Multi seller shipping fee on a marketplace modeled ecommerce website

Question

About a year ago our website decided to go in the marketplace direction where external sellers can sell their products on our website. With this comes complexities like varying shipping costs and delivery times.

at 1st there was free delivery but after a business decision later we stopped. Now the user has to pay the shipping costs. This came with a lot of confusion and complains as the user can't understand the breakdown of the shipping cost across the multiple sellers they are buying from.

From user testing session we realised that grouping the items by seller and showing the calculation breakdown on the cart page wasn't effective. More information didn't help the user understand.

What would be a good way to make the user understand and accept the individual shipping fee and continue to checkout?

Answer 1

We just now had a similar issue, where different domains required different information about shipping fees.

What we did is, instead of putting additional information on the product page, we decided to try it next to the "Go to cashier" button in the cart summary.

We found that either users directly search for discounted/cheaper products (thus with price and financial effort focus) OR are interested in additional fees at the cashier, when it comes down to understand payment anyhow.

For the first group, I think, it will be hard for you to communicate a now existing shipping fee in a positive way. The second group seems possible to handle to me, in your case.

Do you think you could come up with any message that implies that the shipping costs create something positive as a USP? Something like "our new provider now has parcels delivered even earlier!" to 'override' the bad message of costs?

Anyhow, to avoid return and customer service costs, I would put a "There will be shipping fees" at the end of the funnel, thus cart or checkout.

This might not be the ultimate answer, and we are also still testing to understand user expectations. It's always hard to sell a negative feature to the customer...