Hmm... not sure what your numbers are for... my numbers were quoted directly from the current cart implementation.
My numbers are exactly how it is calculated with the current implementation. You said a single 20x30 print. It cannot ship Economy because of the print size. So the base price of Express is $4.95 and since a single print bumps the base cost over $20, an additional $2.00 is added to bring the total up to $6.95.
As you can see, those are un-marked up prices. (I don't have a pro account, not even power. So can't change them if I wanted to.)
We do it by the base price, not the marked-up price. It would be rather silly to charge a different amount to ship the same print just because the Pro priced it differently.
It just seems to me like folks that order expensive options (lustre finish or large sizes) are going to get a bit of an unfair increase in shipping costs this way.
In general the larger prints cost more to ship, handle, and of course do reprints on.
I looked up my old receipt, it came to 59.93 for those two prints previously. $6.95 of that was shipping. (Turns out this was farther back then I thought, 12/28/06 according to the invoice.)
Did that ship economy or express? Do you have an order number? As I said in my previous post, there are specific instances in which the shipping will be higher. That's not our intention for large prints and large orders, so we are looking into improving it and lowering the cost at some point.
How the shipping is calculated does not need to be clear to the customer, it just needs to be fair.
I think it does need to be clear to the customer (and fair of course). I know I personally hate shopping at a site, not being able to calculate or even estimate shipping until the last step of my purchase, and then find out that it is way overpriced. Either I wasted my time filling my cart and going through the whole process or I pay too much for shipping.
Our goal here was not to make profit off shipping like Shutterfly (http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119103160514143521.html). We wanted to simplify it, display it in real-time as the cart was updated, encourage large orders, and move more high-value orders to a better shipping method.
As it stands now, the vast majority of large orders and orders with large prints now ship for less money. To be clear, SmugMug loses money on shipping those orders since we are still charged the same amount by our print vendor.
I think it does need to be clear to the customer (and fair of course).
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. I don't particularly care how prices are calculated, as long as it doesnt cost me $4 extra for two more prints that are going in the same tube and don't add that much weight.
I know I personally hate shopping at a site, not being able to calculate or even estimate shipping until the last step of my purchase, and then find out that it is way overpriced.
Slightly dynamic pricing and calculating shipping on the fly are not mutually exclusive.
"Ordering these prints will add $x.yz to your shipping cost." or "It costs X to ship these. For that same shipping cost, you can add Y numbers more prints of such and such size and not increase your shipping cost!"
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. I don't particularly care how prices are calculated, as long as it doesnt cost me $4 extra for two more prints that are going in the same tube and don't add that much weight.
Again, this doesn't come down to simply how many tubes or how much weight. Shipping a tube with 4 prints costs us considerably more on average than shipping a tube with a single print. Aside from the slightly increased weight and the extra handling, if the tube is lost in the mail (it happens a lot more than you might think) the cost of reprinting all four prints is much larger.
Slightly dynamic pricing and calculating shipping on the fly are not mutually exclusive.
"Ordering these prints will add $x.yz to your shipping cost." or "It costs X to ship these. For that same shipping cost, you can add Y numbers more prints of such and such size and not increase your shipping cost!"
-r
Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. With Amazon and similar businesses, it makes sense to do that. I'm not so convinced with prints. Even worse, it's very difficult and/or annoying to put that text in the proper location. Our cart interface is already crowded with options and text. Every centimeter is valuable space. That's not the case with a book or a DVD.
I know sometimes the new calculator seems unfair, but it really is better overall for large prints and large orders. For example, a single 20x20 lustre print ships for $6.95 under the new system and $5.95 in the old system. Ouch.
But since the 20x20 matte and 20x20 gloss are just below $20.00 per product, a single one of either of those ships for $4.95 in the new system. SmugMug loses $1.00 on shipping on those orders, since our print vendor is still charging us $5.95.
The new system doesn't cover all bases and there are a couple products/quantities that it doesn't work perfectly for, but overall I really think it is a drastic improvement for you guys.
Again, this doesn't come down to simply how many tubes or how much weight. Shipping a tube with 4 prints costs us considerably more on average than shipping a tube with a single print. Aside from the slightly increased weight and the extra handling, if the tube is lost in the mail (it happens a lot more than you might think) the cost of reprinting all four prints is much larger.
