Topic: Shipping from Buyer point of view

I don't know if this has been discussed, I didn't see anything on the first two pages.

The way shipping prices are currently set up is completely misleading. I am recently in the market for some new cards and I usually check eb*****,  tcg*****, trol*****, ama*****, goo***** (redacted to be friendly towards deckbox)... etc etc. I decided to add deckbox to my list of sites I check.

I can't buy anything here, because I can't make an informed decision as to what the total price of cards will be. Your sellers are abusing the shipping rates, offering free shipping which show up as $0 in the price list, but when you get two pages further in on checkout its "with 200+ cards" and lowest shipping is $2.00 white envelope at buyers risk. It's not just a few sellers either, it's like every seller. Sorry, I consider this predatory pricing that reminds me of the bad old days of buying online before shipping was enforced by the big retailers. In this day and age it's unacceptable, and all the sites I alluded to above have shipping shown while browsing and it doesn't change on you.

I found one seller that was priced a good $4 below average but lowest shipping was $8 shipping. Is this some kind of joke? I don't think this is that hard of a problem, the default shipping shown should be "minimum price to purchase soley this item".

Thanks.

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

thalaric wrote:

the default shipping shown should be "minimum price to purchase solely this item".

Yes, this.

Profile  Tradelist

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

Interesting to see the flip side of this. From the seller's perspective, the reason why the shipping rates are like this is because a lot of people don't want to spend the time/resources to fill $5 orders with 50 bulk cards... high fixed shipping rates are meant to discourage these sorts of orders, not to be "predatory."

But yeah, I can definitely see how it messes with buyers' abilities to find good deals since Deckbox's matching algorithm ignores all the stipulations that people can put into their shipping options.

Last edited by 9700377 (2016-02-29 13:44:46)

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

The minimum level of functionality required is to show how much it costs to buy a card. After that, I can see how it would be important for sellers to be able to show how bulk orders can lower the cost of shipping. There are ways both concerns can be met, but the first is most important. The way it is now creates incentive to list free or low shipping, then raise it in the checkout page.

That being said, I have to retract the statement "It's not just a few sellers either, it's like every seller." I did a wider range of searches and it's not as prevalent as I initially thought. Any listing with $0 shipping is pretty much guaranteed NOT to have free shipping, but the majority of postings seem to have legitimate costs. Once you learn that "rule" It's not so bad, but it's still a problem, because when it happens to the buyer it's frustrating and drives them away, and other sellers are overlooked due to their apparent higher shipping.

Last edited by thalaric (2016-02-29 22:26:15)

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

I don't think the purpose of what you're describing is to mislead you, though. Basically, Deckbox doesn't let you specify a minimum order size on a shipping option, so users that want to offer free shipping on large orders and a positive shipping cost on small orders (which should be allowed) aren't able to specify which cost should be used on the price of a single card by Deckbox's algorithm... I believe. Maybe some people are taking advantage of this, but I'm not sure if there's a way to *not* take advantage of this if you want to discount shipping on large orders.

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

Out of curiosity, what does it say is my (Andrew Quist) shipping cost here?

Profile  Tradelist

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

Kammikaze wrote:

Out of curiosity, what does it say is my (Andrew Quist) shipping cost here?

$0.01

Profile | Cards for Sale

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

d72B wrote:

$0.01

Thanks. How about now?

Profile  Tradelist

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

Kammikaze wrote:
d72B wrote:

$0.01

Thanks. How about now?

Still the same.

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

9700377 wrote:

Still the same.

Ok, it looks like it's just taking the minimum shipping cost regardless of where it is in the shipping options list. Mind checking just one more time?

Profile  Tradelist

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

Kammikaze wrote:
9700377 wrote:

Still the same.

Ok, it looks like it's just taking the minimum shipping cost regardless of where it is in the shipping options list. Mind checking just one more time?

Now it's $2.04.

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

9700377 wrote:

Now it's $2.04.

That confirms it takes country into account. Thanks for the help smile

Profile  Tradelist

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

But it's like I said, right? If you have multiple options and one is intended for large orders, it'll just show that one on the single card price?

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

Correct. Perhaps the solution would be to implement a minimum order size in addition to the current maximum order size?

Profile  Tradelist

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

That would seem like the easiest thing to do. It's easy to underestimate the difficulty of this, though - adding all these dimensions onto shipping policies makes the shopping optimization problem harder, and I'm not sure how easy it is for sebi to accommodate all of this.

It's also noteworthy that TCGPlayer doesn't allow users to set multiple rates on singles within a single country, probably in large part for this reason. This has always been tricky, though, as merchants face a tricky dilemma between setting low rates and possibly getting shitty orders (ie. someone orders like 10 bulk cards with free shipping, and shipping costs end up being higher than the value of the trade) and setting high rates and not appearing prominently in searches.

Still, I'd guess that allowing for a minimum order size dimension to be specified and then showing the shipping rate on a single card would be the best way to go. Although I'm not sure what you'd display if the user doesn't specify a rate that a single card can be sold at..

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

9700377 wrote:

Although I'm not sure what you'd display if the user doesn't specify a rate that a single card can be sold at..

I can't imagine this would come up much, but if it did it could just be displayed similar to sellers that don't ship to your country. Like what I see when I run into my own listed cards, see attachment.

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Profile  Tradelist

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

I'm considering adding the much-requested "minimum order value" and "maximum order value" for shipping options so you can define shipping options for various intervals of values.

When a user does not have ANY shipping option with a 0 minimum order value, we would show a warning box suggesting that they should add one, even if it is higher than the other intervals, or they will be shown as not-shipping on cards with small values, and they will not be able to be found when users search via the optimizer.

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

Would that cover most of the required use cases?

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

I believe so, yes.

Profile  Tradelist

Re: Shipping from Buyer point of view

I'm still looking for this...

If there is no shipping option meeting the buyer's order configuration then the buyer needs details explaining why (number of cards, $ value, seller missing option). I've had buyers asking me why there was no shipping option for them and it wasn't immediately obvious to either of us.

Should the specifics of the shipping option be automatically exposed for the sake of clarity? e.g. the user sees "$0.99 / 1-6 cards / $0-20". I currently write this into the shipping option description as a workaround. I'd also be fine with my entire table of shipping options being public.

sebi wrote:

When a user does not have ANY shipping option with a 0 minimum order value ... they will not be able to be found when users search via the optimizer.

Excluding sellers with a nonzero minimum order value from the optimizer seems unnecessary.

Profile | Cards for Sale