What's going on with RAMA shipping prices?

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Indeed, we’re getting closer to sane levels. :slight_smile: Kudos to RAMA in case they happened to have stumbled upon this thread! If they can “fix” the board prices as well we’re good, I guess. :wink:

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Tapping my “dimensional weighting is super weird and also the basis for all modern shipping prices” sign.

Deskmats are really the king of this: they’re pretty light in terms of density (though not necessarily light overall) so there’s pretty much nothing you can do to make them hit the density that’ll hit the threshold for prices to be calculated off actual weight; you can’t just fold them up really tight to get a small box, because it’ll cause intense creasing/seams; and a flat-deskmat-sized box would be nightmarishly expensive for dimensional weighting. So we get poster tubes, which help avoid a bunch of the creasing problems but are newly extremely expensive due to dimensional weighting. Packing a poster tube into a more regularly-shaped box would just increase the volume and thus the base shipping cost, so even if it might make handling easier it’d probably still cost more in the long run.

Logistics, y’all. It’s a huge puzzle. And this doesn’t even get into the broad business practice of presenting lower shipping prices to customers by building extra profit margin into base price that can be subtracted from shipping prices to present more-palatable (*ahem* palletable?) shipping prices to customers because all available information shows people are more willing to accept higher unit prices than they are higher shipping prices. (Biggest example of this is Amazon)

EDIT: tl;dr to understand shipping prices you must first learn to play fourth-dimensional chess to predict package volume and item density

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This was a really interesting read; thanks for sharing! In particular, I had not realized that there was an inflection point where an item could be too light for cheap-ish weight-based shipping but too big/awkwardly-sized for cheap, lightweight packages. It makes perfect sense in hindsight.

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