OK, fair enough, that is a good point that I hadn't considered (and that's why i'm a grad student and not running a business .
I know sometimes the new calculator seems unfair, but it really is better overall for large prints and large orders. For example, a single 20x20 lustre print ships for $6.95 under the new system and $5.95 in the old system. Ouch.
But since the 20x20 matte and 20x20 gloss are just below $20.00 per product, a single one of either of those ships for $4.95 in the new system. SmugMug loses $1.00 on shipping on those orders, since our print vendor is still charging us $5.95.
The new system doesn't cover all bases and there are a couple products/quantities that it doesn't work perfectly for, but overall I really think it is a drastic improvement for you guys.
I think there is some seriously flawed thinking going on here and I don't see it as a benefit to us. SmugMug pushes the lustre prints whenever someone asks, and I think this is a good idea because Lustre looks so much better. (FWIW, I rarely order anything but Luster.) However, I am already paying a premium to get lustre paper. Why should I have to pay an extra premium to have it shipped? I don't see why you can't just charge the $5.95 for all those prints. I don't want to be subsidizing other people. I'll gladly pay the actual shipping cost for my prints.
It is already cheaper for me to just order directly from EZprints (and I can get panoramic prints as well) but I don't, mainly because of the convenience factor. However, now in addition to SmugMug's markup (which I don't have a problem with) it now costs $1 more per large print than it would direct from EZprints, as EZprints is $1 extra per tubed print, after the first. SmugMug is essentially $2 extra for these larger images. This adds up.
The big problem seems to be that the new model does not scale well at all. Larger prints (especially those with Lustre paper) and other items that have a larger SmugMug markup are already far more expensive. Why are they the ones being used to subsidize shipping for everyone else? Why not just do the shipping based on the size of the print? Then everyone pays for what they use. I shouldn't be paying extra so that Joe Bob can pay less. It seems silly that your markup (which I'm sure is carefully set) is the entire reason shipping costs more for one print (Lustre) than for another of the same size (Matte).
Lastly, just to be clear, I am not complaining about the markup or price of prints from smugmug. I understand that such things are required to keep an awesome photosharing/selling site running with awesome customer service. I think you guys run a good business and really appreciate your willingness even to discuss these things on a public forum.
I think the new shipping options are much easier to calculate and definitely more beneficial to customers who have large orders.
My only problem with it is if a customer orders an 8x10 print from us for $9 they are having to pay more than half that cost for shipping –*it seems a little steep.
We've lost lots of orders in the past week because of the change. Most of our orders come through our office and they don't want to pay such a large shipping price for one 8x10.
I think the new shipping options are much easier to calculate and definitely more beneficial to customers who have large orders.
My only problem with it is if a customer orders an 8x10 print from us for $9 they are having to pay more than half that cost for shipping –*it seems a little steep.
We've lost lots of orders in the past week because of the change. Most of our orders come through our office and they don't want to pay such a large shipping price for one 8x10.
Yeah, that was a tough decision, but Economy shipping was just so terrible, especially for prints that size. You would not believe how many prints get lost in the mail with USPS "1st class". It was a headache for customers and for us, so we removed the option of shipping 8x10's through Economy and kept the Express option at the same price (which, incidentally, is $1.04 less than places like Shutterfly and Snapfish).
Sorry about the loss of business! On the bright side, the ones who do make the purchase are more likely to actually get their prints and get them in good condition.
It cannot ship Economy because of the print size. So the base price of Express is $4.95 and since a single print bumps the base cost over $20, an additional $2.00 is added to bring the total up to $6.95.
yup, we're doing the same math, I'm just doing it a different way. If pictures are worth 1000 words, then a formula has to be worth, what, 500?
shipping cost = base[express] + $2 * ceiling ( sum of prints base values / $20 )
where:
base[express] = 2.95 = published number minus $2 for the first $20 of merch.
I've never cared for those places that word it as "plus $x for each additional $y." mainly because few, if any define what that "additional" is relative to. Neither for that matter did Baldy in the opening post here. Nor really does the help page... "Added price for each $20 of product" comes a lot closer though leaving out the magic "additional" wording. But the question becomes, if it's $20.01, is that one or two added amounts? My experiment with the shipping calculations in the cart says 1... they also say my formula above is correct.
We do it by the base price, not the marked-up price. It would be rather silly to charge a different amount to ship the same print just because the Pro priced it differently.
