Does shipping cost influence your vendor preferences?

[Mickeyt1reef]

Agree with most shipping is expensive. Packaging can add up as well. I do like when sellers will do free shipping at a lower total say 200.

 

[Peace River]

I check the total costs, including the taxes as some vendors don’t charge taxes. But taxes are another can of worms.

Good point! Taxes also need to be included in total cost.

 

[GlassMunky]

Total price is all that matters. Free shipping is a myth, the seller is just eating the cost in that case.

The only bad guys here are the shipping companies themselves. Negotiated prices where one buyer has access to prices another doesnt, are fundamentally wrong and probably shouldn't be legal. They can only afford to give big companies discounts because they overcharge small companies. Effectively the big companies are subsidized by the little companies.

But there's nothing livestock sellers can do about it, shipping costs money.

This right here is the root issue of shipping problems. Negotiated prices to these large companies who give you “free shipping” is subsidized by the smaller businesses or just your every day person who’s not a business. Thats why shipping anything on your own will cost you 2-4X what these companies can shop for.

but most of y’all are mad at the small coral vendor While using amazon prime and just furthering the issues you don’t like unknowingly.

 

[FishyDave]

I looked into shipping and found that if I mailed a 4"x4"x4" - 1 pound package with Priority FedX from San Francisco to San Diego the price is $67.89 so I dont think shipping prices are as bad as they could be.
Cheers! Mark

Is that dim weight for the box? If not you are talking apples and oranges. 1 gallon of seawater is 8.6 lbs. How much water is needed for fish or coral?

 

[FishyDave]

About amazon shipping..

I work in IT and we use Amazon's web services for a ton of stuff. This is amazon renting their unused capacity of computers. This now accounts for 50% of their revenue. Next is advertising and then fees on 3rd party sales.

It turns out Amazon loses on ALL its shipping. 11 billion this year alone. All of Amazon's profit is from their other services now. Unfortunately their web service is not growing as it was a few years back. If this continues shipping will go up.

No other company can lose money like this.

 

[EHerbert]

Absolutely. When I started many years ago I got discouraged from purchasing coral online because WYSIWYG is not always so and then seeing pieces at a LFS that would have been a better purchase than pieces I received from online vendors after shipping costs were added in. Luckily, I live in Southern California and have found a half dozen LFSs within 30 minutes of my home and another 4/5 within an hour. So these days I order everything but livestock online.

 

[blurry]

Shipping is a cost, personally I don’t mind it if it’s reasonable (size, weight, speed of delivery...). Free shipping is baked into the costs whether it’s a membership or on the products.

I’ve found most places to be reasonable- only issue in the last year is @EcoTech Marine - they want $15 to ship a $5 cable that fits in a small padded envelope. Either ecotech is making money shipping or they have a hard time negotiating shipping- anyone in the US can ship that for $2-3