Sites losing sales by being unclear about the carriage charges until the end of the checkout

Its retail arm comes in handy for collecting customer data. And you perhaps can agree that taking some of the uncertainty out of what to sell is a large advantage.
They find out what sells well and buy it themselves - similar method to how other businesses operate though with a much better data collection method that businesses pay them to collect!
Can't get much cheaper than that!

 

Your argument doesn't make any sense on any level. Even if you were the only place the buyer could source the product from, the buyer could just buy it in ones and you would be making less money by paying for 6 lots of carriage, the only person who benefits is the carrier ! Did you not examine the calculation I made ? The seller is making more money for less work. To turn me down was just cutting off his nose to spite his face.

I buy a tin of paint at £8 (£6.66 excl VAT) including the cost of carriage, of which the cost of carriage is more than the cost of the item. At a guess the item might cost the seller £3.00, and the carriage £3.00, gross profit about 66p. But that excludes the cost of packing and processing the order, I can't see why they'd bother but there we go, it's his business.
If he sells me 6 (full price £48.00) for a 30% discount that equals £33.60 (£28 excl VAT). The cost of stock = about £18, cost of carriage would be about £4. So £28.00 - £18 - £4 = £6 gross profit and for far less work as regards packaging and processing. Even if the carriage was twice as expensive (which it would not be) he'd still have made far more, in actual fact often the cost of carriage for 6 of an item is exactly the same as for one, as we on this forum all know

 

We were discussing this at work, and for products which are easily sourced from many sellers you might be right. But stuff like specialist aerial products and long poles it is a different matter altogether. Not many people sell long poles, and it will be fewer still over the next few months as TNT/FedEx have introduced a £49 surcharge [+ fuel surcharge + VAT = £63.50 ! ] for anything over 8ft.....

 

None so blind as those who refuse to see.

You want to give 30% discounts? Great, do so in your business.

Do you give that size discounts? Or will I find you don't give much at all when I look?

 

I can certainly agree with that...

 

Your banner only appears on desktop and not on mobile.

Your 'free delivery' link to standard delivery charges is not very intuitive. Why would someone think clicking on free delivery will lead them to standard delivery charges? Also some people won't even know that's clickable.

Your 'P&P is cheaper' link isn't very intuitive either.

Why don't you just put the standard delivery charges in a tab in every product description? It means the customer doesn't have to leave the product page.

 

It's a good idea to put a link to "Standard delivery charges" (with another link at that point to "possible cheaper RM carriage") on every product, I shall put it on my to do list......

Not sure I agree with this though :
Your 'P&P is cheaper' link isn't very intuitive either :

P&P is cheaper for this item if you phone the order through !

Click on the "P&P is cheaper" link and it explains it all, how could that be any simpler ? ! ?

 

P&P cheaper for complicating the online ordering process!
Only you could come up with that.

The point about ordering online is it should be easy. Why make it harder simply to satisfy yourself?

 

That's news to me. How did you arrive at that conclusions. Are the genuinely making losses in retail or is it more down to creative accounting where they can hide the profits in a parent company in Luxembourg and declare low profits for corporation tax purposes?

 

If someone is declaring low profits rather than having low profits would someone not notice?

Besides one division of the company making a loss while another makes profits is not exactly rare.

 

Surely you just need to do what works best for your business. I got a bit fed up on ebay with people buying stuff that was way beyond their ability level, so I changed my sales blurb and went chatty, blunt sometimes and honest. I also put up a few prices to cope with changes in delivery modes when things went a bit strange. I give people details that they'd probably want to know, but many sellers wouldn't reveal. I tell people if a product will only suit certain buyers - I tell people that the expensive radio is really good if you have a vessel with a large clumsy crew who need something a bit more robust, while most leisure sailors take a pride in looking after their kit. Sales went up! Of both products - the Class A and the leisure radio. When I stuck up the price of antennas when Hermes stopped taking round tubes, I put the price up by the extra cost of Parcelforce and sales have carried on exactly the same. I can't see me going back to postage as extra cost. Inclusive works really well for me.

 

Well it's perfectly legal in taxation so there isn't anything in there for anyone to notice. Not saying this is what amazon do but there are loads of tricks such as having a parent company based in a tax haven and a subsidiary effectively buys stock from parent company at well above what parent company buys it for and effectively show zero profit.

Taxman doesn't care because they get the VAT, so there's a nice 20% for them. Everyone finds ways to mitigate corporation tax. Loads of traditional small businesses in the UK barely pay any corporation tax because all their money goes on payroll.

On the month before the tax is due, I quickly tot up my books and get an idea of the projected profits and then if I have any investments I want to make, any stock I want to order I just do a massive spending run to reduce my corporation tax. It's completely legitimate, I don't think corporation tax is as much of a money maker for them as VAT.

Don't want to open a side discussion about the morality or ethics of it. Just when multinationals declare huge losses or zero profit, you have to take it with a pinch of salt.

 

Is it legitimate? Any payment made during a financial year for stock should be added back to that year's taxable profit as it will only generate income the floowing year. Limited companies are not allowed to use the cash basis for calculating profit.

 

"Carriage included" (it is not "free carriage" !) works when people mainly buy just one of something, but it does not encourage multiple purchases, particularly when the cost of carriage a large percentage of (or in some cases larger then) the cost of the item.
A few years ago we experimented with selling stuff on E Bay, it did not work for us. This was partly because most people on E bay are just after the cheapest stuff (regardless of quality) and partly because, at that time anyway, if you didn't have "free carriage" you came nowhere in the search results. So we changed everything to free carriage and noticed almost everything we sold was in ones, the opposite of what happens when people buy from us directly. You would get the odd one wanting you to make up an order invoice for them but that was just loads of farting about, so we dumped E Bay.

 

It should be clear in the checkout process and there should be user testing. It isn't acceptable to have it in a link. It's a basic usability principle.

 

The point is you shouldn't have to go as far as that, with all the hassle of filling in all your details, to find out the carriage is more than you want to pay. Hence, when I was looking for that toy for my lad I didn't even bother, it would have been too annoying to be forced to waste all my time only to not actually want it in the end.

 

It could be in the basket thought as soon as the buyer has added to cart. Unless the intention is to capture the buyers' details and follow up with an abandoned cart type discount code, which is one ecommerce tactic. But it that by design or an oversight? Surely it's better to capture that sale without the discount? But clicking on the product from Google SERPs (assuming it's listed) from mobile would unlikely result in me clicking the delivery link you suggested. As I'd add the item to the cart (fewer clicks in the user journey / path of least resistant and all that) and want to know how much delivery is at that point, without having to search around the website. On the other hand, you could argue a buyer is unlikely to buy from a website first time anyway. Trust would be built first. But it still doesn't get around that flawed user journey in extra clicks to get the job done.

 

You don't have to go into the checkout process on the Corgi site though - there is an entire page listing the postage costs.