Freight has been a hot topic on the floor of the Melbourne gift fair over the weekend with penalty of retailers including newsagents saying they should not have to pay freight.
The reality is: whether you are charged for freight or not you pay for it.
Your suppliers need to make money as do you. They choose to locate their businesses where they do as you choose the location of yours.
It is easy to demand freight free. It is equally easy to source products that do not have a clear or suggested retail price – thereby enabling you to set a retail price to cover freight.
The low Australian dollar, higher freight charges and higher importation charges are behind more suppliers reviewing freight arrangements. Many suppliers I know are not passing on the full impact of the low dollar compared to where it sat a year ago so to pressure them on freight places a further burden on them.
As long as they don’t profit from freight
I accept that we pay for freight, I just prefer that it is built into the wholesale price and not charged separately. Perhaps combined with orders below a certain threshold get charged an additional charge to cover freight
How is trying to bargain with the freight any different than trying to get them down on wholesale price . I know I have been able to get some extra stock to cover the cost of freight in the past .
The only freight prices I object to are for magazine returns at $4 per box. The distributors?publishers should be paying this with their oversupply and mags we have not requested. The only person making money out of this is the carrier and seeing how many boxes he picks up he is sitting pretty.
We pay $12.50 per box Gregg, but we are 5 hours from Sydney.
I have no problems with freight for products I purchase (magazine I don’t sell or request I have issues with). We also sell some furniture and this is often an easy upsell to clients “instead of a discount I’ll pay the freight”. This has in my experience been cheaper then a 10-20% discount.
Have no idea why anyone would want the products marked up to absorb freight costs as this will always be more then the actual cost.