then they have an actual inducement for me to provide it).

Agree!

ZIP code box that doesn't oblige you to provide any more accurate data, and also without it, it should still be possible to display brackets. "Shipping: $6 - $24, [enter ZIP code for detailed quote]".

They could at least include the tax in the price. That's normally fixed depending on the item category e.g. low or high tax rate. Only the US is being weird with its taxes.

Tax is depending on where the buyer is coming from.

Canada has provincial sales taxes.

It's really not that weird when you consider the US is not a unitary state.

I don't know if this is true, but I've been many websites that actually claim that they have an extra deal they can't show you until you put the item in the cart. I used to see those a lot a few years ago, not sure if it was a real legal thing or just a trick to get people to add it, but that was definitely a thing and not related to tax+shipping.

It is a contractual obligation with the product manufacturer.

Something like: we will allow you to sell our product but only if you don't advertise discounts more than x%.

> It's usually not possible because you don't know how much the shipping + taxes are until the customer enters the billing information.

Sure, they show you a different content depending on your IP address and lots of shady heuristics, but when it comes to estimate a shipping cost, it is absolutely impossible: you can just be anywhere, who knows where you are. I say bullshit.