Shipping followups
As we continue to tweak shipping support on the site, we've enjoyed getting both constructive criticism and kudos on our decision to sort all results by postpaid price (or our best approximation of it):
Lucas Ames, Bookselling Online Blog, "Changes at Bookfinder":
"I'd like to applaud Anirvan and BookFinder...The new site is a huge improvement...The other change integrates shipping prices into the search results to allow users to be aware of exorbitant shipping fees on the front-end, a great consumer-driven change that will undoubtedly serve to increase sales through the site."
Michael Stillman, Americana Exchange Monthly, "Truth in Pricing: BookFinder Attempts to Display What Books Really Cost":
"Congratulations are in order to the multi-site book search engine BookFinder for attempting to present real prices, that is, ones that include shipping costs...BookFinder has recognized that a one-cent book with a $10 shipping cost is no bargain compared to a $3 book with $2 in shipping. A little truth in pricing should be most helpful for those looking to find the actual lowest price rather than the imaginary one....This option enabled us to do a comparison...the cheapest delivered price is 373 times the cheapest non-delivered price. That's a 37,300% increase in the price once you add shipping! That's what happens when you buy penny books that have to be shipped."
Jeff Sharman, Using Books Weblog, "BookFinder & Shipping Charges":
"This means that some results from other sites are listed with slightly inaccurate prices. The price discrepency often gives those listings different placement in the search results than they're warranted, sometimes better and sometimes worse. Though usually the final price isn't off by much more than 50 cents or a dollar either way, this will likely cause some to scream "bias" since Abebooks is BookFinder's parent company...Shipping rates can be a divisive and confusing issue and it's really good to see BookFinder taking steps to make them more transparent."
We've made several significant changes in the way our shipping functionality works over the past few weeks, and will obviously continue to do so.
I'd appreciate more feedback. Is the new consolidated postpaid pricing useful? What can we do to make it work better?
And for those who'd prefer seeing the older sort order, have you had problems opting out? We've helped a few users enable preference cookies on their web browsers, and can lend a hand if you're utterly flummoxed.
Comments
The only problem I have is that oversized books often require additional shipping charges, which aren't factored into the shipping cost and must usually be calculated after the order is placed. Short of adding the weight of the book to the data that the booksellers include, I can't seen an easy way to do this. I know that Amazon has weight information included with their product data, but there probably isn't an easy way to extract this information. Perhaps it is available from some other source?
I know that this is a tall order, but you did ask for feedback. I buy a fair number of art books that were published outside the United States, so this does make a difference. Sometimes it can be hard to calculate whether it is cheaper to pay more for a copy from a US dealer and pay less for shipping or pay less from a non-US dealer and pay more for shipping.
Posted by: Christopher Busta-Peck | October 4, 2006 10:03 AM
Hi Christopher. We'd love to incorporate book weights into shipping prices. As it stands, virtually no booksellers provide weight data (in fact some booksellers still give us no shipping data at all); we're stuck assuming that all books are of "standard" weight--a problematic category, as different sellers can have subtly different definitions of what that means. I believe our choices are correct (or nearly so) for most books, but it's hard for us to do as good a job with oversized art books of unknown weight.
Posted by: Anirvan | October 7, 2006 11:28 PM