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I just noticed that the price for USPS package service shipping has increased by $3.
Unfortunately, that means that I'm going to have to ask for my Pathfinder modules and companion subscriptions to be cancelled (after just one module, alas). I know increased shipping costs aren't Paizo's fault, but I only started the subscriptions because my Pathfinder advantage discount was enough to offset the increased shipping cost. I'll still be getting the modules through my local game store here in the UK, though...And if the option to add things to my sidecart to ship with my next Pathfinder volume kicks in then I'm sure I'll start using that.
That raises another question; will I be able to return to the special $5 Pathfinder shipping now that I'm only going to have that subscription left on my account? If I'm stuck with the $9.36, then I'll need to cancel that subscription too, and start making more regular pilgrimages to the store...
Cheers,
Ukos
That raises another question; will I be able to return to the special $5 Pathfinder shipping now that I'm only going to have that subscription left on my account? If I'm stuck with the $9.36, then I'll need to cancel that subscription too, and start making more regular pilgrimages to the store...
It's true that at $10.04 per subscription shipment to France, shipping is starting to become an issue. Is this because of my three subscriptions? Hopefully, the Euro to USD currency conversion rate won't fall under 1.50 any time soon.
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It's true that at $10.04 per subscription shipment to France, shipping is starting to become an issue. Is this because of my three subscriptions? Hopefully, the Euro to USD currency conversion rate won't fall under 1.50 any time soon.
I'm not anyone official, but I'm guessing that the weight of the things shipping was just too much for whatever the bound print matter international rate is. I believe the weight has to be under 4 pounds for that rate, and between a pathfinder, the a chronicles book and a module it might be close to that limit
With the price of gas what it is, it's no surprise to me that shipping costs are affected.
Sure. But a shipping tag going from $6.86 to $10.04 isn't just gas. I rather hope it's a bug.
To quote Paizo's Apr. 25th email :
(To give you an idea of the scale of the changes, the postage for a domestic First Class letter will be increasing from 41 to 42 cents.)
I know that Paizo isn't responsible, and I know that a domestic letter is not an international parcel, but still. It's Paizo who's going to suffer because I'll probably just make a $100 order every three or four months rather than keep my Chronicles subscription.
By the way, it looks like the "whatever you buy that weighs under 4 pounds is $6.86" policy is no longer true. A Pathfinder issue in the shopping cart is now $7.39 for me. 2 Pathfinder issues are $11.71.
Chief Technical Officer
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There are a handful of issues here, all of which are being applied simultaneously.
The first is that the USPS has implemented a rate change, which affects nearly everything. In some cases, it's a small amount, and in other cases, it's a larger amount.
The second is that the rules we were using for international shipments have changed. Before, we were able to charge a flat rate of $6.86 for all packages under 4 pounds that contained at least 50% bound printed matter, and no part of that rule has survived. The new rule is strictly on a per-ounce basis, but the contents of the package no longer matter. The bad news is that this means that packages of books that weigh over a pound have gone up, but the good news is that packages under about a pound have actually gone down, and it's also cheaper to send lightweight non-book items like flip-mats and T-shirts.
The third is that the "Pathfinder standard shipping" option (which we had priced at $5 internationally and $4 domestically) is no longer being offered. We set up that rate a few months before we begin offering Pathfinder, and we had contacted our shipper and asked for a specific quote for our Pathfinder subscription shipments. They gave us a quote, and then we set up that rate, and announced it to our customers. And then the shipper told us that the rates they'd given us were going to go up a couple of months later, before we'd even shipped a single copy. We decided that, since we'd already offered it to customers, we'd bite the bullet—we really should have been charging $6.86 for everything that went out under the $5 plan. Ultimately, we paid our shipper tens of thousands of dollars more to ship those items than we charged our customers (and that doesn't even account for the cost of the envelopes and boxes, which we didn't charge for either).
Now, we recognize that shipping costs are going up a lot for folks who subscribed to more than one of our products—and the more products you subscribed to, the more the rate is going up. So we're once again going to subsidize international shipping for certain packages weighing between 1 and 4 pounds. To give you the most extreme example, an international package that weighs 4 pounds costs us $23.96 to ship. That doesn't include the cost of the box, or packaging material, or any other handling fee—that's just straight postage. However, we'll be charging customers as though it's costing us only $13.86 in postage for that package. So, in this extreme case, the cost has doubled for you, but it has gone up fourfold for us. In short, we're still going to be losing money on postage—and the heavier it is, the more we're losing—but we've chosen to do this again because we think it's the right thing do to.
That subsidized rate automatically applies to subscription shipments, so the price you're seeing on the "my subscriptions" page is accurate. We'll also be offering it for non-subscription shipments that include at least $25 worth of product—Gary's still working on that.
Once we get that in place, we'll be sending an e-mail to international subscribers explaining what's going on.
Thanks for the details, Vic!
