Amazon.com's Vague Shipping Charges - Technology Evangelist

I love Amazon.com, and use the site every day to at least check a price. Let's just say that a lot of smiling boxes have shown up at my house Amazon. However, there is one nagging problem with Amazon's service that really needs to be addressed: shipping opacity.

For example, I just reached check-out for an Amazon.com purchase where my order total is $145.98. The order consists of three items. One that costs $99.99 and is eligible for free shipping. The other three items - accounting for $45.99 of the order - have $23.68 in shipping charges. I'm not a fan of paying a 50% of the purchase price for shipping, so it's time to consider dropping the item generating the outrageous shipping charges. However, this is where things break down: Amazon doesn't break out the shipping charges by item, so I can't tell which item is worth dropping.

Shipping charges from Amazon can become ridiculous when each item is being shipped from a different supplier. Amazon rolls up the various shipping charges at checkout when they should be breaking them out by item - or at least supplier - so I can see which items are worth buying and which should be dropped.

How can I figure determine which item is causing the shipping pain? By dropping one product at a time from my shopping cart to see what effect it has on my total shipping charges. It's a real pain, but is the only option available to me today other than avoiding adding non-Amazon shipped items to my cart in the first place.

Will Amazon address this nagging issue? If so, how? By providing a consistent shipping policy for all items in their store? By providing itemized shipping costs at checkout? Other?

I just went through the same agonizing process of elimination. What makes it even worse is you don't get to see the shipping charges till the end of the whole purchase process.

In my case I discovered a partner for a CD purchase that is listed with a 2.98 shipping charge is actually resulting in $6 added to my total. It would appear to me that listing one price and charging a higher one is fraud.

I often sell books I don't need on Amazon.com. Typically they charge the buyer $3.99 for shipping a book but pass only a portion of that amount on the the seller who is the one doing all the shipping. This, on top of the percentage of the selling price that they take for the listing is pure profit for them. The shipping credit they give the seller sometimes doesn't even cover the actual cost of shipping if it's a heavy book. The high shipping charge that Amazon makes my customers pay puts me at a big disadvantage for pricing. Even for a new book, I've got to beat Amazon.com's price by at least $4 to make it worthwhile for the buyer because they can get free shipping from Amazon for spending only $25 (which isn't hard to do when you're buying books). What's more, even if the customer is savvy enough to buy more than one book from the same seller, Amazon doesn't give them a break on shipping. It's $3.99 per book even if there are multiple books in the same order (which would save shipping costs).

I wish to retract part of the statement I made about Amazon.com above. I used to be that they only passed on a portion of what they charge the customer for shipping to the seller. Now they apparently pass on all of it. Perhaps they listened to my complaint. ;-)

Comments

1. Posted by: Elizabeth on September 30, 2006 10:29 PM:

On the topic of Amazon.com...
I just placed an order for 61 older junk books the order total came to $29.83 No problem right yea well then they figure up my "shipping charges" $212.89
I sure would like to know how they can sell a book for a penny and ship it for $6.00 I can ship a book across country today and it only costs around $1.00 (I checked with USPS)
So you say they need to change policy I say they need to stop commiting fraud!!

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