Why Is Shipping So Expensive?
We ask ourselves this question all the time. We know our customers wonder why it costs $12 just to ship a doll outfit, and we're equally appalled. This week, we're shedding some light on a few reasons why shipping costs are out of control, and we're giving a few examples what we try to do about it to help our customers.
As a small business, our shipping practices have become more and more burdened from parcel service policies and pricing. The pricing is one of the easiest things to explain, because it's a product of the slowing of the economy and inflated gas prices. Fuel for trucks that carry and deliver packages is far more expensive than it was five years ago, and shipping services pass this expense along to their customers in the form of price increases. What I personally find hysterical is that UPS charges a fee to "offset the climate impact" of a shipment - meaning to be more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly, you have to pay more. Isn't fuel efficiency supposed to save money? But I'm not in the shipping industry, so I'm judging from outside the situation. Perhaps this is unfair to them. My apologies to them in advance - I can only speak as a confused and frustrated parcel service customer.
Most of the above are details you probably already knew or could deduce for yourself. What you probably wouldn't expect or be able to anticipate are the hurdles parcel companies make parcel shippers jump over to get a package priced in the first place. Sure, it's easy to plug in addresses, weights, measurements, and values and then print out a label, and then off your package goes. But here's the catch - you put in a weight of 15 pounds for a box 20 inches long by 20 inches wide by 25 inches high for a fashion doll trunk, and when you read the shipment details, UPS calculates your 15-pound 20 x 20 x 25 shipment to be "billable" at 61 pounds. How is that even possible? How does that make sense? Well, we may not be able to make sense of it, but we can explain it to the best of our understanding.
Some of you probably ship on a regular basis, either selling from home or for a business, and so you may be quite familiar with incredibly pregnant and bewildering terms such as "billable weight." But we don't often ship items that exceed regular parcel standards, so the "billable" and actual weights are usually the same. Thus, we're rarely surprised by shipping costs or billable poundage, but on occasion, we find ourselves absolutely shocked! So what is this mysterious billable weight, and why does it override actual weight? For companies such as UPS, billable weight is all about calculating how much space will be taken up by your package on a truck, how much fuel will be consumed to transport it from us to you, and how heavy it is because that impacts what's required of the driver to pick up and deliver it.
Sounds simple enough until you backtrack to that very first element where so much emphasis is placed: how much space it takes up. As an example, we'll use the above package. To successfully navigate the Rubik's Cube of charts and policies that are responsible for these costly quirks would require pages of explanation and a compass so we can find our way back. So, we'll simply summarize a few key elements, the first and most pivotal of which is dimensional weight. Yes, yet another ambiguous shipping term regarding weight, when really the formula for this equation has nothing to do with the actual weight of the package and everything to do with determining how much space it will take up so that a much larger number can be added to the real weight.
Simply put, dimensional weight is the cubic size of the box, so the equation is Length x Width x Height. And for reasons unbeknownst to me, since it's been a long while since I took geometry, you divide the sum (of L x W x H) by 166. Using our example, 20 x 20 x 25 = 10,000 / 166 = 60.241. And there you have it - 61 billable pounds. If you don't believe it, check out "How to Determine Billable Weight" at the UPS official website. According to the domestic shipment calculations there, if the cubic size (the sum of L x W x H before dividing by 166) is less than 5,184 inches, then you can use the actual weight of the package to determine cost. Between the actual weight and billable weight, UPS will, of course, use whichever is higher to calculate the cost of your shipment.
Now, we come to our end of the equation: the Monarch Collectibles shopping cart. We love our new website, as we do our new shop, but we're limited by certain formulas our shopping cart has to perform. First, our inventory varies wildly in size, meaning that larger dolls need larger boxes with more protection for safer shipping. Second, our cart pulls domestic rates from UPS, because our shipping contract is with them since 95 percent of our parcels ship within their standard parcel requirements, allowing our shipping and handling for the majority of our items to be accurate 95 percent of the time. Last but not least, we add our costs for shipping materials and handling fees in by weight, since it's the most efficient and effective way for our cart system to factor those elements into your shipping and handling charge.
