January 29, 2001, 9:47 AM — Shipping and handling costs leave a bad taste on the lips of e-shoppers
I MUST ADMIT, we "do" e-commerce in a big way in my house. We just like the convenience of shopping online. And because we work from home, we are not looking to kill time on our lunch hour at the mall.
Although I'm generally pleased with the online shopping experience, lately I have become frustrated at the wildly inconsistent "shipping and handling" charges I'm getting stuck with. Maybe I'm just noticing what's been going on all along, but when you actually pay attention to these charges, they get a bit obscene.
For example, I use Clinique cosmetics, a well-known global brand. I'm a loyal customer, so I was pleased when the company rolled out e-commerce on its Web site. I've been ordering from the site ever since. But when I started paying attention to shipping and handling charges, I became less enamored with Clinique.
Two weeks ago, I purchased two lipsticks, two small containers of moisturizer, and a mascara. (For you guys out there, these are items that are roughly equivalent in size and weight to your mini-Swiss army knife, your keys, or something like that.) In fact, I weighed my Clinique purchases when they arrived, and they weighed a mere 14.6 ounces in total. Yet, surprisingly, shipping and handling set me back eight bucks.
The items were shipped from Ohio to my home in California. Mind you, I always go for the slow shipping, so these are standard shipping charges and not speedy delivery taxes.
A week or so earlier, I bought a Bissell Proheat upright deep cleaner (for carpets) from Vacuum-discounter.com. Shipping costs to send my 30-pound carpet cleaner plus 64 ounces of cleaning fluid from the Texas-based Vacuum-discounter.com to my home: $5.50.
Just for kicks, I called Vacuum-discounter.com and chatted with someone there who told me it costs them $12.91 to ship that model to my ZIP code, and that shipping is usually free (it's bundled in with their extremely competitive prices). The reason I got charged $5.50 was because I ordered that cleaning fluid.
Just days later, my husband Joe was feeling proud because he had located a travel book on www.galleyslaves.com, whose tagline is "your neighborhood bookstore on the Web." Galleyslaves had slipped the book in a plain-looking envelope and sent it U.S. priority mail. "See, at least these guys didn't stick one book in a big box and charge a ton of money for shipping," Joe said. Then he handed me the invoice (apparently they also allow you to send them a check for payment at Galleyslaves), and I noticed the shipping charge said $4.40. Looks like Galleyslaves still tacked on more than a buck, even though the postmark clearly shows it cost them $3.20 to send the package. I guess that extra $1.20 is the cost of "handling," huh?
One of my colleagues, Diane Tunick Morello, points out that Amazon.com offered free shipping during the holidays but then spoiled it by turning cartons over to the U.S. Postal Service rather than UPS. As Diane puts it, she'd rather pay for the UPS shipping charge and know that the item will get to her on time. She also believes that companies such as Amazon are big enough now to offer their loyal customers deals, but they don't.
Now, I recognize that shipping and handling are vague, but e-businesses need to recognize that we consumers are smart. We send out our own mail, so we know what it costs to send a 14.6-ounce package. Some of us shop on the Web so we can get the best price, and we don't want bogus fees interfering with that. It jjust doesn't make sense that some things seem to cost so much more to ship than others.
E-businesses should not dupe their customers by tacking on empty charges unless they want to lose business. You can't make up the losses you incur by running your business badly with shipping and handling charges, although I'm sure some folks sit around and scheme about it. Equally heinous is the crime of putting small merchandise in a big box so we think it must have cost a lot to ship. We're not going to fall for that either. Some reason has to apply here, and when it costs less to ship a carpet cleaner than a couple of tubes of lipstick, something just isn't right.