Did that ship economy or express? Do you have an order number?
There's no way I'd ship anything economy again, or after a few scans of dgrin, for all I care you can remove that option entirely. it was express, 231236.
As I said in my previous post, there are specific instances in which the shipping will be higher. That's not our intention for large prints and large orders, so we are looking into improving it and lowering the cost at some point.
Large orders make sense to me, they weigh a lot more by cost. Let's assume an average of $0.20 for a 4x6 prints. 132.5 of them would cost the same as my 20x30 lustres. But they would contain 3180 square inches of paper, as opposed to the 600 sq in of paper in the 20x30. If you assume the same weight/sq in for the paper (seems reasonable to me) then we're talking 5.3x heavier. So certainly the large order of 132.5 4x6s should pay a premium for shipping.
perhaps that's the metric you need... $2 additional for each X sq in of aggregate print surface.
heh, yeah, but clearly I was reading it with 20 odd hours of being awake after about 4 hours of sleep when I wrote that it said it differently, more like I did above.
It is already cheaper for me to just order directly from EZprints (and I can get panoramic prints as well) but I don't, mainly because of the convenience factor. However, now in addition to SmugMug's markup (which I don't have a problem with) it now costs $1 more per large print than it would direct from EZprints, as EZprints is $1 extra per tubed print, after the first. SmugMug is essentially $2 extra for these larger images. This adds up.
The big problem seems to be that the new model does not scale well at all. Larger prints (especially those with Lustre paper) and other items that have a larger SmugMug markup are already far more expensive.
Some of the images are more than that... I think normal prints today that get tubed top out at $36. Just a couple of those is going to put you up pretty quickly... on average $1.80 each. This is I think where we are going to be hit the worst... the majority of the print orders we've done through smugmug are for a small number of large prints... like 3-7 prints of 20x20 and up.
Lastly, just to be clear, I am not complaining about the markup or price of prints from smugmug. I understand that such things are required to keep an awesome photosharing/selling site running with awesome customer service. I think you guys run a good business and really appreciate your willingness even to discuss these things on a public forum.
amen
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
I'm a little fish. All of my customers are also little fish. The vast majority of my orders are for 8x10's or smaller. Very few of my orders are for more than two or three prints.
I also don't charge very much, which makes this scenario even worse. My customer orders one 8x10 for $10 and now has to pay $5 for shipping? There cost just went up 50% to get the photo mailed to them.
One thing we hope to be able to do is promote that they can order "up to" 50 prints and get the same fee - so we think this might have a positive effect, more ordering......
I'm looking forward to promoting this! More sales for me is good for SM and me!
I really don't understand how your pricing model works though when you up-charge based on price. Can you please elaborate further on how you came up w/ this? My entire career was in printing/shipping at the PM level and I still don't understand how you can have the client in mind when you establish a pricing model such as this. Mabey your business model is different. Either way I'm interested in hearing your views.
Are you willing to release some of the reporting that your queries come up w/? i.e. % of ppl that order (x) 4x6 prints; % of ppl that order (x) of 11x17.. etc. IMO this will show where the rubber meets the road so to speak.
No matter what you come up w/ though. PPL will complain. It's inevitable. PPL don't like change, but change is natural progression of growing business.
I'm happy w/ SM as a whole though and wouldn't trade you guys for anyone on the market today!
I just found this thread because I did a search for shipping hopping to find out why standard shipping was not an option for my last two orders. I am often not in a big hurry and would usually rather save money than get my print fast.
I ordered 1 8 x 10 because my wife wanted it. My local pro lab charges 2.50 for an 8 x 10, I always buy from smugmug, even though their print costs 1 dollar more plus shipping. They are a great company, I like to support them, and I don't have to leave home to deal with my purchase. 6.00 is a lot to pay for that service. I am not complaining, but I am saying that I would probably have to choose to make that purchase locally instead of paying that much again.
As I went through the thread again I noticed some discussion of switching from the USPS to another shipper (fed ex, UPS, whatever).
That would eliminate 95 percent of print orders from me. The other shippers here will not leave a package if no one is home. At my house, no one is ever home during business hours. They leave me a note that they will try again the next day, which of course no one will be home again. After this they will leave a note telling me I have 48 hours to pick it up, or they will return it to the sender, so I have to take time off of work and go pick it up.
