What’s the true cost of shopping online vs shopping at a brick and mortar store? How do you compare prices at one online store with another?
They’re interesting questions. If you’re shopping online instead of going cross-town or cross-country to a shop, your costs will be different, and not always equal. And total costs of purchasing at one online store vs another can be wildly different for the same order.
Let’s start with shopping costs. If you go out in your car to shop, you need to pay for gasoline and other auto expenses, fight traffic in some cases, and in some places you need to pay for parking. Additionally, you’ll need to pay sales taxes on your purchases in most places, and since a brick and mortar store has rent and employees to pay, you’ll be paying top dollar for your purchases. And then there’s the extra time it takes to get to and from the shop. Shopping online, unless your online store has a “presence” in your home state, you won’t have to pay local taxes and you’ll save time and expense. We’re only required to add sales taxes to orders shipped within Nevada.
On the other hand, going to a regular shop gives you a couple of advantages; you can see, feel, and touch the product before you buy it, and when you walk out you’ll walk out with your purchase and won’t have to wait for a few days for delivery. That’s important to a lot of people, and there’s also the social aspect of going out “shop-hopping” with your friends. Most quilt shops have classes and other social activities, which is their way of getting traffic into their shops. Quilt shops and casinos have a lot in common, they both know that the longer you’re in there, the more you’ll spend.
By the way, we have what we call “Sample Packs” for almost all our fabric lines, so if you need or want to touch and feel the fabrics before purchasing, order a sample pack first! It’s a no-risk way to see and feel the actual fabrics, because you get a rebate coupon for the cost of the sample pack along with the sample pack. So all it costs you is a dollar or so in postage. Click Here to see our sample packs.
Lots of online stores charge a lot for stuff, usually manufacturers suggested retail price (MSRP) or higher. Many if not most of the online shops are extensions of brick and mortar stores and they need to charge the same in their online stores as they do in their regular shop. A few online shops, like ours, try to give you a good value for your money and sell for less than MSRP. We can’t offer classes and social activities, so we try to lure you in with lower prices, and everyone likes lower prices!
There are a few fabric manufacturers that are now engaging in what they call “protecting their brands” and what we call “price fixing.” What they’re doing is dictating to retailers the minimum price that they’re required charge their customers for the product, usually MSRP. The punishment for not selling at MSRP is that these manufacturers won’t sell to retailers that don’t sell at full MSRP anymore. This is price-fixing in our book, and we won’t carry their product lines. That’s why you won’t see several famous fabric lines at QKO until the manufacturers decide to quit this price-fixing activity.
We can sell our stuff for less because we have less overhead, simple as that. We don’t have a brick and mortar store to try to support with our online business, we’re just an online business. We don’t have any rent to pay, no employees to pay, and we’re both retired with pensions so we don’t have to depend on this business to pay our bills.
Some of the discount online stores have low prices, but they make it up with shipping and handling charges. Here’s how they do it. First, many of them use price-based rate tables for shipping. All orders under $50 are shipped for say $8, then orders from $50 – $60 are shipped for $10, etc etc. Doesn’t sound too bad except for one thing; a lot of their orders are being shipped for a lot less money than their minimum shipping price, so they’re making money on shipping! And then you check the fine print where they say “bulky items or big items, blah blah blah will incur an additional shipping charge, we’ll let you know when that happens…”
What that means is they can jack up your shipping charges however much they want to, AFTER you confirm your order, if your actual shipping costs go over those shown in their rate tables, because they’re not going to take a loss on shipping costs. This happens quite a bit with price-based shipping tables, especially if you order a lot of bulky yard goods or batting, etc. They either have to charge you way too much on most orders, or charge you extra if they’re not making enough money on shipping.
At QKO, there aren’t any surprises, at least not bad ones. The way our shipping estimator works is that we put weights in our system for all our products. We know what a half-yard of Hoffman batik weighs, what a pattern weighs, and so forth. When you place your order, our system adds all the weights together and sends a message off to the USPS computer asking what it’s going to cost to ship it, and that shows up on your checkout cart screen. It’s usually pretty close. If it’s not completely accurate for some reason, it’s usually a little bit high. Once in awhile, we’re a few cents off the other way. It’s how we handle it that makes the difference to you;
- First, we only charge actual shipping, even on small orders. So, we don’t charge you $5 to ship a $8 pattern, we charge you the actual postage that the USPS charges us.
