As we all know, (or should know), postage has increased about 5.4% across the board. This makes sense considering the last postage hike hasn’t been since June of 2002.
Unfortunately for some online retailers, they’ll have to eat that cost while they wait for the consumers or their affiliate partners, (i.e.amazon to catch up.
I have one friend who had heard about the price increase just before she was about to send a letter from her home. After some minor deliberation, she decided to tape on two pennies and let the post office work it out.
Unfortunately for online retailers it may not be so simple. Many people fear that by passing the cost on to their customers they’ll lose business to those people who don’t.
Personally, I don’t think that increasing shipping costs by 5.4 percent will affect the sales–at least as long as the price has a nice marketing ring to it.
I’m curious to see when Amazon will pick it up and offer their sales partners an increased shipping credit. I’m sure they’ll take their time for now. We’ll see…
As an internet retailer we have made the decision to eat the cost. We will readjust our postage after the next USPS update. We have found that in many cases increasing the customer’s cost does have an extremely large impact on our ability to sell small-ticket items.
Preston,
Will you leverage other aspects of your sales to compensate for the loss in shipping costs? Or do you plan to over compensate at the next USPS update to make up for your losses until then?