In reply to Bobzilla:
USPS offers tracking numbers on everything. You just need to pay for them. IMB. I dealt with it every day.
In reply to Bobzilla:
USPS offers tracking numbers on everything. You just need to pay for them. IMB. I dealt with it every day.
Fueled by Caffeine wrote: I worked in Amazon's transportation strategy and ops department for years. Won't talk about it.. I'm commenting as a private citizen here. But will say that, like healthcare or steel or whatever, there is a limited supply of transportation in the world. Doing it right is very, very expensive. Doing it wrong is 6x as expensive as doing it right. I don't see transport costs going down anytime soon, nor do I see as e-commerce as a money adder to an organization. It's a race to the bottom. People will still do it, but I don't expect what we enjoy now to continue in its current form at its current price structure. Now.. in the transport industry, you can get rates pretty easily. They control them by the dim weight of an item. Compact heavy items are often cheaper to ship than a larger cheap item. Think about a book versus a box full of ping pong balls. I can fit lots of books on a package car(what ups calls their trucks). I cannot fit many large boxes of ping pong balls. https://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/packaging/dim_weight.html Remember this. The final mile cost is the most expensive part of the supply chain. That is from depot to your front door. All costs are optimized around that final mile. The Mid mile cost is a commodity. A truck from Dallas to Kansas City is essentially a fixed cost......
All very true and correct. However, I cannot believe that it justifies charging $100 shipping for (example) a damn bumper cover. I know, it takes a box about 60"x16"x20", but come ON, it only weighs about 5 pounds box and all... $100 really???
WildScotsRacing wrote:Fueled by Caffeine wrote: I worked in Amazon's transportation strategy and ops department for years. Won't talk about it.. I'm commenting as a private citizen here. But will say that, like healthcare or steel or whatever, there is a limited supply of transportation in the world. Doing it right is very, very expensive. Doing it wrong is 6x as expensive as doing it right. I don't see transport costs going down anytime soon, nor do I see as e-commerce as a money adder to an organization. It's a race to the bottom. People will still do it, but I don't expect what we enjoy now to continue in its current form at its current price structure. Now.. in the transport industry, you can get rates pretty easily. They control them by the dim weight of an item. Compact heavy items are often cheaper to ship than a larger cheap item. Think about a book versus a box full of ping pong balls. I can fit lots of books on a package car(what ups calls their trucks). I cannot fit many large boxes of ping pong balls. https://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/packaging/dim_weight.html Remember this. The final mile cost is the most expensive part of the supply chain. That is from depot to your front door. All costs are optimized around that final mile. The Mid mile cost is a commodity. A truck from Dallas to Kansas City is essentially a fixed cost......All very true and correct. However, I cannot believe that it justifies charging $100 shipping for (example) a damn bumper cover. I know, it takes a box about 60"x16"x20", but come ON, it only weighs about 5 pounds box and all... $100 really???
That's how much the space on their trucks cost. Think about it this way, they need $100 from you for that large item to make up for the lost revenue for other items that could be on that truck. It all comes down to cost per sqft of space on a truck.
If you can do better, go into the business 
Trucks can carry a certain amount of volume and a certain amount of weight. The cost to get the loaded truck from point A to point B doesn't really vary. If that truck is full of big packages, then the cost has to be split amongst them.
Fueled by Caffeine wrote: In reply to Bobzilla: USPS offers tracking numbers on everything. You just need to pay for them. IMB. I dealt with it every day.
I've been gone from that world now 2 years. I know that 5 years ago, getting a trackable package from USPS actually tracked was like asking Congress to give us a balanced budget.
oldeskewltoy wrote: shipping gets costly when you want an engine half way around the world, by air.......
How expensive you ask... how about $2600
I remember when we'd get overnight parts from Japan.... literally. One was an RL rear diff. I don't even want to know what THAT cost them. I do know that OVN from Japan on UPS comes through Anchorage. I thought tat was interesting.
Bobzilla wrote:Fueled by Caffeine wrote: In reply to Bobzilla: USPS offers tracking numbers on everything. You just need to pay for them. IMB. I dealt with it every day.I've been gone from that world now 2 years. I know that 5 years ago, getting a trackable package from USPS actually tracked was like asking Congress to give us a balanced budget.
They have become more customer centric as of late, but Yes. They have had this capability for years. Never used it well though..
Keith Tanner wrote: Prime is subsidized by Amazon's other lines of business like AWS. I'm not sure the retail side of the house has ever turned a profit. But they sure do make it difficult for the rest of us!
Don't see how they can make a profit based on the last thing I bought on Amazon. I ordered 3 plastic plant stands with rollers as one order. Somehow it got processed as 3 separate orders. So I got 3 boxes each containing 1 plant stand when all 3 of them could easily have fit in one of the boxes along with 3 more. And the shipping was free!
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