I always though that calculated shipping is a good thing. When the visitor puts in his zip code and gets a shipping quote, it seems to him that he’s being charged the true shipping cost and not some arbitrary amount.

But I know for a fact that I lost at least one sale and possibly more because I used calculated shipping.


I created an eBay auction and I set it up so that it uses a shipping calculator for USPS Priority Mail. I got an irate email from a potential customer asking if I really thought people were going to pay 56.00 for my item. (My item was 35.00 plus shipping).

It turns out there was a major problem with eBay’s shipping calculator. When I went to the auction and put in a California zip code, it came to over 35.00. The same zip code on the USPS site was 11+. The visitor who sent me the email was seeing 26.00 for shipping.

I had noticed the same odd behavior a few weeks ago using Paypal. I clicked on Create a Shipping Label to send an item to Florida via USPS Priority Mail and the price came up as 25.00. The same address on the USPS website to create a ClickNShip label was 11+.

I immediately changed the shipping to a fixed price, but who knows how many orders I lost.

Even if the calculated shipping doesn’t malfunction you could lose a sale. On my Zen Cart site I had a shipping module that calculated Priority Mail costs by using an interface with the USPS shipping server. But I got an email from a potential customer saying he was trying to order but my site couldn’t come up with a shipping rate for his town in California.

I tried myself with his zip code and it worked fine. So I think what happened was the USPS shipping server was down or a connection couldn’t be established when he tried to order (it was close to Christmas).

I immediately emailed him that it should work fine now, but he never returned.

I’ll never again use a calculated shipping module.

Addendum: Well, the case of the mysterious shipping charge is solved. It turned out to be operator error. The dimensions of my box are 12 x 12 x 18. The last time I looked at the USPS requirements, this did NOT constitute what they consider to be a large box (and therefore a higher charge). Their requirements were if the largest girth of the box (in my case 12 + 18 + 12 + 18) plus the length (in my case 12) is greater than 84 inches, it is a large box. (My box adds up to 72 inches).

But somewhere along the line, they added this phrase, "or is bigger than 1 cubic foot (12 x 12 x 12)."

My box is greater than 1 cubic foot. On my website and on eBay’s auction, it asked me for the dimensions and it calculated the charge for a Large Package. But when I went to the USPS site myself, I just selected Package.

It’s interesting to note that I saw a post from another person with the same problem. His box was bigger than 1 cubic foot so the shipping calculator gave him a Large Package price, but when he brought it in person to the post office, they charged him the regular package price.

For me, the solution is to use FedEx or UPS from now on.

And I’m still not going to use calculated shipping again.

Posted by susb8383 under Misc. | No Comments »

In a previous post, I detailed how to analyze sales with visitor keyword searches, specifically how you can use PHP to assign a unique id to a visitor, store that id with their Google Analytic information, and pass that to the affiliate network. The reason for going to all that trouble is so that you can analyze the keyword and campaign info that sent the visitor to your site for visitors that actually bought something from your affiliate vendor.

Well, I now have a really practical example of how this analysis saved me money.

One of the companies that I am an affiliate for sells collectible dolls. They have lots of different types: newborn dolls, dolls that breathe, dolls that have heartbeats, anatomically correct dolls, etc.

I have a Google Adwords campaign for each of these different categories. Without my PHP magic, I could tell how many impressions and clicks each campaign got me, but I had no way to tell which of those visitors actually bought a doll because I was sending them off to the other website.

Using my PHP technique, I was able to run a report that showed me all the keywords just for those people that purchased a doll. And I found out something interesting.

Even though I was getting lots of impressions and clicks for anatomically correct dolls, not a single person bought one. That’s out of about 200 visitors who came to my site because they searched for anatomically correct dolls and clicked on my ad.

I was showing them a page with anatomically correct dolls, exactly word-for-word what they had searched for. So why wasn’t anyone buying an anatomically correct doll?

To find out, I created a survey (the topic of another post I have yet to do). I directed all the people who clicked on that ad to my survey first, then on to my website. I asked them a couple of questions like “what were you hoping to find when you searched for anatomically correct dolls?” etc.

And I found something interesting.

All the people who filled out my survey were looking for anatomically correct dolls that could be played with. One person gave me more helpful information: she’s opening a day care and her child development background prompted her to search out these types of dolls.

Armed with that information, the lack of sales made perfect sense. My site sells collectible dolls which can cost up to $199.00. These are dolls that are made to be put on a shelf and admired, not played with. These people were looking for dolls as toys.

So I disabled that particular Google Adwords campaign. Without the ability to relate keywords to sales, I never would have discovered this and I would have continued to waste money on a Google campaign that wasn’t resulting in any sales.

Posted by susb8383 under Affiliate Marketing & Google Adwords | No Comments »