Within the past year or two Fedex has started to charge a hefty premium on over sized boxes that we ship out. This has caused problems with our estimating your shipping costs. For instance a 25 pound box that is oversized now can be charged as a 75 pound box which throws everything out of wack. All shippers do the same thing so UPS is also doing this.
I have been trying my best not to raise Train City, Inc.'s shipping and handling charges. We are not trying to make money on shipping. As a matter of fact last year we lost around $9,000.00 on shipping charges.
We will most likely be forced to raise our shipping and handling rates in the near future. But in the mean time we will do our best to estimate accurately the cost for shipping oversized boxes.
To cover our butt on these type of charges we state that bulky or oversized boxes may require a premium price. Actually that statement has been on all choochooauctions invoices that we send out for years. We actually didn't anticipate that Fedex would lower the size boxes affected, thus we are running into this problem more frequently now.
I am sorry for any inconvenience and additional expense this causes you. I don't want to overcharge you. As a matter of fact I'd love to be able to give free shipping. But that would put us out of business as we as a company didn't make nearly as much as it would cost us to offer free shipping last year.
Companies that offer free shipping most likely aren't selling goods on an auction site. Especially our auction site is geared to give you a very good price compared to other places you can find the same items. Free shipping companies most likely are actually charging you a shipping price in higher prices up front.
So to our fantastic customers, I hope you understand our dilema. We are here to serve you. And the reason we are here is because we do charge shipping. We will continue to keep your shipping charges as reasonable as at all possible, but at the same time we need to stay in business to serve you.
I shipped a starter set to my cousin in Pennsylvania for Christmas. The weight itself would have only run about 20 dollars, but shipping the big bulky box cost me over twice that much. (Admittedly, I purchased a box to ship the box in, and that added to the price, but I was shocked at the final bill.)
I was tempted to tell the kid at the UPS store I wanted to just send the package to Pennsylvania, not put it through four years of a private college in Pennsylvania!!! I bit my tongue. It wasn't his fault. You may be able to find the shippers' formulas on the web for how they determine their prices. I did earlier, but I didn't save the URL.
