What Happened to Free SHIPPING!?!

Since our inception, fast free shipping has been one of our tenants as a company.  So it took a long time for me to come to a decision to eliminate the free portion of that sentence.  I know we all want free, so taking that away is putting a lot of trust in you guys to be able to understand my reasoning and trust my math.  I'm going to list a few reasons I moved away from the free shipping model all-together below.  I'd love to hear from you if you think this is a bad decision or if you appreciate me putting the shipping cost decisions in your hands.

Free is Never Really Free

Full disclosure, free shipping isn't really free shipping.  I am paying to ship you your coffee, so you're either paying for it buried in the price of the coffee beans or at the end at checkout.  I think the psychology of free shipping is that you don't end up at the checkout and find out that you need to spend another 30% to get your items.  That's a very real thing and I hope to have a simple pricing model to help you avoid that sticker shock.  Before I get there, let me tell you what I used to do.  It costs me about $9.00 to ship 5lbs of coffee (USPS just raised their prices...again).  So what I did was add $1.80 to each pound as I calculated the selling price.  I then had $5 shipping for under $35 orders to try to drive the customer (you) to buy about 5lbs of coffee and make the math work.

There have been several flaws with this model.  First off, it made the cost per lb look like we're WAY more expensive than other green coffee resellers in the market.  Second, it really stops working when someone orders less than 5lbs and more than 5lbs, because the cost to ship 5lbs-30lbs per pound is much less than $1.80/lb.  So it kind of narrowed our market.  Third, we have recently been able to negotiate even better rates with FedEx and blown up the $1.80/lb model.  We can now do a 2-day Padded Pak at an amazing rate and fit 10lbs in it.  The irony of a free shipping model is that it is less transparent.  If I'm going to be completely transparent with my cost model, then you'll recognize a good deal when you see it and we're all happier.  Transparency makes the whole sales process work better.

So we now include our pricing without shipping and add it on at the end.  To help you optimize your buying experience our shipping pricing is listed below.