Hobby & Craft Forums

After today's fair I am planning a stock take for a sale in the New Year, this brings up the thoughts on P & P, atm I do not charge for P & P but with the increasing costs feel that I have got to change this.

Now the question is would you rather see graduated postage according to what you spend, flat fee or percentage, or increase the prices by a nominal amount per item to include P & P.

I personally prefer a flat rate postage, no suprises at checkout then

I've voted for graduated cost as this was the closest to my ideal... you could also use postage to your advantage by having less postage the more customer buys encouraging them to spend more etc! This method works about 80% of the time with me personally, not sure about others but it must work if the likes of Amazon do it i.e. I want to buy a book which costs £25 and the delivery is £3.95 but if I spend over £30 then delivery is free. I usually look for something else to buy, maybe a CD or DVD or something which makes me spend more than I originally planned but if the CD is for sale for £15 then I get it for £11 as there's no postage to pay etc!

This is the bane of my life...because Paypal shopping baskets do it based on how much you spend - and some of my low cost items are heavy and some are light so, for instance a Moisturiser costing £5.50 will only cost £1.62 to post but a soap base costing £2.50 costs £4.50 to send!!!

I switched to Romancart which allows for weightbased postage rates...so it is much better but it's hard for me to offer a flat based P&P charge (which is what I prefer) because (again) some items cost me a few quid to post and others cost £7.00 to post (and that doesn't account for the time spend packing it up and all the packaging costs...

£7.50 is now my maximum and that seems to work (especially on the Bath-Bomb.com site) as most people want to buy 2 or 3 kits so they kind of get the second, third or fourth one for no more Postage....

Does it not allow you to put in seperate postage prices for each item Judith?

judivenn wrote:This is the bane of my life...because Paypal shopping baskets do it based on how much you spend - and some of my low cost items are heavy and some are light so, for instance a Moisturiser costing £5.50 will only cost £1.62 to post but a soap base costing £2.50 costs £4.50 to send!!!

I switched to Romancart which allows for weightbased postage rates...so it is much better but it's hard for me to offer a flat based P&P charge (which is what I prefer) because (again) some items cost me a few quid to post and others cost £7.00 to post (and that doesn't account for the time spend packing it up and all the packaging costs...

£7.50 is now my maximum and that seems to work (especially on the Bath-Bomb.com site) as most people want to buy 2 or 3 kits so they kind of get the second, third or fourth one for no more Postage....

I know what you mean, although I prefer a flat rate postage, I am supposed to be doing postage by weight at the moment due to my current supplier, but I messed up the weights and havn't had the time to go through 170 products checking and altering the product weights. So currently I have a £5 flat rate delivery charge, it feels a bit steep to me, but means I would currently make extra on some orders and loose money on others.

But I also liked what Nicki sais about free delivery over a certain amount, so will look into that in the new year if the profit margins add up.

Nickie wrote:Does it not allow you to put in seperate postage prices for each item Judith?

I may do, Nickie, but it's likely to be too difficult and fiddly - I do offer shipping to EU (at a different rate) and the rest of the world (at yet another rate)...so I'm not sure the code to configure the basket would be able to cope with all that info...

A weight based configuration means I can input the weight (within the code) for each item in the shopping basket and then configure the cart to charge P&P based on that weight according to where in the world the customer is...if that makes sense???

It does work better for some items - I have only just switched the Bath-Bomb.com site over to Romancart - There is a difference of about 500gms in the weight of a bath-bomb kit and a soap kit so they used to both be charged P&P of £5.50 - now the soap kit is only £4.50 and I'm definitely selling more of them...

Thank you for the replies, I must admit I often have to trawl sites looking for the postage rate, which is annoying, before ordering and sometimes have placed an order only to reject it when I get to the end as the P & P is too much. I have always favoured free P & P but recently sent one of the matinee jackets and it cost £1.62 for an £8.00 item admittedly sent RD the only thing is not use RD but get proof of posting for smaller items then the comp is up to £39.00 and then larger items, which are dearer up the comp levels accordingly.

I am a cheap skate and tend to buy from free P & P sites that way I know up front what I am paying, they may include part in the costs but hate surprises.

As a customer I like to know the postage before I start adding basket.
I avoid sites where it is calculated and then added on.

For our site we have gone for a flat rate of £2.99 which, if you look is on the front page, on an image of the UK.
I feel awful when someone buys 1 bar of soap and they have to pay £2,99, but they do know that when they order.
Conversely, when someone orders £100 worth, they still pay £2.99 and we bear the extra cost.

We spent hours agonising over how to charge postage.

Am thinking that maybe the flat rate is the way to go, as you said Jane making it clear on the front page of the site.