On Shipping

Thu Dec 21

Written by: Casey O.

TL;DR: The ‘likely free’ shipping filter is a guess; it might be free. ‘Unknown’ means we don’t know.

‘Free shipping’ is an interesting idea, because it costs money to ship things. Generally it costs more to ship heavier or larger items, and price often increases with distance.

Vendors often makes this opaque to consumers, but behind the scenes they have a lot of control about how they much they charge.

The cost you pay for shipping can be:

• Included in the purchase price (‘free shipping’)
• Included in the purchase price if you pay a monthly fee (Amazon Prime)
• Included in the purchase price above a certain minimum spend (usually $35 on Amazon)
• A flat rate
• By weight
• Based on the recieving address
• The rate the courier/logistics company charges the vendor, calculated and passed along
• A combination of the above factors, or some other way

In addition, even within the US some vendors don’t sell to certain states (usually Hawaii and Alaska).

It’s not so simple.

We make a price comparison tool for batteries, and we want to give you the best data possible. We can’t know in advance, and don’t want to know:

• How many items, or how much you might spend on some future order. Including other items that aren’t batteries, purchased at the same time.
• Where you are located
• If you subscribe to Amazon Prime

So, we do out best by allowing you to filter items based on a few values:

• Prime: the item is eligible for Amazon Prime program, which you may or may not pay for.
• Likely free: Our best to guess is that shipping will be free for many customers in the continguous 48 states. Again we can’t know for sure because we don’t know which items nor how many you may someday purchase.
• Unknown: additional shipping fee likely, but again, maybe not. We just can’t know.

Hope that clears it up!