... and it allows you to compete on equal footing with other vendors. Sounds like a win-win.
Having recently shipped a couple of keyboards to friends, I wondered how you were able to ship for $9. Now I know! )
Fun fact: our average cost to ship a keyboard is $10.20 Sound high? I couldn't agree more, but believe it or not - that's a high volume shipper discounted average. Feel free to test out a 4.6lb shipment (avg keyboard + packing) using any of these sites USPS.com, FedEx.com, UPS.com.
We originally setup $9 flat shipping to provide incentive to buy more than one item. However, after over a year of the site being active, over 95% of orders are for 1 item. If you're among the 5% buying two items, I tried my best!!! (also, see below)
...
More good news: If you have a multi-item order in the next 3 months, email us (support@mechanicalkeyboards.com) with your order number and tell them ShakeR told you to ask about a shipping credit
Edit: We also enacted a $6 discount on several models (Shine II, etc) the same day, so for those who like math... $8 - $9 - $6 = $7 total discount on those models compared to the day before (shipped).
First things first - I posted this thread last week when I was in a bad mood and would've easily deleted it (even before you all made additional downward adjustments) within a couple of days if, like I said before, there was a way to do so, but there isn't. Griping about an extra $7 for a $250+ order is lame enough on its own, and especially so in light of the figures you posted. I learned my lesson in the permanence of thread origination.
Secondly, I should clarify that this was all coming from the perspective of somebody that pretty much exclusively prefers/uses Ducky boards. You seem to have deleted the portion of your post relating to price-competing with the likes of Amazon before I could log on and directly address that part, but the point was that ever since TankGuys dropped the business (for new products... I know they still have old stock), so far as I know, you all are the sole official, major Ducky distributor in the US -- so when somebody like me brings up your site one day, clicks the Ducky icon on your homepage to browse just your Ducky stock, and sees a uniform $8 jump across the board, it plainly looks like muscle-flexing monopoly / "because-we-say-so" pricing (enough to make any free-market-loving American speak up, no?). Obviously, given your explanation and figures, that's simply not the case, so my apologies if that's how it came across.
As Ashby said, nobody wants to see a unique and much-appreciated small business taking losses, me included. And I did realize that the prices on the old stock had been taken down a couple of notches soon after, which is more than fair, so thanks.
And FWIW, I actually do a fair amount of shipping PC components I stock up on and then end up not using / selling new, so I'm pretty well acquainted with the pain of shipping economically, particularly in the case of a full-sized keyboard. You probably can get something better at business rates, but the little-known gems of the retail shipping world are USPS Priority (1)
Regional Rate A & B, and (2) Padded Flat-Rate Envelope. For the 2.5% of your orders that are multi-item w/out full-sized boards, your central location + Regional Rate A/B could save you a few bucks in some cases while earning you brownie points with customers for the speedy delivery. Probably irrelevant for a business, but again, just saying.
And no, I won't be
lame inconsistent and ask you to discount me on orders with multiple full-size boards -- sincerely appreciate the notice, though.
**Edited in agreement with Jabar on the poor word choice -- I didn't mean to imply that anybody requesting a quote mod was in the wrong, just acknowledging that
me asking for it, for multiple full-size (108-key) boards, given my last paragraph, wouldn't make sense. I'll stick with the options available, in that case.