Why Flat Fee Shipping?
Flat shipping fees make pricing products easier for sellers compared to "free" shipping.
Unfortunately, shipping is never truly free. "Free" shipping requires sellers to add shipping costs to product prices. This can be difficult, especially for low cost items such as patterns or thread. Shipping one pattern is about the same price as shipping two patterns, so should the entire shipping cost be added to every pattern or split across multiple patterns?
A flat shipping fee solves this problem because it acts as a base amount for shipping costs. Sellers can add a small amount to each item to account for the increased cost of shipping multiple items. For example, a pattern seller might want to add $.25 to the price of every pattern. If the customer buys one pattern, the $.25 wasn't really needed but also wasn't very painful for the buyer. But if the customer buys 40 patterns, that extra $.25 adds up and covers the extra shipping costs. See our recommendations on how much to add per product here:
Flat shipping fees prevent sticker shock during checkout compared to calculated shipping rates during checkout.
Actual shipping costs can't be calculated until the customer enters their zip code during checkout. This means the customer can't mentally include the cost of shipping while they are browsing. The sticker shock of seeing shipping added at the last moment leads to many abandoned shopping carts.
Flat fee shipping encourages customers to buy multiple items per seller, rather than a single item from multiple sellers.
Shipping several items in one package is more eco friendly than shipping multiple packages with single items. It can also benefit the seller because they are selling multiple items per order.