Why does Amazon make it so hard to figure out which products in your shopping
cart are running up your shipping costs? Is it just me? Let me explain:
Last night, I added a few things to my shopping cart on Amazon. I knew that one
of the items shipping directly from Amazon and qualified for Amazon Prime, so
that would ship for free (shown in the middle of the first screen shot below).
In this case, that item was The Dip by Seth Godin.
The other items were going to ship from 3rd parties so would incur some shipping
charges that added up to $17.74 as the upper-right column shows.
Free shipping for one product. $17.74 for the other two in the order.
One of the two 3rd party shipped items was a pair of bike pedals from Bike
Nashbar, pictured below:
They were listed for $49.99 on Amazon, and it was clearly states that this
product, "Ships from and sold by Bike Nashbar" so I could assume there would be
shipping charges associated with this product.
However, nowhere on the product page does it mention how much the shipping
charges will be. And, as the first screenshot above shows, shipping charged are
not broken out in Amazon's shopping cart.
Since I had more than one item in my cart from a 3rd party vendor, the only way
I could determine the shipping costs of individual items would be to remove all
but one of the items from the cart. There has to be a better way to do this.
What really irks me about this is the order confirmation email I received only
minutes after placing my order:
Notice that it clearly breaks out the shipping costs associated with each of
the 3rd party shipped items? Why doesn't Amazon do this in the BEFORE the
order is placed? It would have been nice to know that the product I ordered
from Northern Tool & Equipment generated $11.32 of the $17.74 I paid in
shipping.
Amazon can do better. They should give their customers the information they
need to quickly make informed purchasing decisions.
