Did you change something in the intl' shipping cost calculation?

[Thorsten Schneider]

I just wanted to place an order:

GameMastery Combat Pad
Open Mind Games 1 @ $16.95
GameMastery Campaign Workbook (OGL)
Paizo Publishing, LLC 1 @ $13.95
GameMastery Critical Hit Deck
Paizo Publishing, LLC 1 @ $9.99
Castles & Crusades Players Handbook v3.0 (OGL)
Troll Lord Games 1 @ $19.95 $17.96

Then I saw the calculated shipping costs for that order:

USPS Priority Mail, 6-10 days
Subtotal (4 Items) $58.85
Shipping & Handling $39.30
Order Total $98.15

I know it is international shipping, but this shipping price is totally ridiculous :/

Edit: It took out the Crit Hit Deck cause it does not fit in like the rest of the books, but the shipping price remains the same.

[Cpt_kirstov]

That sounds about right unfortunately - I sold a few 2e books on ebay last month and for one book to go overseas was 8.50 by weight - and this was the small complete books, not even a hardcover. when the US redid shipping about 2-3 months ago, they did away with all boat shipping overseas, thus forcing people to pay air prices, and shipping skyrocketed.

[Gary Teter]

That's the shipping rate for Priority Mail International. There is a cheaper rate available called "First Class Mail International", but it has a weight limit of 64 ounces (~1.8 kg). You might find that if you split your order up into multiple smaller orders you can pay less in shipping.

I'd like our software to do that automatically but I have no idea when I can get around to it.

There are other even cheaper international delivery services we use, but they have weird requirements such as: "weighs less than a pound no matter what it is" or "weighs less than 64 ounces but has a minimum 50 percent 'bound printed matter' (ie books)." We use these automatically if your order qualifies.

[Thorsten Schneider]

Thanks for those infos Gary. I did read on the USPS site about the new shipping costs for international packages. While they did away with ship transfers they did change something in the air freight cost calculations. Looks like the price not as influenced by the weight as it was before. So you can just make one big order with a higher number of items and the shipping price still remains the same. Whereas before it could get quite high because the weight of the package had a higher factor in the cost calculation. It looks like the bigger factor now is the dimension of the packet. Strange, since I always thought that for air transport the weight would be a bigger factor than dimension *shrugs*