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Shopping online, but oh, those shipping costs!Online shopping is becoming more and more popular with people of all ages and walks of life.
With all the wonderful choices of products we can now purchase on the web we have easy ways to locate great products that we may not be able to find in a store. Even better, with just a few clicks of our mouse we can do comparison shopping without leaving our chair! After finding just the right product and clicking “Add to Cart” we feel a great sense of satisfaction for our wise selection.
But wait - your copy of the order shows up and before you begin paying for your products you notice the shipping charges. You ask yourself, “how can they justify charging that much just for shipping one little item?”
Although I have thought that not all shipping charges seem unreasonable, just like you it seems to me that there are many that seem high at first glance. But then I began to realize what all goes into getting a product pulled from a warehouse and shipped to my door.
When we buy a product from an online store many times we are dealing with a retailer who sells products from a manufacturer or distributor. Did you know that for every order we place someone has to drive a forklift through a giant warehouse to get our product? Maybe they have to drive to several different parts of their warehouse to get the several different items we have purchased.
As a consumer, we have to pay for them to pull our product(s), therefore a “fulfillment charge” is included into our shipping charges. Postage itself is not always too expensive but when this fulfillment charge is added onto our order we may often find ourselves thinking that it seems a bit excessive. Then there are handling fees tacked on to many orders to help offset the retailer’s cost that the credit card processing company or pay pal charges for processing each order (we pay increased prices in a brick and mortar store to cover these prices also).
So now we begin thinking that placing an online order may not be cost-effective. But, let’s think this thing through. We still can find the method of online shopping more to our liking for many reasons.
Gas is expensive. Driving to the store and finding a place to park, walking through a parking lot and hanging onto our purse and children can be a challenge. The weather is too hot, too windy, too wet or too cold. We usually buy more items that we set out to and we get hungry and thirsty and spend money on food and drinks. Then there are the checkout lanes to contend with (I know I do not need to expand on this subject)!
I don’t know about you, but now I am convinced that paying for a forklift driver to pull my items is well worth the “fulfillment” cost. I will choose to shop online after all!
PS. I don’t need to put my shoes on to shop online!
SHOP AT All I Can Imagine for eco friendly kids toys, bookends and coat hooks.
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