- How are shipping charges calculated?
- Is Shopster making money on shipping?
- Why is the shipping different today from yesterday?
First of all, Shopster has no margin built into the shipping options. Anything we charge for shipping is purely cost recovery. We calculate shipping differently, depending on what information the suppliers provide us:
- flat rate shipping
- product weight
- product size
First off, if the supplier has a flat rate set shipping domestically, we use that. If they don't, then we use the product weight the calculate the shipping using a linear shipping estimator. This would be a base cost, plus a variable cost per weight unit of the product. For example, if a book is 1 LB, and the shipping rate has a base cost of $5, with an additional $1/LB (not an actual shipping rate in our system), the shipping would be $5 + $1 = $6.00. Similarly, two books would be $5 + $2 = $7 shipping.
In addition, each of our suppliers have different shipping rates because of which carriers they use, whether or not they combine handling costs with shipping, etc. When the supplier's rate is off from our base estimator, we adjust the rate up or down to make the shipping cost more accurate.
Finally, if we have historical information on shipping costs for an item, and the same item and quantity is going the same distance for a new order, we use the last invoiced shipping cost as the shipping cost for the new order.
So, the reason shipping can change from day to day can be due to three reasons:
- Supplier corrects the product weight, size, or flat rate.
- Supplier's shipping adjustment is changed to make the shipping estimate more accurate.
- Historical information becomes available, so more accurate shipping cost is used.
Note that as a retailer, if you ever come across shipping numbers which look way wrong, that gets escalated to me in a hurry if you contact customer support. It's a very large problem, but we do our best to make our shipping costs as low as possible without losing money.