Comments
We do it by the base price, not the marked-up price. It would be rather silly to charge a different amount to ship the same print just because the Pro priced it differently.
In general the larger prints cost more to ship, handle, and of course do reprints on.
Did that ship economy or express? Do you have an order number? As I said in my previous post, there are specific instances in which the shipping will be higher. That's not our intention for large prints and large orders, so we are looking into improving it and lowering the cost at some point.
Are we looking at the same page? http://www.smugmug.com/prints/shipping.mg
A print that size cannot ship economy. Express is the cheapest option. The first $20.00 of product is not charged the $2.00.
I think it does need to be clear to the customer (and fair of course). I know I personally hate shopping at a site, not being able to calculate or even estimate shipping until the last step of my purchase, and then find out that it is way overpriced. Either I wasted my time filling my cart and going through the whole process or I pay too much for shipping.
Our goal here was not to make profit off shipping like Shutterfly (http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119103160514143521.html). We wanted to simplify it, display it in real-time as the cart was updated, encourage large orders, and move more high-value orders to a better shipping method.
As it stands now, the vast majority of large orders and orders with large prints now ship for less money. To be clear, SmugMug loses money on shipping those orders since we are still charged the same amount by our print vendor.
Slightly dynamic pricing and calculating shipping on the fly are not mutually exclusive.
"Ordering these prints will add $x.yz to your shipping cost." or "It costs X to ship these. For that same shipping cost, you can add Y numbers more prints of such and such size and not increase your shipping cost!"
-r
Again, this doesn't come down to simply how many tubes or how much weight. Shipping a tube with 4 prints costs us considerably more on average than shipping a tube with a single print. Aside from the slightly increased weight and the extra handling, if the tube is lost in the mail (it happens a lot more than you might think) the cost of reprinting all four prints is much larger.
Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. With Amazon and similar businesses, it makes sense to do that. I'm not so convinced with prints. Even worse, it's very difficult and/or annoying to put that text in the proper location. Our cart interface is already crowded with options and text. Every centimeter is valuable space. That's not the case with a book or a DVD.
I know sometimes the new calculator seems unfair, but it really is better overall for large prints and large orders. For example, a single 20x20 lustre print ships for $6.95 under the new system and $5.95 in the old system. Ouch.
But since the 20x20 matte and 20x20 gloss are just below $20.00 per product, a single one of either of those ships for $4.95 in the new system. SmugMug loses $1.00 on shipping on those orders, since our print vendor is still charging us $5.95.
The new system doesn't cover all bases and there are a couple products/quantities that it doesn't work perfectly for, but overall I really think it is a drastic improvement for you guys.
I think there is some seriously flawed thinking going on here and I don't see it as a benefit to us. SmugMug pushes the lustre prints whenever someone asks, and I think this is a good idea because Lustre looks so much better. (FWIW, I rarely order anything but Luster.) However, I am already paying a premium to get lustre paper. Why should I have to pay an extra premium to have it shipped? I don't see why you can't just charge the $5.95 for all those prints. I don't want to be subsidizing other people. I'll gladly pay the actual shipping cost for my prints.
It is already cheaper for me to just order directly from EZprints (and I can get panoramic prints as well) but I don't, mainly because of the convenience factor. However, now in addition to SmugMug's markup (which I don't have a problem with) it now costs $1 more per large print than it would direct from EZprints, as EZprints is $1 extra per tubed print, after the first. SmugMug is essentially $2 extra for these larger images. This adds up.
The big problem seems to be that the new model does not scale well at all. Larger prints (especially those with Lustre paper) and other items that have a larger SmugMug markup are already far more expensive. Why are they the ones being used to subsidize shipping for everyone else? Why not just do the shipping based on the size of the print? Then everyone pays for what they use. I shouldn't be paying extra so that Joe Bob can pay less. It seems silly that your markup (which I'm sure is carefully set) is the entire reason shipping costs more for one print (Lustre) than for another of the same size (Matte).
Lastly, just to be clear, I am not complaining about the markup or price of prints from smugmug. I understand that such things are required to keep an awesome photosharing/selling site running with awesome customer service. I think you guys run a good business and really appreciate your willingness even to discuss these things on a public forum.
-r
My only problem with it is if a customer orders an 8x10 print from us for $9 they are having to pay more than half that cost for shipping –*it seems a little steep.
