We’re answering a question that commonly comes up about shipping, which is, “Why don’t you offer free shipping?”
First, let’s clear up a common misconception: there is no such thing as free shipping. Someone always pays for free shipping.
While we have a love/hate relationship with Amazon, good ol’ Bezos is notorious for hurting small businesses (we said the quiet part out loud). Amazon has trained us to seek out “free shipping,” but let’s take a deeper look at what this really is.
There are three main ways that businesses offer “free shipping:”
- They cover the shipping cost and make up for it in other ways.
- They raise the cost of their products to cover free shipping.
- They make up for “free shipping” with quantity
But the cost of shipping has several layers:
The actual cost charged by the shipping carrier covers equipment, the salary of people fulfilling and delivering the order, the cost of materials to ship the product, and the impact on the environment.
For small businesses, a person (me or Richard) prints out your packing slip, pulls your order, packages it, prints the shipment label, and then drops off your order to the USPS.
We are delighted and happy to do this part.
Every time we receive an order, we’re over the moon that we have another customer who is spreading kindness in the world. Every order we ship is done with love.
Our furball CEO oversees that we always do a good job, too.
Can we honor our values of being fiscally responsible and offer free shipping?
We thought long and hard about offering free shipping on orders over a certain amount for orders within the continental U.S.
To be financially responsible and to support our efforts to hire help when we hit that tipping point in our growth, the shipping costs are added to orders instead of inflating our product pricing.
Additionally, since we are committed to giving back to causes that help the world be a better place, it’s important that we are able to do so from a generous place vs. a place of scarcity because we don’t consider hard costs like shipping.
As we grow, we will continue to assess our shipping costs and see how we can pass savings along to our awesome customers.
The biggest reason we wanted to write this post is to share a little behind-the-scenes about small businesses and to help consumers consider the love and hard work we put into providing our products to you.
In the meantime, the next time you see the phrase “free shipping,” consider who’s paying for it (pssst, the customer or the small business is).
We get that getting something for “free” is a great little dopamine hit, even if it’s a bit gimmicky and not 100% honest. 🙂
