What's in Your Shipping Cost?
Shipping costs are the worst! I honestly don't understand how some retailers offer free shipping. I can't see how our business would ever be able to do this. Are you wondering what exactly goes into these shipping costs? Let's have a look.
First off, our website is directly linked to Canada Post, and we have an app on our website which calculates the box sizes, contents, weights and so forth. This combined with Canada Post's shipping rates comes together to formulate the shipping cost. Some couriers will not allow live plants to be shipped. And, our 3rd party shipping app does it provide us with the all the flexibility we require to make our shipping the best it can be. Nor is it cheap.
Other charges which make a dent in your shipping costs include a fuel surcharge from Canada Post. The fuel surcharge alone is usually 10-20% of the total shipping charge you pay. For a shipment to Ontario, this might be $50-60! Oversize package fee is another charge from Canada Post. Any package a minimum of 40" long/tall, which our largest packages are, is hit with an oversize charge of $21(up $3 since last year!). In BC, this oversize fee would represent 10% of your total shipping cost but in Ontario this would represent significantly less of the overall shipping charge. However, in Ontario the fuel surcharge is significantly larger than in BC. Then there's the taxes. Every Canadians' nightmare: taxes.
Unfortunately the shipping costs remove some potential customers from ever purchasing from us. This is the reality. On the other hand, as many of our customers in the east will attest to, access to Japanese maples is limited so it becomes a question of perceived value for the ability to find great trees but albeit with a high shipping cost.
Honestly, the shipping part of what we do is not a perfect science, but we work hard to give you the best value possible. All we can do is try to safely squeeze as many trees as we can into a box and ship them to you as fast as possible. If we shipped them at a slower rate, then the shipping cost decreases dramatically but the danger of receiving a tree in distress(or worse) increases. That isn't an option for us. Who knows what the future holds in terms of the shipping process, but in the meantime, we will continue to put healthy trees into boxes and ship them to your door as fast as possible.
Chris