Up until now – our system makes the seller ship every box purchased separately. For example - if you buy five 11 lb bags – the seller will ship you five boxes in the mail. While we were solving a big headache with prepaid shipping – shipping five separate boxes is a bunch more work for the seller and it costs a lot more for the buyer.
Hey erics - thanks for the reply. That’s a really good call, I totally overlooked 33 lbs in my mockup. I guess my only question is if all sellers would be able to ship 33 lb boxes. If it’s super common to ship 22 lb, 33 lb or 44 lb boxes then we don’t have a problem.
If not everyone can ship 33 lb boxes - I worry we end up in this scenario which is much more complicated and not somewhere I’m trying to go. Thoughts?
As a shipper, very few 33# boxes are used. Hop Heaven uses a 44# box and adds packaging to the box when they have a 33# order. The weight to size is still heavy enough that it is not dimensionally surcharged
Overall I like what I am seeing. Only addition I would like to see is to be able to select both Fed Ex and UPS as shipping options.
How are you handling the whole hops? They ship be volume (dimensional weight), so as a shipper I need to put in my box size so the shipping charges will be correct. Pellets compact small enough that they are billed by weight.
Are you making arrangements to combine across varieties? Or is this just for one variety? One is easiest and a great addition. Issues with cross varieties, they may come from different processors and not nest together when combining. They can take different sized boxes, especially imports
Last comment, to save money, less boxes, sending more weight is per is better. It saves about $3 per box combined
Hey Ted,
Thanks so much for the feedback - this is super helpful. We’ve gotten to work on this - based on these new settings LEx will automatically group bags into larger boxes but only the sizes that the seller says they want to ship. For example, the seller can choose to only ship 11lb, 22lb and 44lb boxes and the system will purchase shipping labels in the correct weights (and not force the seller to shop using 33lb boxes, etc). Thanks again!
Shane
To answer some of your questions:
Allowing power sellers to select multiple shippers is on our roadmap. Its a medium sized lift. Let us know how big of a show stopper this is for you and we can try to prioritize accordingly
Whole Hops: we are treating whole hops the same way we treat pellets regarding prepaid shipping. When buyers check out with whole hops we purchase shipping labels equal to the weight of the purchased hops. We do NOT take box size into account when purchasing the shipping labels. While I could settings in the future that allow power sellers the ability to specify box dimensions for various quantities of whole hops - that is a bigger lift than we are hoping to make at this time. I guess my preference would be to just exclude whole hops from the prepaid shipping system for now as their volume is so low on LEx - do you agree or do you have other thoughts?
You are correct - we don’t have plans to build a “shopping cart” (or combining multiple varieties into a single checkout/shipment) in the short term. It’s an idea we’ve kicked around multiple times - but is really complicated on paper. If this is high on your wishlist please let us know and I can mock something up.
Quick update - we are moving forward with development of this feature and are hoping to restart the shipping beta in the first week of January 2018. Slight changes below to support different box sizes
multi shipping companies is important unless LX is the shipper. If I only offer UPS and someone has Fed EX account and no UPS account, do they go elsewhere? If you are the shipper, overall the rates should be much better than john’s pub that purchases 1 hop order a month. To offer a service to brewers, I need to be able to get them the hops when and how they want them. In some areas, UPS is notorious, in others Fed ex. No one sized shipper that fits for all destinations. Hop Heaven has both companies picking up daily. We prefer Fed Ex, average about $2 less expensive and quite often 1 day quicker deliver. They are our default service with the exception of LX, here their was a strong push for UPS shipping so we went that way after very limited sales using Fed Ex.
2 whole hops: yes avoid them no on the prepaid shipping. If you don’t, there are going to be upset clients when they get their revised bills from the shipping companies
3 shopping cart: This is important to the purchasers. They may not know it yet, but will realize they are paying more in the near future and this will lessing the experience purchasing via LX. Yesterday I just shipped a multi variety pack. They go out weekly. Each combined pack up to 44# save the client $3 in shipping charges on average.
Last on your box size release, looks good. Make sure each box siae can have a seperate weight. Hate to keep harping dollar bills but a pound more is $1 to the far zones. My 11# boxes are 1#, 44# boxes are 3#
As is it is a great addition, keep up the good work!
Hey Ted,
Thanks for the detailed response - happy new year to you! Some quick updates:
We’ve bumped up multiple shipper options for sellers in our dev roadmap. We have a few things ahead of it - but keep your eyes glued to this community for updates
We will exclude whole hops from the prepaid shipping system. They are low volume so it shouldn’t be a big deal
I’ve got a few ideas how this could work - let me mockup some ideas and will post to the community.
Below is an updated mockup with the box weights taken into account. Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks!
Shane
