Hot Rods Shipping Costs Killing Part Sales On The HAMB..

Let's have a think about that.
Say 5.6 miles per gallon with diesel at $5.60 per gallon. That's a total fuel cost of $1 per mile, for the whole load !!!
That doesn't seem to be a lot of money per pound/mile to me.......

 

Fuel is not the only ,or even the most significant cost per mile to consider .

 

I thought that was what I just pointed out.....

 

"Free shipping" is like "Free lunch".... neither one exists! The cost of shipping is buried in the price of the part.... creative marketing and image building.

 

Living in Alaska, with almost no swap meets everything vintage car has to be shipped in/out. The shipping cost alone kills off a lot of buying of all things. For example, there has not been a chrome shop here for 20 + years. A person finds a part online, pays the cost for it & the absorbent price to ship it here, cleans it up, sand blasts it, make the repairs that you can, repackage it, pay the absorbent cost to ship it to America, pay to re-chrome it, & then pays an absorbent price to ship it back. Kinda burns your ass. At least you guys in the States can get a better shipping rate, as truck or bus is cheaper & connects everywhere down there. And a lot of sellers on EBAY & Amazon won't ship to Alaska & Hawaii. Most times we have to ship air. Any paint, spray cans of anything, most liquid cleaners, gun powder, primers & more are hazmat materials & the shipping cost skyrockets. Even fire extinguishers are considered hazardous cause they are pressurized. UPS & FED X have been given a license to screw us. I sent a ring & pinion recently to Silver Jimmy here on the HAMB in Arizona. UPS quoted me like $112.00 for ground. Luckly I was able to take the original box apart, bubble wrap everything & squeeze it in a large prepaid USPS Priority Mail Box & ship it for $22.45. $90.00 difference? Why? I'm done venting for now.

 

Often it's the buyers who are the problem. They have gotten so conditioned to free shipping from the major suppliers that they have a fit over the shipping cost or if local(within 50 miles) the thought of driving to get the part is too much.
Case in point. Was selling a 57' Ford car radio. Listed it for $10. Get a message,guys been looking and it's just what he needs. Asks if I'll deliver it to where he lives. It's 43 miles from where he lives and a 1 hour each way and this DORK wants me to do the drive. Yeah,right.

 

Very true but they both feel good at the time. Lol
I’ve noticed that Summit has the little notation in the cart that says, “spend $xx.xx more and get free shipping”. I always need something else if I give it some thought. Good ploy to get me to spend it now.
Speedway doesn’t seem to do that anymore, I have no idea what the dollar threshold is for free shipping with them nowadays. My spending with them has decreased because their shipping always seems higher than it should be.
I love my USPS gal. I just packed up a valve body to go to Louisiana and she looked at it and said, you could save some money if you use our box. Sure enough, $25+ in my box, $17.05 in their box. So I repackaged it and saved him some dough.

 

Geez, give the guy a break. A two hour drive is hard to do without a radio, man....

 

I would be more than happy to even find vintage parts up here 50 miles away! I would drive 100 miles all day to puck up what I needed if I could even find it!

 

I’m sure the scrap yard gets a lot of trinkets from me that aren’t worth my time to move them to someone who needs them. Took a 174 bucks worth last week.

 

Bought some antique 1895 stove parts from North Carolina. 50# box was $116.00 to just north of Portland, Oregon. After looking for twenty plus years for these parts, I would have paid double. Box arrived in perfect condition from UPS.
Sent some items to my son in Las Vegas via USPS and this is how they arrived.

 

Yes that’s the way it works. I never take it to a franchisee. I go to the UPS service center and get a better price. Big items like fenders are just going to stay in the rafters.

 

It was $2.85 when I first started selling in the 90's.

 

Yuppers and you can get your own "business account" real easy with UPS and fill out the form and print out the shipping lable and then carry it to the UPS DC or drop it at a business in town that has regular pickups. I used to work in a Ford Newholland shop where several local people dropped pre labled packages for UPS to pickup and one of my former students that shipped a bunch of stuff out of his store in town every day let me leave labled ready to go packages there for pickup. If you ever receivesometing from Davison Auto & Marine you got it from me. That is the extent of the company, having my own UPS and FEDEX accounts.

I've got a buddy who needs a nine inch housing and two axles carried from Hood River/ The Dalles to Boise and dropped at Dutchmans now who is having a hard time finding reasonable shipping.

 

There you go, @5window, the voice of reason and reality. An LTL carrier makes its money by the number of bills loaded on its trailers. As an individual, I can't come anywhere close to a carrier's price to transport my parts unless it's in my zip code. Even then, the profit off a $20.00 part isn't going to pay for my time and fuel to deliver. Unless I have picked up something of value to take home, that trip isn't making me anything.

