By far the most confusing thing I’ve run into in the process of running my online boutique has been shipping.   There are just so many options, and so many hidden costs.  This week I found that out the hard way.  Let me start at the beginning…

I had planned on shipping with UPS from the beginning, since they always provide tracking, insurance, the whole nine yards.  It also doesn’t hurt that there is a UPS place about four blocks from where I live, making it extremely convenient for me to drop off these packages daily.  So I went there before the shop was even open and they told me about getting an account with UPS.com, saying I would get discounts on my fees.  Yes, DISCOUNTS.  Of course, I said sign me!  Oh how little I really knew….

So I used this account for all my shipping for the first couple of weeks.  Everything was so easy with it!  I would just fill out the slips at home, take the packages in and it would take them about two seconds to ship it off for me.  Each label had really short and easy to read tracking numbers already printed on the too. Just to be sure of the costs, I asked the girl at the counter how much it would be, and she gave me the price, but said it could be “a little more or a little less” using an account.  Okaaaay. The thing is, on UPS.com you have to get a separate login via snail mail before you can even see how much you’re being billed.  Kind of ridiculous, huh?  So basically, I had no way of tracking exactly how much I was being charged at this point for my packages.

This is where things started to go wrong…

The next week I finally get an invoice from UPS.com.  My mouth literally dropped open when I saw the total. It turns out they’ve been charging me nearly THREE TIMES the amount  it would cost for me to ship without an account for each package!  That’s triple the price, plus they charged me an extra $10 fee for a mistake that was made at the shipping center.    It turns out that it actually costs about $5 to use the shipping labels they gave me down at the UPS place, plus a bunch of ridiculous extra fuel and residential charges, on top of absurdly high prices to begin with.

But was I made aware of any of this at the shipping center, when they were pushing this account on me?  Nope.  When I asked them about it later their excue was “we don’t know nothing about that”.  The grammar in that sentence pretty much says it all.  Maybe it’s just me but it seems rather sensible to keep your employees up to date with what’s going on at the corporate levels.  I mean, God forbid they have the ability to actually ANSWER customer questions and keep their customers fully informed!

Thankfully I was able to get some of the charges removed.  I’m still pretty upset about the whole situation, considering how irresponsible this company is at a corporate and at a franchise level.   I’m no longer using the account.  The only downside now is that it takes a bit longer to ring up each package and the tracking ID’s are considerably longer, but they’re small prices to pay for saving a huge chunk of money. It turns out that even when you do ask as an exhaustive amount of questions, it doesn’t always help.