Amazon is putting the squeeze on small businesses in ways you might not have thought of. Sure, it is well-known they’re price wh..res, prostituting products, but did you know they are shipping who..res too?
Everyone knows Amazon sells everything cheap (remember when they only sold books?). But another big part of their schtick is selling shipping cheap or, better yet, giving it away for free.
So, who is paying the shipping companies? The nice guys at Amazon?
As a small business partner of theirs, I know they pass the loss on to us little guys. When Amazon gives you a shipping price, it is usually under cost. The price difference is made up and paid for by the vendor who is fulfilling and shipping the order. This clever tactic is three-fold, it makes Amazon look good, lulls consumers into false expectations, and squeezes out the little guys and, sometimes, their competition.
Shipping Myth
Because you can’t really hold it, the service of shipping seems invisible. An intangible product you often don’t really think about. A wonderful, appearing seamless, service loaded with people, packaging, and the complex coordinating of processes and companies. From owning a small business with a shipping department, I can say from experience, it ain’t easy or cheap to execute and then provide customer support for something another company is doing.
Yes, once my product leaves my warehouse it is out of my control, but not out of my realm of work. As all good companies do, we continue to liaise and support our customers from order creation to front door delivery information and help.
These are value added, intangible services that can be hard sells to a novice businessperson. But when a package of your purchasing goes missing, you notice if there’s no one to call.
Profiteering
I don’t know if FedEx is like many other behemoth companies taking advantage of Covid scarcity and inflation-talk to hike their prices and rake in huge profits. Or if delivery companies are in the same boat as FAB and feel the trickle-down effects of those profiteering companies and need to raise prices.
But whatever the reason is, this week, FedEx had the highest price increase in their history, 6.9%. This huge spike comes in addition to all the previous, smaller, incremental increases of the last two years, and will set precedent for the rest of the shipping industry to follow suit.
5-Star Rating
To give our customers a voice and to learn, we read our online reviews. To date we are a 5-star company except when it comes to shipping. The only complaints we ever receive are “shipping is too high.” Sometimes the commenter will even go so far as to think we are making money on our shipping rates. When I read that, I want to set my hair on fire because it is so far from the truth.
Yes, today you may get your shipping cheaper on giant e-tailers like Amazon, but there is always a price to pay. Nothing in life is free, especially not shipping. In the end, as monopolies continue to take over our free market and human jobs are squeezed out by robots, consumers may pay the highest price of all, which is yet to be known.
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