Shipping costs- WTF

There's a thing called "Dimensional Weight" that the carrier's can factor into their quotes. If you ship something that's relatively light, in a large box, your rate will be calculated based as though your item weighs much more than it actually does. As mentioned in an earlier post, this is because there is only so much room on the trucks.

If you sell through a site like e**** and use their shipping estimate and pricing you'll see a substantial discount vs retail shipping outlets.  For returns, I have asked the retail shipper to send me their shipping label and charge me the shipping fee or reduce my return by their shipping fee.  This saves substantially on shipping but not all retail will do it. 

So yes there are multiple tiers of shipping prices depending on who's shipping and if a larger contract agreement is in place.

Shipping prices got out of control before the Pandemic, and then after the Pandemic, they went nuts. I was a store owner and we had a UPS account with daily pick ups and deliveries. The thing that killed me was, every day when you opened up the software, there were increases due to "fuel charges. I get that fuel is a cost of doing business, and if gas goes up, so do the shipping charges. BUT then fuel prices would drop, but the rates would not change, until they went up again. Just to show how much shipping prices went up. In the early 2000's to ship a 18" x 24" x 18" box in state (approximately 100 miles), weighing approximately 38lbs was $11.71. That same box today is over $50.00. I know prices on everything have gone up, but that is almost five fold.

I recently shipped a pair of Magnepan .7s and stands via FedEx. The delivered the stands and lost the Magnepans! After two weeks of supposed 'looking' they declared the shipment lost and I filed a claim for the value of the speakers as sold and shipping, $976.00. Surprise! When I got the check it was for $117.00 supposedly because I had not declared the value of the shipment. Which, BTW, you are not asked, nor is there any place on the online form to do so. My appeal is underway. Needless to say I will not be using FedEx again, and I encourage everyone to avoid them as well.

HTF do you lose a 5 1/2 ft tall, 2 ft wide, 6" deep box, anyway? It was clearly marked with both my and the receivers addresses, inside and out, as well as having a FedEx tracking number. FedEx has no answer. 

Covid was a great excuse for companies to raise their prices across the board.

I agree, costs are never coming back down.  The genie is out of the bottle on this one....