A business practice within our industry that gets on my nerves
is our competitors offering blind with Free Shipping, but then once you get to the cart, they charging a handling
charge. What the heck is this ‘charge’?
When you go to the website of the biggest online window treatments retailer and
are about to purchase you blinds you will see there is an Order
Processing Charge of $4.95. In effect this
allows them to pass on an additional charge to the customer for no good reason
- and by the time the customer sees it, she has already made up her mind on the
purchase, and likely just “accepts it”. But just because a customer accepts it
does not make this practice acceptable.
May I suggest that rather than handling charge it should be called a “we-would-like-you
to-pay-more, but-did-not-want-to-disclose-this-until-now-charge”.
Don’t misunderstand me, I am all for companies charging
whatever they want. Profits enable growth, new jobs and all the wonderful
things that the US stands for, but don't bury those charges by using semantics.
Check out most of our major competitors, they all seem to do it. And then they
seem to explain it in an innocuous way so that the customer doesn't realize she
is essentially being hornswoggled. On one site, I even see this the explanation
tugging on the customer’s heartstrings, “fuel prices in the industry have gone
up, but we only pass on a tiny bit of this causing the need for this handling
fee”.
Oh, so you didn't just think of raising the prices of your
product, which is what most other industries do when costs go up? Instead, you
create some ridiculous little fee that you don't present until the customer’s
credit card is on the table
Payless Décor Blinds offers Free Shipping and does not insult your
intelligence by then offering a Handling Charge or Order Processing fee. Sometimes for oversize blinds we get
charged quite a lot by Fedex to ship them, but we not only include this in the
price, we also make the charges transparent on our ‘free shipping explanation
page’.
The next time you see a $4.95 shipping fee at a website that touts 'Free Shipping' in big letters on their homepage, I recommend you
contact the company and say, “Sorry I was going to purchase from you, but now I
am going to take my business elsewhere to a company that actually discloses
their prices.” I’ll bet you that company will offer to waive the fee, but
that’s when you should say “sorry, too late.”
A vote with your dollars is the best way to drive change.
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