As you may know from our previous blog post about shipping that we are constantly brainstorming about possible ways to help our customer lighten the shipping cost load. Free Shipping through all its different versions have been enjoyed by our customer in the contiguous U.S. for many, many years but those outside the lower 48 states always ask what about us the international (and AK/HI) customers?
The obvious reason free shipping can't be offered to all is that shipping cost differs greatly once outside the invisible lines of the 48 states. For example, we have many Canadian that asked "I live just a few minutes from the US border, can I get free shipping?"
Let's take a look at what happens in this situation. Let's just say a customer that lives in Washington state 5 mins from the border and another that lives 5 mins from the border on the British Columbia side with both making the same $100 item order.
Washington shipping is about $18 to $20s with FedEx (at the time of publishing this post)
British Columbia shipping ranges about $50-60 non-guaranteed Post Office to $112 guaranteed FedEx.
As much as we would love to cover the $60 on the $100 order, it really isn't possible. We completely understand why our Canadian customer asks but international shipments just cost more.
Some of our Alaska and Hawaii customers may remember we had tested for a brief time free shipping to AK/HI using the more economical postal services. The feedback about the free shipping service during and afterwards were very negative. Many packages was supposed to get there in a week took almost a month. Many customers comment that we should use FedEx for free shipping or they rather we not offer free shipping if it's going to be like this.
So after going through past data and much thought about the situation, we figure we can at least give something back as discount to our international (and AK/HI) customers to help on shipping cost. We're excited to announce the following new discount option to our international and Hawaii/Alaska customers:
Save $5 on your cart total* for every $75+ you spend by clicking on the picture below :
If you are logged in, you can also enter the code: SHIPSAVE at the view cart page.
Once the code has been applied, it will work like this:
$75+ order, save $5.
$150+ order, save $10.
$225+ order, save $15.
$300+ order will save you $20.
The saving automatically increases $5 on $75 order increments
We know that this is not the same as free shipping or equating that free shipping is worth $5. Please understand that if we could offer free shipping to the world, we would. We are doing this because we want to show that we appreciate our international and AK/HI customers just as much as we do our local US customers and that you have not been forgotten.
*Please note that due to how our shipping calculation works for international orders with duty included for FedEx shipping methods, we cannot deduct $5 from the shipping fee. However, deducting $5 from shipping or $5 from cart total is essentially the same.