Hi [member=66038]Ebuwan[/member] I believe you wrote in an email to me, and I've replied and will get you a better quote on shipping, likely tomorrow.
Thank you for the tagging and confidence from a couple customers here! I'm happy to reply and share more.
Several of you have hit the nail on the head - dimensional shipping.
That, and since I implemented shipping, I don't ship many XXLs and so my available boxes aren't optimized for it.
Long story long...(I'm choosing to reveal some of the gory details of being an eCommerce business here).
For those that have been around a while you may recall that at Systainer Store I had Free Shipping on certain size orders. For examples, orders over $150. About a year ago this came to a crashing end, as the rate hikes of late 2021 and early 2022 pushed the business to the point where it wasn't making money and I had to implement a true shipping system. That or shut down the whole business.
I love systainers and I love serving the community and since I only sell systainers I needed to get back to profitability (or at least breaking even, so I could live to fight another day. As the largest dealer of systainers in North America, I wanted to find a way to keep serving all of you. That is my goal.
Getting technical, I use Shopify, and their default shipping system was only using weight. When I offered free shipping on larger orders, it was a bit of a hack so I didn't have to worry about calculating shipping weight or dimensions for a customer to check out. When this became the Achilles heel of the business, I had to find and configure a smarter shipping system that used weight and dimensions based on boxes that we stock. The system has been working well enough for about a year. I had to do some tuning and tweaking, but have been rather pleased. My goal is to not profit on shipping. If I recall right, last year I think I was within 1% of collecting more funds for shipping than what it actually cost to ship.
I know my FedEx rates are my best rates. I know that larger tool dealers get better rates because of so much more volume.
The XXL and this particular order with 1x XXL and 1x M reveals that I'm not optimized for this "physical volume".
There are about 20 box sizes I stock. I have a really large box, 32" x 32" x 12", that I keep on hand. Since implementing the shipping charges I don't ship many XXL via FedEx/UPS/USPS as they just about always hit dimensional weight. This order with one XXL and one M pushed it into this rather large shipping box, but it is wasted space in the box, and yet the larger size charges for the size box.
No doubt there is some optimization that can be done to get this order from Grand Rapids, MI to NJ. I'm having my team custom quote shipping on this order and I'll get back with the customer in a day or so. We can likely cut down a box to custom fit the XXL or maybe ship in two boxes, one the XXL and one the M.
So, I'm happy to keep serving. Shipping can add up on some orders. On larger orders I can do freight shipping, and if the order is large enough, think $2K or more, I can likely do free freight shipping. Always get in touch with me for those things.
I'm sorry [member=66038]Ebuwan[/member] for your shock. I'll try to improve. And I don't mind if there is a chance for you to save money and shipping by buying with Tool Nut or Woodcraft or a local dealer of Systainers. I'd like Systainer Store to grow and ultimately I do that by serving the community well. You could say these others dealers are my competitor, but I don't view it that way.
Make it a great day - Sys Tim