 

Once consolidated freight used to be the go if you weren’t in a hurry, nowadays you wait and still get shafted on cost. Used to be part of the service, after all you’ve already paid for the item,,now it’s part of the profit.

 

Try being in the business of auto transport.
Every day that goes by you end up making less.

I stopped in New Mexico on
Thanksgiving & am staying at a friend’s motel.

I need to schedule a vehicle transport out of
Central California before I drop off this
1936 Plymouth Coupe owned for the last
51 years by this gentlemen & his wife ….



Most folks expect to pay less than the cost
of diesel fuel to have a vehicle transported …

Jim

 

I used to drive oilfield hotshot. Same applied, that's the cost of moving a single item from point A to point B; most of the time my return load was bobtail so the ticket only pays half the journey.

There's no subsidy. There's no grant. There's the cost of the miles, the cost of the maintenance.
We got out of that because the companies decided to save themselves money by loading up their own trucks with any random guy from the yard with a license. 7 months later after an unbonded driver wrecked carrying radioactive material crashed, the business returned after the cops began stopping any company liveried pickup truck with only a driver.
But, by then we were so far upside-down we'd hung up the keys and called it quits.

It had reached a point that the only way to make money was to never sleep...

Makes me wonder, the number of people ordering things online, the big carriers have gotta be full truckload both ways, 24/7. I guess that's not the real cost of the business.

 

The postal service is a disaster right now! I never ship anything with them. They can’t even deliver my mail correctly, goes to neighbor’s houses all the time.

 

I source more stuff from shows or local vendors than i have done in years. Just one item can offset the cost of entry to a good hotrod event in shipping alone.

 

I go as a spectator any way, now it will be as a vendor.

 

I've been using Pirateship.com to ship UPS and USPS. It saves about 20 percent over the retail rates. It's a free account, web based service. Buy the label online and drop off to the local po or UPS store.

 

I've had a few buyers back out because of shipping. I even had stuff I had listed for free turned down because of $hipping. Don't really blame them but, sometimes, as a buyer I accept higher prices within reason. Example; I see a part I want for $25. Shipping is $14. OK, I find that somewhat over priced. I think $6. would be reasonable for shipping. So, the question I ask myself is, Do I pass up the part I really want over lousy $8? No, I buy. However, that theory goes out the window once you're talking big bucks.

 

Shipping costs are like buying your beer from a convenience store instead of a Walmart.

 

I hate FedEx with a burning passion. I can see my package is loaded onto the delivery truck with their website. The driver is so lazy that if he doesn’t have anything else to deliver out where I live, it will sit on the truck for days on end. I only live 37 miles southeast of the center of St. Louis. One of my porters at work is a former FedEx driver, and she admitted that if she couldn’t find a package, (and wasn’t looking real hard), then it would get delivered tomorrow, or the next day. That’s complete BULLSHIT, people depend on getting their packages when the company says they will be delivered. Piss on FedEx.
One more thing, when the price of Diesel Fuel goes up, EVERYTHING will go up. There is not one thing you buy that isn’t delivered with diesel.

 

Wow Andy,

Your story & others horror stories really suck! I guess that is another thing for me to be thankful for on this holiday weekend...We have really great service here from FedEx, UPS & USPS. I do not know if it is because we are such a small town or if it is because I get lots of deliveries. I can only recall one issue over the last few years & that was damaged Chewy box with dog food in it that got damaged.

You are completely correct about the correlation between the price of diesel & Everything! From a transporting business standpoint, it has really not affected me since I am blessed with so many repeat customers that prefer the higher level of service & understand the price increases! Of course you can't pay $4k+ to transport a $3K vehicle, so those folks have to explore other options.

God Bless
Bill
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum...ar-transport-hauling-open-or-enclosed.614419/

 

Our local t-v station has a take on the Rosen report, basically how to save money (3) identical items were packed in (3) separate packages & sent across country by fed x, ups, & regular postage (usps), each arrived in 2-3 days & regular postage (usps) came out on top at half the rate $11 vs $21 of the other two.

 

Well with diesel at over $5.00 a gallon in the southeast and much higher in other parts of the country it’s not just car parts that are expensive to ship. Expect everything that is shipped by truck to go up in price. The end user always pays the price as operating costs continue to be passed along. Buying car parts and having them shipped may take second place to necessities like food, heating or getting to work if not retired.

 

Absolutely...I paid for and printed a shipping label on line, went to drop it off at a UPS "store", goof wanted to charge me five dollars to leave the box where the UPS driver would pick it up later.

 

Some days USPS surprise me with their efficiency, though.
I opened my front door just now (9:30am, mail doesn't usually pass until after 11) and said box is sitting on my doorstep.

That's under 3 day delivery, CA to LA.

I've had boxes drive all over the States on a sightseeing tour for weeks where the logistics got broken.