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Amazon can afford discounting the shipping due to freaking massive amounts of stuff they ship. They can negotiate rates based on volume that are beyond the reach of relatively small fish like Paizo.
Heck, I even think they can afford losing on shipping, most of their earnings are Prime subs, cloud services and fees from third party using them as store-front.
It is next to impossible to ship anything anywhere for less than about 7 dollars. Go to the post office or Pack-n-Mail and check rates for yourself. As Gorbacz says, Amazon gets discounted rates from their shippers which allows them to offer lower shipping costs or free shipping. Other shippers either add the cost of their "free" shipping to the product price or negotiate their own deals with shippers, if they are large enough.
The $3.99 price you're seeing from third party sellers represents USPS Media Mail rates, which Paizo doesn't offer. You can read about that here.
The pdf I can put on my phone and twiddle with when I walk the dog.
This thread gives some reasons to have the pdf. There are some confusing (and wrong) assumptions in the first 40 posts. Start here
I find having both hard and soft copies very useful. Hard copies make it easier to flip back and forth between two sections (say an encounter writeup and an NPC statblock), so when I'm running a game in person I tend to prefer physical copies. However, I also run games online, and having the PDF means I can run games with just my computer and nothing else, and I can incorporate art and maps into online games very easily by just extracting them from the PDFs.
Sometimes I also like casually reading my books, and having PDFs saved to my Google drive means I can access them from anywhere I can access the Internet. It also means I can have access to my entire library when playing games in weird places (sometimes having to haul around many pounds of books just doesn't work out). Unfortunately I'm also hard on books and lose everything I touch, so having a PDF backup means I'll always have whatever I've bought. You may not have that problem, but I do.
If I'm only running a game in person at the table, I only use a hard copy. However, most of my gaming these days is online, which makes the PDFs invaluable for pulling out images and maps.
If you don't need digital images of the art/cartography, I'd probably just get the hardcopy.
It may be worth noting, per this thread, that if you want to use Lone Wolf's new(ish) Realm Works software, owning the PDFs is a necessity. That might make the free PDF that comes with a subscription more attractive.
Amazon can afford discounting the shipping due to freaking massive amounts of stuff they ship. They can negotiate rates based on volume that are beyond the reach of relatively small fish like Paizo.
Heck, I even think they can afford losing on shipping, most of their earnings are Prime subs, cloud services and fees from third party using them as store-front.
Not only do they lose money on shipping, they often sell the product at a loss too.
Their profit comes not from shifting product but from being the only game in town, so other online sellers will buy an amazon store (which IS profitable) rather than going into competition with them.
Now that I know why its more expensive, I'm still curious how useful other GMs have found having the hard and soft copy vs just having the hard copy.
I rarely use the PDF, but when there's a cool player handout it's much easier to print from there than to photocopy.
Yeah I think amazon loses money one several of their policies but makes it back on stocks and subscriptions
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I really don't care what excuses are made for the outrageous shipping charges Paizo charges. I almost passed out when I saw the shipping on the Golem order I thought about placing. Ridiculous. Until Paizo fixes the shipping cost, I will purchase everything off of Ebay at the same 30 percent discount, half the shipping cost, AND I get it faster than I ever got anything from Paizo. It's a shame because I like the idea of the Pathfinder Subscription.
That's the best thing to do. Paizo provide lots of ways to get their product and we each get to choose what suits us best.
I would question why you would label "we charge for shipping at what it costs us" as outrageous (it seems like a reasonable approach to me - what do you expect them to do?) Ultimately though, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks is reasonable, you've found the solution that works best for you, so the system is working as intended.
Yeah, I agree that's a significant factor in the perception.
I personally find it hard to fault Paizo for following the rules even though some companies are happy to break them.
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Now that I know why its more expensive, I'm still curious how useful other GMs have found having the hard and soft copy vs just having the hard copy.
I like to have the books as a collector but to be honest, I mainly use the pdfs as my kindle is much easy to wear around than my book collection.
Now I agree that it is kind of a bummer if the shipping cost basically annihilates the 30% off retail, but apart from getting the book and the pdf with the subscription, there are three other advantages worth mentioning:
1. First (and probably least important for you as a customer), subscribing to any product line enables Paizo to make a more educated guess about the number of products they can sell. So subscribing actually helps the publisher, and as I'm a Paizo fan as much as Pathfinder fan, that makes it worth it for me(you can't see it yet but I just resubscribed starting with the Nirmathas-AP).
2. You get the pdf as soon as they ship your hardcopy which means that you do not need to wait for your pdf until the actual product is released. If you're like me and kinda hate it if other people already discuss things you can't read yet, that's an additional bonus.
3. (and this might be the most important) If you subscribe to the AP line, you'll also get the Pathfinder advantage which means another 15% off on any Paizo products you might buy (including pdfs from other lines)
Does anyone know why Paizo's shipping is so expensive?
Because no one's gotten the teleporter to work properly.
