Made in USA Forever.com’s Shipping Fees
February 28th, 2008
A few customers or www.MadeinUSAForever.com have asked me recently about shipping costs and sales tax, so I will use this opportunity to address it.
Presently we almost always use UPS, though I am investigating other alternatives. The advantages with UPS include the ability to constantly track packages in an easy for customers, plus UPS pretty much ships anywhere in the country within 2 to 5 days. That lets me compete with Amazon, etc. on delivery time, often significantly beating our larger competitor’s turnaround time.
The main issue is cost, particularly to residential and rural areas. The website is presently setup to pass along most of the actual UPS cost. We do not make a profit on shipping, and actually end up subsidizing it a lot of the time. Therefore, here are some tips that would save you money on shipping:
-If you can, have the package shipped to your office rather than a residence, as UPS adds on a $2 fee for home delivery.
-Instead of several small orders over a few months, consider occasional bigger orders. Most of the UPS fee is in the first pound, and has nothing to do with the dollar value. Therefore, adding another shirt to one order rather than waiting to do another order next month would save quite a bit on shipping – for example the first package goes from $7 to a total of $8 (i.e. $1 more shipping for the weight of the extra shirt), whereas the two separate shipments would have been $7 each or $14 total. Some of the bigger orders have shipping fees that are less than local sales tax.
My question to you is, would you prefer an option that is cheaper, but perhaps takes longer and without live package tracking?
On sales tax, we only charge sales tax to shipments within California. Therefore, there is no sale tax on shipments to anywhere else in the nation.
Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 1:58 amand is filed under Uncategorized.
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