The FREE Shipping Rip-Off

The FREE Shipping Rip-Off

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In the world of e-commerce, “Free Shipping” is the golden goose. Thanks to the “Amazon Effect,” consumers have been conditioned to expect the price they see to be the final price they pay. If we sold t-shirts and small boxed items we too could bake a few dollars into the price to cover shipping.

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But in the world of selling lumber that involves Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) Freight trying to apply the “Free Shipping” model to a 1200-pound shipment is not fair to our customers. Here is why we use calculated LTL shipping rates.

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The Myth of “Free” LTL Freight

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Let’s establish one universal truth on logistics: Shipping is never free. Someone is paying the shipping company to move that pallet.

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When a business offers “free” LTL shipping, they are simply hiding the shipping cost within the product price. To do this, they calculate the highest shipping rate from their location, and inflate the price of every item by that amount to cover it. This model goes against everything we stand for in trying to offer our customers an affordable premium product.

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The Solution: Calculated Shipping

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Pergola Supply has integrated real-time shipping into our website. This allows us to offer phenomenal pricing on our kits combined with the ability to display real-time shipping cost to our customers during checkout. In doing this, you will pay a fair market price for our kits. We don’t want to pad our pockets based on “free shipping” fees.

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Our customers who are 500 miles from our location no longer pay the same freight as our customers who are 1500 miles away. Our goal is to ship more kits because we don’t need to add “just in case” shipping buffers to our prices. We also offer local pickup as well. You can place your order online and arrange to pick it up locally in New Orleans, LA.

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Call us today at 1-877-575-3510 if you have any questions about freight charges or our products.

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