I will wait for the e-mail and I'll do the math. I guess it will probably be better for me – only one shipping fee – and for Paizo – less shipping charges – if I just order my stuff every few months, then.
Once again, thanks for your detailed answer.
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Chief Technical Officer
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I guess it will probably be better for me – only one shipping fee – and for Paizo – less shipping charges – if I just order my stuff every few months, then.
Be careful, though—you don't want to go over 4 pounds, or you have to go Priority, which is even more expensive (although Gary's looking at providing the ability to break large packages into smaller packages behind the scenes when it saves you money).
(A Pathfinder in our standard cardboard envelope weighs about a pound.)
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I feel like your margin is going down in a spiral, after the discounts you offer on some subs, the general discount to PF subscribers and now the hit on postage (Seriously, a 4 pound package went from 7- to 23+? That's robery!).
Do you have any Plan Bs being worked out?
Would using someone else beside USPS be a viable possibility?
Selling subs through FLGS? (You send all subs at once to the FLGS, each subscriber then goes at the FLGS to take his portion. Maybe shipping for a dozen or more subs at once would end up cheaper for everyone?)
Or any other solution including buying at my FLGS while I could still receive free PDFs? (At these shipping rates, I guess I would be willing to pay a couple bucks and type in an access code to get a PDF...
Or selling PDF-only subs? (Physical books are nice, but I would prefer you make money over the PDF I buy, instead of losing/breaking even.
Or working with USPS, showing them their new rates don't make sense, and reaching an agreement on lower costs based on the quantity you ship? (What Amazon is probably doing if they want to be able to keep the free super saver shipping...)
Right now, I'm wondering if keeping all subs is a good thing, for both you and me. Not only am I not sure about paying twice as much for shipping each month (but I do think it's still worth it with all the discounts and free PDFs you give me). But you might almost be losing money for my convenience, and that I don't like at all.
Show me the way!
Any chance we could have the product weight added to the description pages, so that we could ballpark when ordering?
As I'm living in France, it's clear that I subscribe to mainly Pathfinder ongoing subscriptions because the Euro to US dollar rate currency conversion is good for me. It won't go down before a lot of months...
So, I'll stay with Paizo long months!
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Chief Technical Officer
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I feel like your margin is going down in a spiral, after the discounts you offer on some subs, the general discount to PF subscribers and now the hit on postage (Seriously, a 4 pound package went from 7- to 23+? That's robery!).
As I said above, we were electing to subsidize postage before, and we're electing to subsidize it now as well. So we're not actually losing margin we weren't already expecting to lose. In short, we're not giving up anything we can't afford to give up, but hopefully you'll understand why we can't afford to give up any more.
Would using someone else beside USPS be a viable possibility?
We actually are—we're using UPS Mail Innovations, and the $23.96 postage I quoted on that 4-pound package is their discounted rate. The cheapest USPS rate to send that package to Germany or Australia, for example, is $30.10.
Selling subs through FLGS?
I'm not sure that would solve the problem (heavier packages go to an even steeper rate table, remember), plus we've never figured out a way to sell subs or PDFs through retailers where we can't easily be taken advantage of.
Mail Innovations actually works kind of like your "distribute through the FLGS" idea, but in a much bigger scale. They take all of our packages that are going to Quebec, for example, and they bundle them up with Quebec-bound packages from their other customers, and then drop them into a Canada Post distribution center near their final destination. In this way, we're able to benefit from rates that they've negotiated based on much higher volumes than we'll ever have ourselves.
Or working with USPS, showing them their new rates don't make sense, and reaching an agreement on lower costs based on the quantity you ship? (What Amazon is probably doing if they want to be able to keep the free super saver shipping...)
Our rates from Mail Innovations do factor in our volume; if our volume went up substantially, our rates could go down. But we're not Amazon—they probably ship more in a day than we ship in quarter. Amazon can also afford to take low margins—or even losses—on their sales, because they know they'll make it up on volume, and on future, more profitable sales.
But you might almost be losing money for my convenience, and that I don't like at all.
Don't worry—we avoid making decisions where we lose money. We're losing margin, but we're not taking losses unless we screw up somewhere.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Any chance we could have the product weight added to the description pages, so that we could ballpark when ordering?
I think we'd end up confusing more people than we helped with that. Our shipping weights take into account stuff like the weight of the box and other packaging materials, and those are chosen based on the aggregate contents of the shipment. So, for example, if you have a Pathfinder Module (which would ship in an envelope), and you add a set of dice that weighs .25 pounds, we'd switch to a box and packaging that would add much more than .25 to your order. (But we couldn't just say that the dice weigh more than .25, because if you added another set, it would only go up .25.)
The easiest—and most accurate—thing to do is just add stuff to your cart, and see if the cheap shipping option goes away.
That subsidized rate automatically applies to subscription shipments, so the price you're seeing on the "my subscriptions" page is accurate.
