Seth Godin has a post on his blog about shipping and handling.  He points to an item on Amazon.com that costs $2.25 but has an S&H charge of $8.57 and then explains why this is a bad idea for the merchant (it kills repeat business).  Seth is right of course, but the reason I’m posting about it is that by sheer coincidence I received an email from Amazon yesterday with this subject line: "We Pay YOU for Overnight Shipping on Shoes & Handbags".  Here’s a pic of the email:

As Seth points out in his post it’s been common practice in the direct mail industry to split out shipping and handling charges as a way to allow buyers to compare the base cost of an item with the cost of the same item in a bricks and mortar store.  When you think about it, however, it’s really irrelevant because what the consumer cares about is what they’re paying total.  If you add shipping and handling and the item costs more online or from a catalog than in a store then the consumer is likely to go to the store.   An online or catalog merchant would probably be better served promoting the convenience of buying from them versus dealing with a store (no parking, standing in line or surly clerks!).

What caught my attention about this email is that it says they are going to give me $5 on top of free shipping.  They didn’t say they were giving me a $5 discount on any item (i.e. a coupon) but they said my shipping would be negative $5.  I don’t recall ever getting a similar pitch and it’s an interesting way to take a negative (S&H) and turning it into a positive. 

I could be wrong but my take has been that online merchants are using insanely low prices on items so that the items do better on product search comparisons and then make up the difference in shipping.  This has led to the increasingly common practice of applying S&H charges that are multiples higher than the actual price of the product, and as Seth points out that practice is likely to kill customer retention because it just feels slimy.  That’s why I’m assuming that Amazon.com’s marketing team was influenced by that trend and decided to use it to their advantage.

On a completely unrelated tangent I want to know what part of my customer profile at Amazon.com would prompt them to send me a marketing message related to shoes and handbags?  It’s kind of disturbing.