webscaleizfun
Joined 10 years ago
Joined 10 years ago
For the average shopper, pricing in shipping and sales tax will make them buy more online. Breaking out sales tax has caused a 9% sales drop in states Amazon charges sales tax in.
[1] - http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/washington/tacoma
I don't see "free" shipping going away, nor do I see Amazon's new delivery service succeeding where DHL and other have floundered in the past, since you need a certain volume in that business to even be viable, and Amazon has stated they can't push that volume alone to make running a shipping service make sense.
What might happen, and what I hope happens is the lower end, smaller businesses get better next day and 2 day shipping prices. Currently, from one wholesaler I can order a 50lb box of hardware, and UPS charges them $21 to $23 to ship it from Chicago to Seattle in the span of about 18hrs and get it on my doorstep.
Another much smaller vendor I deal with can't get anywhere near that pricing, half that weight/size box will run me $150 easily, with ground (a week and change) being $40 usually for a 25lb box from them.
Edit: Another layer to this is USPS and China Post teamed up a while back and offer Chinese sellers dirt cheap ePacket shipping, where 1lb of goods can be moved to the US for $5, whereas USPS charges $50 to the American seller to ship something to China [1]. Essentially, it makes American online sellers uncompetitive in our own market. This is why people like Trump, since he says he'll put a 35% tariff on foreign imports and end programs like ePacket (not supporting him though, just to be clear).
[1] - https://www.skubana.com/e-commerce-trends/the-usps-epacket-p...