Shipping cost

[Raymond]

Do you state the shipping & handling cost very clearly in the item details page? Or do you just display the actual shipping cost during checkout? I notice some sites show it and some don't. Anyone here got any suggestions on whether I should leave it in the item detail page or only display it in the order summary?
Thanks.

[danieljean]

If I can avoid having shipping charges, I get rid of them. Otherwise, I try to find the simplest possible way to determine charges, and am upfront as soon as possible.

[martyt]

Nothing annoys a shopper more than having to wade through the cart and one or two check out pages before they find out what the shipping cost is going to be. I believe that's a major contributor to the high rate of shopping cart abandonment at many sites.

If you can give the customer an accurate shipping cost early in their shopping experience do so. If you need to collect information from them (like a zip code) in order to estimate shipping, put that prominently on the shopping cart page and let them enter it whenever they want.

I avoid the issue completely by offering free shipping. But that won't work for a lot of markets due to slim margins. It's been discussed here before that free shipping is often an incentive that buyer's can't refuse - they think they're getting something for free even though the items are priced to make it possible to ship them at no extra cost.

You could simplify it by setting a shipping cost based on dollar amount. If your products have very different shipping costs not relative to their price, that won't really work (i.e., a cheap but expensive to ship item).