I have been wanting to say a few words about my shipping policies. As we all know shipping is an integral part of the cost of anything you purchase on line.
I use priority mail for all domestic shipping depending on the weight. Many people have requested that I use Parcel Post and I will normally not do this for several reasons. 1. There is really no savings involved unless you have really heavy items. I get free boxes from the Post Office for Priority Mail that are easy to pack and safely ship to you. If I ship something Parcel Post I would have to pass along the price of the box and the additional time involved in packaging. In 99.9% of the items I ship you would lose money.
2. I do not believe that Parcel Post is handled as carefully as Priority and I want to keep the risk down because most of my shipping is fragile.
3. Priority Mail gets the merchandise to you faster than Parcel Post, 2-3 days as opposed to 5-7 days.
4. Finally, and this is the most important to me, if for some reason a Parcel Post package is undeliverable, it will be returned to me and I have to pay the return postage. If the item goes by Priority Mail and it has to be returned the Post Office eats the return Postage.
Another issue is Delivery confirmation. I have spent around $350 on delivery confirmation fees in the past year. Up until the postal rates went up I would simply pass that along to you. When the raised the rates I decided that I would pay this fee myself and I have for the last six months. The bottom line here is that in all this time I have never had to use the confirmation system once to track a package. It's a waste of money. I will continue to use and pay this fee whenever someone buys from me the first time, but after that I am just going to skip it.
Finally, let's talk about insurance. As most of you already know, if there is a problem I will almost always resolve it to your satisfaction. I'm here to make friends and return customers, not enemies and bad publicity. The Post Office will only reimburse you for the amount that you paid me for the item. You are out the shipping cost, even if they accept responsibility for the breakage. Since most of my items are under $10, you will be paying $1.30 to insure a $10 or less item that I am going to reimburse you for any way. I do not recommend insurance on items under $50 and on more expensive items I will normally pay for insurance myself.
What I am trying to do here is minimize the cost to you for your purchase. As in off-line (brick & mortar) stores, look at the total cost and buy where you get the best value and service.
Thanks for listening.... the old guy
Updated for content 06/09.
No comments:
Post a Comment