Thank you all for bearing with us through the shipping issues!
Mod Atlass spoke with the Senior Product Manager at BigCartel, who works with shipping and digital products, and discussed the various issues our shop was encountering during our first day of open leftover sales.
We had set to the new Automatic Rates calculator, which was working great for (smaller) domestic orders, providing more accurate shipping costs.
For domestic orders with many items applied, it seems the automatic calculator gets a little overwhelmed and confused with adding all the individual weights and sizes together, and since it didn't know what to do at that point, it just simply applied free shipping. As you can imagine, the zine isn't going to be able to give out free shipping for the most expensive orders, so any orders that checked out with free shipping will be contacted via email.
International shipping — the prices the Automatic Calculator was giving was CORRECT... however, many buyers of zines are accustomed to the discounted prices we can provide by using services such as Pirate Ship or Shippo, so the Retail USPS prices were giving some Sticker Shock. We will do our best to work around this with our new plan, outlined below:
-----GOING FORWARD-----
Domestic orders—
New orders placed in our shop for Leftovers items will have their shipping calculated via the Automatic Rates calculator, which takes the weight of each item in the order and uses it to estimate the actual cost of shipping by USPS's retail rates. These are extremely close to Pirate Ship rates already.
We now have Backup Rates implemented, which SHOULD step in in the event the automatic calculations become overwhelmed by too many items. If your order happens to give you free shipping anyway, please anticipate we will be emailing you to request you pay for the shipping of your items.
International orders (all countries, including Canada)—
All new orders will also be calculated via the Automatic Rates calculator, as specified above.
The prices will be USPS Retail Rates, which will likely be higher than you are accustomed to for zines. To remedy this, we have two options:
1) If you can afford to, pay the higher shipping fees so that you can get your order in, and we will REFUND the excess shipping amount paid once we have made your shipping label and have the accurate price with Pirate Ship's discounts. If you need the refund immediately, please email us at [email protected] with your order # and we will investigate and get you your refund.
-or-
2) You can send us a screenshot of your cart and the shipping rate you are given, and we will provide you with a discount code that will subtract a USD$dollar amount to make your shipping more accurate to the Pirate Ship discounted rates. You do not need to give us your name/address in the DM, but we WILL need your country in order to check on the proper rates to provide you a discount.
As you can imagine, the RIOT mods will not ALWAYS be online, so this method is not ideal if you're afraid of an item selling out. However, all mods have access to the shop and socials and will be able to provide you with the discount codes as soon as they're able to.
Mod Atlass is chronically online, so unless she's asleep or very busy with work-work, she will likely be able to get you your code close-to immediately.
Why can't you use the normal shipping methods?
- The default shipping profiles allow for us to set one rate for a specific country, no matter the package's weight. Therefore, packages with just one sticker would be charged the same as packages with one of everything. In a zine with a lighter book and no special heavy items, this works mostly just fine. However, our book is over 1lb and our laptop bags are 13oz and 1lb (13" and 17", respectively), so the large variation in order weights does not let this method of shipping rates work.
- Product-specific shipping profiles are not working correctly, according to the BigCartel Senior Product Manager that Mod Atlass spoke with. The shipping profiles are charging for each separate "type" of shipping applied to items in an order.
For example, if we charge $3 to ship a sticker, and $10 to ship a book, instead of taking ONLY the most expensive shipping rate for that order (which is how the setting is supposed to work), it is charging for BOTH the sticker AND the book, therefore charging $13 and assuming the items are shipping separately. One customer was charged each separate type of shipping, resulting in a $183 shipping charge—as you can imagine, that is very much not correct and that customer has been refunded, lol.
BC has said that they are working to fix this but it will not be fixed immediately.
Product-level shipping profiles are being phased out and are no longer accessible via our shop interface. Thus, the USPS calculated rates is the best option to get the fairest prices for both customers and the zine team.