How to Charge for Shipping

Customers and friends, we need your help. How should we charge for shipping?

For the first two years of our webstore, we charged by weight. This is terribly tedious to maintain during postal rate increases and still sometimes overcharges customers because the weight on the item is for a one item package. Order more than one item and the actual combined weight is less than the straight sum because they share packaging.

Recently we switched to a per item charge. This is easier to communicate to customers (see our Easy Ship page) and easier to change when postal rates increase. However, if a customer buys three or four lightweight accessories, they get charged for each one and end up with a huge shipping charge. We always refund overages, but that's tedious too and probably turning customers away.

There is one more option that we haven't tried - charging for shipping based on item cost. We could do this either as a percentage of sale or rate such $5 for orders up to $20, $7.50 up to $40, etc.

We want to hear from you: What kind of shipping charge do you prefer?

By the way, we have no plans to change our most popular coupon - 'freeship50' gets Free Shipping on orders over $50!