September 7th, 2017
We've been listening to feedback and the number one issue people had with our store was that shipping was simply too expensive. This was an unfortunate thing to discover--it does cost that much to ship and we'd based our pricing on other chocolate companies that often charge more. Part of the cost that's often hidden is that we pack for the heat with ice packs and use insulation when we can as well as the handling for packing orders of various sizes. Not only is that additional materials, it's man power to fill every order.
However, we quickly realized people are too used to Amazon Prime and cheap delivery from larger corporate stores. Any shipping fee stands out to today's customer. In fact, our own chocolate is available for free shipping on Amazon which made our own store's shipping charge even more frustrating for them as well as us.
In that case, why have our own store? Two major reasons: 1) Amazon doesn't let you do holiday discounts and we really wanted to be able to discount our chocolate on a whim and 2) Amazon doesn't let you group orders, so if someone bought our chocolate and our squares, they would come separately which makes zero sense. What a waste to the environment! There's also a third, smaller reason where having our own store lets us do our own newsletter and offer a more personal experience.
So with that goal in mind, we spent some time coming up with a solution. Not only did we want to find cheaper shipping, we wanted to find a better free shipping price point. It used to be $50 and that's simply too high. After all, in addition to our Amazon conundrum, lot of first time customers are hearing about us thanks to our Instagram and people don't always want to commit to buying over $50 when they try a new product.
After some math and some creative packaging, we have dropped shipping down from $10.95 to a flat rate of $5.99 for any order. As an added bonus, any order over $35 gets free shipping (down from the previous $50+ free shipping requirement).
We hope this post helped you understand our shipping costs and the struggles a small business faces! After all, we just want to make chocolate, why haven't they invented a teleporter yet?
XOXO,
ChocZero