Vic, could you please clarify this line for me? I'm not sure if it means that the rate will always be $10.04 for me, or that every month the rate will change and reflect the actual weight of the shipment (modulo subsidization).
Under the old system, I knew that I would pay $6.86 for shipping, as long as the weight of my monthly shipment was under 4 pounds.
Now that the price tag for my shipping method is $10.04, does it mean that I'll pay :
• $10.04 for the first Pathfinder that will be released in July,
• $10.04 for the second Pathfinder released in July, bundled with the Map Folio,
• $10.04 for the August Pathfinder release, plus the Campaign Setting, plus the Companion
or will it be $7.49, $10.04, and $18.72 (fictional numbers used to illustrate my point)?
I'm trying to get an estimate of what my monthly Paizo bill will amount to now.
Thanks!
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Chief Technical Officer
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That subsidized rate automatically applies to subscription shipments, so the price you're seeing on the "my subscriptions" page is accurate.Vic, could you please clarify this line for me? I'm not sure if it means that the rate will always be $10.04 for me, or that every month the rate will change and reflect the actual weight of the shipment (modulo subsidization).
The latter. Gary's hard at work on a replacement for the Subscriptions page that will actually show you all of this stuff in advance, and let you move stuff around in some circumstances.
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Gary's hard at work...
I hope you don't mean harder than usual, that could not be possible for a human being ;p
Thanks for all the info Vic! You can be sure to keep all the sub items going my way, then :D I was a little worried for my "Charter Superscriber" tag ;p
I sincerely hope all the new things you are doing (PFRPG, PF society and future PF products) will give you enough increased business that you get to new heights in copies sold and can make up for your somewhat lower margins :)
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Thanks Vic, that's given me a really interesting insight into how you go about shipping things to my ungrateful hands! I remember reading somewhere that you guys where already subsidising that $5 rate, but to hear that you still are on the new rates makes me feel even more greedy :) To be honest, I'd assumed that the increased rate was still working like the old one, that it was a flat rate for a certain weight.
Having now had my Modules & Companion subscriptions canceled (thanks to whoever did that), I can see that the shipping for Pathfinder has dropped to $7.39. I'm more than happy to pay slightly more than cover price on that for the convenience of getting it delivered right to my door and also getting the pdf. Of course, that means that really I'm only paying $2 for getting the Modules & the Companion also shipped direct to my door with the pdfs...I'm beginning to wonder if I might have jumped the gun...A bit of maths shows me that the exchange rate is still in my favour and I'd be getting a better deal that I had assumed...Hmmm
Cheers,
U
You shall ever have our loyalty, Paizo.
I'm beginning to wonder if I might have jumped the gun...A bit of maths shows me that the exchange rate is still in my favour and I'd be getting a better deal that I had assumed...Hmmm
Cheers,
U
Just resubscribe :)
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Just resubscribe :)I'm beginning to wonder if I might have jumped the gun...A bit of maths shows me that the exchange rate is still in my favour and I'd be getting a better deal that I had assumed...Hmmm
Cheers,
U
Funnily enough, that's exactly what I was thinking :)
Having considered it overnight, I think I want to resubscribe to both Pathfinder Modules and Companion. I've noticed that they still appear on "My Subscriptions", so does that mean a friendly neighbourhood customers services rep can set them going for me, or do I need to do it myself?
Cheers,
U
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I can only applaud Paizo's policy towards international customers. You really care for us.
I am getting a bit worried though about shipping internationally per se. With TWO major shipping rate changes for international countries in less than a year (resulting in an increase of about 100% for shipping cost), I see the stability of small commerce between America and Europe slipping into nirvana. And that is also not taking into consderation that might not be the last hike, as the oil prices explode and the conversion rate gets even worse.
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Director of Sales
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Having considered it overnight, I think I want to resubscribe to both Pathfinder Modules and Companion. I've noticed that they still appear on "My Subscriptions", so does that mean a friendly neighbourhood customers services rep can set them going for me, or do I need to do it myself?
Cheers,
U
This is exactly what it means, and I have done so. :)
However, you will need to go to your My subscriptions page and set your combined shipping method again, because it was reset when the subscriptions were canceled. We do not retain this information, and it isn't a decision I want to make for you.
Thanks,
cos
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Chief Technical Officer
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...With TWO major shipping rate changes for international countries in less than a year (resulting in an increase of about 100% for shipping cost)...
Government regulations prevent the USPS from raising their rates within a year after the previous rate change. The previous rate change was May 11, 2007; this year it was May 12.
I do expect that we'll see a rate increase every May for the foreseeable future, though.
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This is exactly what it means, and I have done so. :)
However, you will need to go to your My subscriptions page and set your combined shipping method again, because it was reset when the subscriptions were canceled. We do not retain this information, and it isn't a decision I want to make for you.
Thanks,
cos
Thanks Cosmo, all done. Next time I'll do the maths before canceling :)
U
Edit: I just realised how bad that sounds...What I mean, is that I'll engage brain before making important decisions :)