There has been one recuring theme in all my seminars since my first one in August 2005 – Shipping Costs in SA. They’re irregular, illogical and just doesn’t make any sense!
I once ordered a DVD from the UK. It was clear from the parcel that shipping and insurance was £0.95 – at the time about R9. The problem was that Amazon posted the same parcel twice. So I had to send one back.
The VERY SAME parcel in the same shrink-wrap and box would cost me R110 from SA to the UK. Same weight, same dimensions, everything. Except that did NOT include the insurance. It was cheaper for me to simply pay Amazon for the second DVD and give it away as a gift. Which is exactly what I did.
Today I had to ship some parcels off around South Africa. Overnight Counter-to-Counter was R52. This is an acceptable price, no worries. But what if I had to post it overseas? I decided to ask SpeedServices.
They told me that they could ship to 200 destinations worldwide. Each country is priced differently. They could not give me a pricelist NOR could they even give me a list of countries they support! Go to their website and it’s just as bad! This is a snapshot under International Courier:
This is it! Nothing else! No other information provided and no other links!
How am I supposed to set up my website and shipping fees? Should I take a random fee and hope that it’s ok? A friend of mine tried that. After numerous chats to various people at various courier companies, he was told that it wouldn’t be more than $100. Then he got an order for one of his zebra skins (selling via eBay) to the USA and turns out the shipping alone was R2500! The client in the US refused to pay the extra shipping fee and my friend ended up making a huge loss.
If we’re going to live in the 21st Century – we need a wake-up call. Courier companies need to relook at their strategies and maybe, just maybe, more people would start using same-day courier service in this country.
What do you think?
Popularity: 7% [?]
