I’ve been running into more problems lately because of the inflexibility of shipping options on Tindie.
I’m a fairly small time seller and the majority of my orders are people buying one thing at a time, so I’ve tailored my shipping options to these types of orders. I keep envelopes/boxes in stock that are small enough that they don’t mean exorbitant shipping costs for those who just want 1 thing, but can also handle maybe 2 or 3 items just in case someone wants more. This helps keep the shipping prices as close to cost as possible so people are paying closer to the true shipping cost, and also so I’m not losing money on shipping.
For the most part, this has worked well for me over the past 4-5 years. The problem however is when someone wants to order a lot of one product. So for example if someone wanted 10 things instead of 1, well then I’m going to be paying way more to ship that order because unfortunately, there’s no option or anything on Tindie which will bump that person up to another shipping tier if they order more of an item.
There used to be a system where each item on Tindie had a weight, and each shipping option had a max weight so that you could roughly determine the number of products that could fit into your shipping options. Now this wasn’t perfect as it was based on just pure weight whereas real shipping costs are calculated in a more complicated manner, but it was great for getting close to a real total and helped reduce losses.
I’m curious to see if others have this problem, and if so what people are doing about it. I’m annoyed because while I just sold ~25 of one of my products which is great for business, I’m going to be eating a large chunk of the shipping cost because the buyer only had one shipping option to choose from.