We've lost lots of orders in the past week because of the change. Most of our orders come through our office and they don't want to pay such a large shipping price for one 8x10.
Yeah, that was a tough decision, but Economy shipping was just so terrible, especially for prints that size. You would not believe how many prints get lost in the mail with USPS "1st class". It was a headache for customers and for us, so we removed the option of shipping 8x10's through Economy and kept the Express option at the same price (which, incidentally, is $1.04 less than places like Shutterfly and Snapfish).
Sorry about the loss of business! On the bright side, the ones who do make the purchase are more likely to actually get their prints and get them in good condition.
Ah, now I see where our math diverges....
As in "two, twenty by thirty prints". same as what the first pair of screen shots show.
yup, we're doing the same math, I'm just doing it a different way. If pictures are worth 1000 words, then a formula has to be worth, what, 500?
shipping cost = base[express] + $2 * ceiling ( sum of prints base values / $20 )
where:
base[express] = 2.95 = published number minus $2 for the first $20 of merch.
I've never cared for those places that word it as "plus $x for each additional $y." mainly because few, if any define what that "additional" is relative to. Neither for that matter did Baldy in the opening post here. Nor really does the help page... "Added price for each $20 of product" comes a lot closer though leaving out the magic "additional" wording. But the question becomes, if it's $20.01, is that one or two added amounts? My experiment with the shipping calculations in the cart says 1... they also say my formula above is correct.
yup, very silly.
There's no way I'd ship anything economy again, or after a few scans of dgrin, for all I care you can remove that option entirely.
Large orders make sense to me, they weigh a lot more by cost. Let's assume an average of $0.20 for a 4x6 prints. 132.5 of them would cost the same as my 20x30 lustres. But they would contain 3180 square inches of paper, as opposed to the 600 sq in of paper in the 20x30. If you assume the same weight/sq in for the paper (seems reasonable to me) then we're talking 5.3x heavier. So certainly the large order of 132.5 4x6s should pay a premium for shipping.
heh, yeah, but clearly I was reading it with 20 odd hours of being awake after about 4 hours of sleep when I wrote that it said it differently, more like I did above.
Some of the images are more than that... I think normal prints today that get tubed top out at $36. Just a couple of those is going to put you up pretty quickly... on average $1.80 each. This is I think where we are going to be hit the worst... the majority of the print orders we've done through smugmug are for a small number of large prints... like 3-7 prints of 20x20 and up.
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
I also don't charge very much, which makes this scenario even worse. My customer orders one 8x10 for $10 and now has to pay $5 for shipping? There cost just went up 50% to get the photo mailed to them.
Not good.
There are allot of valid points here. Andy brings up a great selling point when he states: I'm looking forward to promoting this! More sales for me is good for SM and me!
I really don't understand how your pricing model works though when you up-charge based on price. Can you please elaborate further on how you came up w/ this? My entire career was in printing/shipping at the PM level and I still don't understand how you can have the client in mind when you establish a pricing model such as this. Mabey your business model is different. Either way I'm interested in hearing your views.
Are you willing to release some of the reporting that your queries come up w/? i.e. % of ppl that order (x) 4x6 prints; % of ppl that order (x) of 11x17.. etc. IMO this will show where the rubber meets the road so to speak.
No matter what you come up w/ though. PPL will complain. It's inevitable. PPL don't like change, but change is natural progression of growing business.
I'm happy w/ SM as a whole though and wouldn't trade you guys for anyone on the market today!
-Jon
I ordered 1 8 x 10 because my wife wanted it. My local pro lab charges 2.50 for an 8 x 10, I always buy from smugmug, even though their print costs 1 dollar more plus shipping. They are a great company, I like to support them, and I don't have to leave home to deal with my purchase. 6.00 is a lot to pay for that service. I am not complaining, but I am saying that I would probably have to choose to make that purchase locally instead of paying that much again.
That would eliminate 95 percent of print orders from me. The other shippers here will not leave a package if no one is home. At my house, no one is ever home during business hours. They leave me a note that they will try again the next day, which of course no one will be home again. After this they will leave a note telling me I have 48 hours to pick it up, or they will return it to the sender, so I have to take time off of work and go pick it up.
I have been through this 3 times with UPS.
Once with Fed ex
I choose vendor's that ship USPS.
Just my 2 cents.