How we calculate Shipping & Handling fees.
It's a common practice in the mail-order shipping industry to charge "shipping and handling", to reflect the costs of both postage and the supplies and labor involved in fulfilling customer orders. The problem is, many customers tend to ignore the "handling" part of "shipping and handling" believing that suppliers should charge them only the actual postage costs.
Mail supplies (envelopes, labels), packaging, trip to Post Office (employee time, gasoline, car insurance), processing of your credit card order (about 3% of the total price) cost money -
costs that, for a firm to remain profitable, are almost universally passed onto the end customer.
We want to make sure that our customers do understand that these costs are passed onto them, and they do not mistakenly believe that postage they see on the shipping label is the only our expense.
We want our customers to focus on the quality of our products, not the cost of shipping and handling fees. To avoid creating customer confusion and make sure our customers receive a completely satisfying experience doing business with us, we acknowledge that the price on the shipping label might be less than the price of Shipping and Handling fees we charge for the order.
However, when the customer has multi-item order, the S & H fees could be actually less, than the cost of shipping fees alone. That might reflect the discount for buying several different items on the same invoice.