Fragile Items
We got a call from someone who had bought a piece of equipment online. This was a high value fragile item. The caller needed us to go and pick it up, pack it carefully, insure it, and ship it. This item also required some special handling with some disassemble.
Buying online is a great way to find hard to find items. That is why we do a lot of auction packing. I will tell customers that the size and weight of an item both factor in when shipping items. This is especially important for fragile items which require more packaging. We had a customer get a great deal on some fans, but because of the size the cost of shipping was greater than the value of the fans. Now had he bought 300 fans and wanted us to freight ship the items it would have been worth the money he would spend. He was just trying to get half a dozen fans. He had us just trash the items. We didn’t make any money on that transaction.
I always question whether we are doing the right thing by not charging for labor. Especially with fragile items which take longer. We figure that if the customer lets us pack the items when we have time that we are not losing anything. This item was a little different. We not only had to pack it, but following instructions provided by the customer we had to break it down before packing. I think in the end the customer got a deal that didn’t hurt us. We did charge for picking it up and for the materials in packing and then of course the cost of shipping.
Here you can see the final results before we added final packing material.
It must be scary to have these high value fragile items picked up and shipped by an unknown business. We go above an beyond and at the same time we try and make it as economical for the customer as possible.