Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Daylight robbery (aka rubbish shipping calculation)

Suppose you are enticed by the online discount of the above guitar hardcase & proceeded to purchase it online. It's a cool USD89.95, so why not. However, that didn't include the shipping charges & the party shipping this item to you only does express air delivery so you decided to proceed. It's going for a a superb discount anyway till you check your final charges & realized you were billed USD100 more. So how did that heinous addition came about? Answer: Volumetric weight charges.

This simply means that the people doing the shipment treated your guitar case to bear the true weight of an object with the same dimensions. Let's imagine that the guitar case is now a fish tank- sporting the exact dimensions- filled to the brim with water. So there you have it, a very heavy fish tank because it's darn full of water but your guitar case in question is primarily full of air. It doesn't weigh as much as the hypothetical filled-up fish tank & will never be. But airlines carrying such goods have no such considerations, they assume your guitar case bears the volumetric weight so the charges are according to this rather than understanding that your guitar case won't be as heavy as they considered them to be. You were charged much more than the true worth of your item- that's bloody dishonest.

So my friends, before you commit to any shipment charges, please note the terms of the trade. This is why shipment charges are prohibitive, in fact, these charges exceed the price of your items in question in most cases- you think it's worth it?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I dunno man. but to me, the seller should offer more than 1 method of shipping. Air express is definitely gonna be expensive. With regards to volumetric weight calculation, compare 10kg of rice to 10kg of cotton wool, the cotton wool definitely takes up much more space. Hence, the use of volumetric weight calculation.

subversion.sg said...

they are not interested in space, they work with given dimensions & formulate a fixed weight for consideration; cotton wool, rice, oil, manure :-) ... they all weigh the same. warped logic.