Chief Technical Officer
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The $3.99 price you're seeing from third party sellers represents USPS Media Mail rates, which Paizo doesn't offer. You can read about that here.
Joana is usually right, but I'm afraid this is an exception—it has nothing to do with Media Mail.
Amazon has a number of different ways that third-party sellers can sell through Amazon; two of the main categories are Amazon Marketplace Professional and Individual Sellers. When these sellers sell what Amazon calls a "BMVD" product (Books, Music, Videos and DVDs), Amazon sets a fixed shipping price based on that product type—not based on weight or size! The shipping charged for books going from these sellers' US addresses to US addresses is always $3.99 (regular), $6.99 (expedited), and $14.99 (2-day), regardless of the seller's actual postage costs. This entire amount is passed on to the seller in addition to their percentage of the product's price.
Amazon does not dictate the shipping method that the seller chooses—they just set a delivery window. (The default delivery window for standard shipping is 4 to 14 days after shipping, though it can be reduced for qualified sellers.) It's up the seller to figure out how to ship the product to get it to that customer within that window. If the seller is able to ship for less than the amount Amazon set, the seller makes more profit, and if it costs more to ship than Amazon charged, that cuts into the seller's profit on the item. (It's possible for sellers to lose money on the transaction as a whole when shipping heavy BMVD products; I personally suspect a lot of sellers don't realize that.) Amazon, on the other hand, has zero risk of losing money on these Marketplace sales—they're getting their cut of the purchase price no matter what.
Vic,
But I am right about no one has gotten the teleporter to work properly, right?
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Chief Technical Officer
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But I am right about no one has gotten the teleporter to work properly, right?
Remember that shipping prices are driven by speed... and if you think 2-day shipping is expensive, you're so not going to be happy about teleporter shipping costs.
The good news is since it's all about speed, you should instead build a time machine, travel back in time to a couple weeks before the product is ordered, and then ship the order using the cheapest possible method. You just need to be careful not to get it to the customer before they order it, otherwise they might try to save money by not ordering it, and then the universe will collapse into paradox jelly.
So time machine better than teleporter huh?
I can almost see that. Thank you Vic. :)
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Now I agree that it is kind of a bummer if the shipping cost basically annihilates the 30% off retail...
IIRC, the original point of the discout was to offset the cost of shipping.
In other words, the price you paid when ordering from Paizo was about the same as what you'd pay to buy it at a bookstore (plus, you'd get the PDF if you subscribed!). Paizo was really trying to get people to sign up for those early subs.
-Skeld
So time machine better than teleporter huh?
I can almost see that. Thank you Vic. :)
It is really important that you don't spoil any products that haven't even been written yet on these messageboards. That is a surefire way to get them eliminated from the timestream.
David,
Well if I get it working, I promise to not show off my Paizo version of the Necronomicon. ;) Oops. ;)
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Now I agree that it is kind of a bummer if the shipping cost basically annihilates the 30% off retail...IIRC, the original point of the discout was to offset the cost of shipping.
In other words, the price you paid when ordering from Paizo was about the same as what you'd pay to buy it at a bookstore (plus, you'd get the PDF if you subscribed!). Paizo was really trying to get people to sign up for those early subs.
-Skeld
I actually save around two bucks off what I would at a store.
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IIRC, the original point of the discout was to offset the cost of shipping.
Yeah, you might be right, I seem to remember that as well. I can see though that people who don't know this might be dissapointed when they discover this.
To me the only thing where shipping costs really come into play is with the hardcovers, where I simply can't afford paying 25$ in shipping costs, especially when I can get the same book via their german partner Ulisses without any shipping costs at all. But I realize that this is not Paizo's fault so I wpuldn't hold it against them in any way.
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Now I agree that it is kind of a bummer if the shipping cost basically annihilates the 30% off retail...IIRC, the original point of the discount was to offset the cost of shipping.
In other words, the price you paid when ordering from Paizo was about the same as what you'd pay to buy it at a bookstore (plus, you'd get the PDF if you subscribed!). Paizo was really trying to get people to sign up for those early subs.
-Skeld
IIRC, the original point of the discount was to offset the cost of shipping.Yeah, you might be right, I seem to remember that as well. I can see though that people who don't know this might be dissapointed when they discover this.
Here is a source for that.
Further, keep in mind that subscribers pay shipping on their copies, and that shipping charge brings the total subscriber cost pretty close to the retail price. For most people, the PDF is the only real incentive, because the discount is a wash with shipping.
Both shipping and the cost of the product (and, therefore, the amount of the discount) have gone up in the last 10 years. Not sure how the math works out now.
EDIT:
Joana is usually right, but I'm afraid this is an exception—it has nothing to do with Media Mail.
Aww. :( *scuffs toe of shoe in dirt*
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Hey, it's a great post to add to your list of favourites-for-later-use.
"Vic Wertz says I'm usually right: source."
Keep that quote in your back pocket in case the site ever starts using signatures.