- We ship all orders USPS, because all the other carriers are, quite frankly, a lot more expensive for 99% of the orders we ship. Additionally, to ship UPS or Fedex we’d have to pay pick up fees which would add even more to your shipping expenses.
- Next, we don’t charge any handling or packing charges. Shipping containers are expensive, anywhere from 35 cents for a small Tyvek envelope to several dollars for a large box. The label that goes on the box costs about 15 cents. We figure that’s part of the cost of doing business.
- Next, for every order, we try to figure out the least expensive way to ship it to you, assuming you chose the least expensive way to start with. If you order Priority mail, you’ll always get it, but sometimes this means we ship your order via Priority mail when you ordered parcel post! Here’s why; depending on the size, weight and distance we’re sending your order, sometimes the total cost of shipping your order is cheaper via priority mail, so we ship it that way and then we refund the extra to you when we charge your account.
- Sometimes, it’s almost the same price to ship it priority mail, maybe just a few cents more. If it’s a few cents more than what you’ve paid for parcel post, we look at our total cost to ship, including packaging and decide that it’s cheaper for us to pack and send it in a free USPS container via Priority mail than it is to send it to you in our own container via parcel post. You get it faster at the same price!
- Once in a great while, our system underestimates shipping costs. It usually happens because Don forgot to put a weight in for a new product so it didn’t get included in the package weight. Once in awhile the USPS computers go down and show you $0 for shipping. In either case, we eat the difference and you’ve won the lottery and gotten reduced rate shipping, or free shipping on a order that wouldn’t qualify for our free shipping discounts. We’re not going to come whining to you that we need to charge you extra because we or the post office screwed up. We figure that’s our problem, not yours.
The bottom line is that we’ll never, ever send you a note and tell you “oh, by the way, your package was too big or too heavy or too anything else so we’re adding $$$ to your shipping cost.” That isn’t going to happen at QKO.
What you see when you check out is the MAXIMUM you’ll pay for shipping, and often, you’ll pay less. We’ll show your actual shipping cost on your final invoice copy packed with your order. Always compare it with your order confirmation, you may be pleasantly surprised.
How about free shipping? Well, we currently have a free shipping discount for orders over $75 in the USA, and we discount shipping on international orders over $75. Some shops have lower free shipping thresholds, some have discounted shipping on many orders, most don’t offer any free shipping. Basically it comes down to your total cost. You need to compare prices plus shipping expenses, and see where you’re getting a better deal. Lots of stores add handling charges or pump up their shipping charges in order to offer lower prices. We don’t do that. We offer low prices and we charge you exact shipping charges.
On International orders, we also don’t add any processing or handling fees, despite the fact that there is additional work in processing international orders, filling our the customs forms, etc. We also give a discount on International shipping for orders over $75. That discount is the amount it would cost us to ship the order across the USA. Depending on the order size and weight, the discount could be anywhere from 4 or 5 dollars on up to 12-15 dollars. International shipping is expensive, but many of our customers find that comparing our low prices plus shipping with the high cost of fabric, high taxes and travel in other countries, it’s cheaper to buy from us and pay higher shipping costs than it is to buy the same goods in their local shops.
The international discount is applied when we ship your order, so if you’re shopping with us from outside the USA, what’s shown when you check out is your shipping cost BEFORE any shipping discount is applied, on all orders. We always try to ship all orders within 24 business hours, what we call here in the valley “Post office hours,” and so far we’ve always made it happen. Usually, if you order in the morning on a weekday, your order will be shipped the same afternoon. If it comes in late in the day, or if we’re out getting groceries and can’t pack it until after PO hours, it’ll be shipped first thing the next morning. If it’s a Saturday or Sunday order, it’ll be shipped first thing Monday morning. You see, the dirty little secret is that we don’t take your money until after we deliver your package to the Post Office, so it’s in our best interest to get it there as quickly as possible.
So, what’s the point of this long rambling post? Just to let you know that when you order from QKO, you can be assured that there aren’t going to be any hidden charges or unpleasant surprises waiting for you after your order, and sometimes you’ll get pleasant surprises in the way of faster or lower-cost shipping than what you expected. You’ll always get fair prices and actual shipping costs, or you’ll pay lower than actual shipping costs and we’ll make up the difference.
When you compare the total costs of shopping with us at QKO with the true and total costs of shopping with anyone else, online or brick and mortar, we know you’ll almost always come out ahead with QKO. If you find someplace else that beats us, we want to know about it. Leave us a comment on this post, or send us an email at info@quilt-kits-online.com.
