Avoid those pesky $7,000 shipping charges
SAN FRANCISCO – By now, the story of the Georgia woman who ordered $88.17 worth of toilet paper from Amazon and got charged more than $7,000 for shipping has become the stuff of Internet legend.
Barbara Carroll bought three boxes of toilet paper as part of her job as a building manager. She told Atlanta’s WSB-TV she was flabbergasted when she checked her bank statement — she used a debit card — and found she had been charged a shipping fee of more than $7,400.
We did talk to logistics experts to walk us through what might have happened and how to avoid it.
First, even if Carroll had a membership to Amazon’s Prime program, this clearly wasn’t a Prime-eligible item. Prime members pay $119 a year for free, two-day delivery on more than 100 million items along with other perks.
Carroll also couldn’t have been ordering from Amazon itself. Instead, she must have been ordering from a third-party seller that sells its goods on Amazon’s website, where Amazon is the go-between but the actual transaction is considered to be between the buyer and seller.
Currently, more than 50% of items sold on Amazon come from these third-party sellers. They break down into two groups: those that keep their goods in Amazon’s warehouses so Amazon can ship them and those that simply do the sale via Amazon’s website but ship the goods from their own warehouses.
The real take-home message is this: Check the full fee, including shipping, before you click the “buy” button.
In Carroll’s case, the toilet paper must have come from a third-party seller that sold from its own warehouse. Otherwise the shipping fees would have been from Amazon.
When Amazon ships an item from its warehouse, regardless of whether it’s an Amazon sale or a third-party sale, customers typically get free shipping if the order is more than $25. According to Amazon, that deal is available on more than 100 million items. Orders less than $25 are eligible for four to five days shipping for $5.99. (Prices and delivery speeds vary from Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico.)
For items sold by third-party shippers that don’t use Amazon’s facilities to ship from, pricing and speed can vary. That said, Amazon’s policy clearly states “sellers cannot set excessive order fulfillment or shipping costs.”
So a $7,000 charge for three boxes of toilet paper would not be an acceptable charge no matter the circumstances.
The other possibility is that Carroll somehow asked for two-day or expedited shipping. There was an instance of a Tennessee woman who bought $24 worth of paper plates on Amazon at Christmastime and somehow asked for expedited service to get the order more quickly. That resulted in a $1,080 shipping charge, she told WTVF in Nashville.
She didn’t believe she clicked on anything for expedited shipping but Amazon maintained she did, though it eventually did refund the charge.
But even if Carroll had asked for expedited shipping, a $7,000 delivery fee on toilet paper would have run afoul of Amazon’s “no excessive shipping costs” rule. Maybe a grand piano, but not three cases of toilet paper.
In this case, the real take-home message is this: Check the full fee, including shipping, before you click the “buy” button.
“I always find out how much the shipping’s going to cost first before I hit the buy button. And if it sounds unreasonable I won’t do it,” said Cathy Roberson, founder of Logistics Trends & Insights in Atlanta.