Obviously, we know that the weight of the package from our example isn't 61 pounds. The above package will cost $32 (and change) to ship whether you enter the weight as 15 pounds or 61 pounds, and that's because of the billable weight. Plus, we add to the weight to cover shipping materials and handling fees, as I just mentioned. Therefore, we would list this item at 70 pounds. For the record, the difference between a shipping weight of 61 pounds and 70 pounds is about $2, which is the lowest end of our handling fees, which range from $2 to $10, depending on what's involved with packing your order and preparing it for shipment. The highest we have charged for handling was about $20 on particularly complicated international orders. Anything beyond that, we always refund, whether you pay with PayPal or credit card. So, even though you see the weight listed at 70 pounds when you go to check out, be assured that we know this isn't the actual weight of the item, but unfortunately, due to its sheer size and shipped dimensions, that is what it will cost us, a nominal charge for handling and materials included, which is why that's what it costs you.
Finally, everyone knows that international shipping is very expensive, but is it really as expensive as our cart calculates at check out? Sometimes, it's not. And here's the reason for that: since an item can only have one weight, we have to list the billable weight based on our domestic parcel service, even though USPS Express Mail International uses actual weight to calculate postage. In other words, a package billable at 50 pounds with UPS is only billed at its real weight of, let's say, 15 pounds when shipped internationally. However, whether you are in the U.S. or located abroad, the shipping and handling costs will be calculated by our website based on a 50-pound weight. In this case, we take the package to the post office, get the actual postage cost for 15 pounds, add handling, and give you a partial refund for the difference.
Many of our dolls over 22 inches tall have their weight listed at 30 pounds, because that is their approximate billable weight once we get them into an oversize box, even if the actual weight is only 5 or 10 pounds. Once boxed, many of these dolls will only fit in shipping boxes 24 x 20 x 12 or larger. (See the above overcomplicated formula for dimensional weight.) If you do the excessive math, dolls in boxes 24 x 20 x 12 are technically billable at 34 pounds. You might be surprised at the number of times our shipping charges (the shipping costs we charge the customer) have turned out to be much lower than what we actually had to pay - sometimes by $30 to $50, even with the weight listed at 30 pounds for a doll that actually weighs 8 or 9 pounds for which the customer may have already paid $25 in shipping and handling. We absorb that loss, because the miscalculation is our mistake, just as we occasionally issue partial shipping refunds for the same reason. And yes, this fantastic mess and chaos is all due to the cubic dimensions of the shipping box, which we always try to keep as compact yet insulated as possible.
We do our best to ensure that our customers are treated fairly by this complicated system of calculations. Recently, we had a buyer purchase an American Girl-sized outfit, and the lowest weight we can enter into this system is 1 pound, which still brings shipping for a simple set of clothes to over $12. Due to our shipping contract as well as staff and time constraints, we cannot take every order to the post office to see if it will be cheaper (although, you would be surprised how comparable domestic prices are sometimes between USPS and UPS for parcels). However, in this case, we knew it would be the best service to our customer to take the outfit to the post office where it cost much less to ship with Delivery Confirmation, and we refunded the difference in postage after handling fees. I should note that we would love to offer free shipping in our online shop or the kind of discounted shipping that large retailers and some private sellers do, but as a brick-and-mortar doll store, unfortunately, it's not fiscally realistic for us to do so.
Is your head spinning at 120 miles per hour? Mine too.
Personally, we believe that you shouldn't need a doctorate in physics to figure out how much it costs to ship something, nor should you need a room of NASA scientists to explain why a 15-pound box will cost you the same as if the box weighed 61 pounds and was a fraction of the size. But shipping isn't our industry, so all we can do is help our customers to understand why shipping charges are so high and issue a partial shipping refund if the formula fails us - and you.
We're always happy to answer any questions regarding shipping, and we appreciate your patience and understanding with shipping quandaries such as these.
We welcome feedback on this article! Feel free to email us at monarch@dollsdolls.com, or call to speak with our in-store doll blogger Mary at 1-800-648-3655.
