Shipping options

[nick]

Add the ability for sellers to specify shipping options and pricing... eg 1 day delivery, 5 day delivery, etc.

[micahalcorn]

To expand on this, sellers have also expressed concern about the wide-ranging costs associated with shipping. One step toward alleviating this is for buyers to include their shipping addresses when making offers, but that doesn't quite resolve the pricing anxiety that sellers feel. An option might be for a seller to be able to place the shipping cost burden on the buyer, potentially by including a calculator at checkout that results in supplementing the offer price with the appropriate amount.

[nick]

Maybe we can add some simple shipping options to the Create Listing flow? Allow the seller to specify a description and price which is then presented as a dropdown for buyers to choose, eg:

1 day shipping to USA $20 5 day shipping to USA $5 10 day shipping to rest of world $25

[joshfraser]

I think that's too simplistic. Remember 80% of our users are based outside the US. A few ideas:

• We could offer seller-defined pricing buckets. The problem is it's hard for sellers to predict how expensive shipping would be to every corner of the planet. The variance in pricing can be huge too. Maybe they offer fixed pricing to their local region & have a "contact me for shipping pricing" for everywhere else? Adding all of those buckets is a lot of work & stressful if you forget to look up the pricing for Africa and get stuck with a huge shipping bill.

• Another option would be for the seller to name their preferred shipping provider and add a link to a pricing calculator for that shipper. We can actually build integrations with USPS, Fedex, DHL, UPS & all the international providers later. This is probably the best user experience, but it's a ton of work & requires a lot of integrations with centralized providers (not ideal).

For now, it seems like the easiest solution is for:

• the buyer to include their encrypted shipping address with their offer
• give the seller an easy way to respond to an offer with a request for additional funding to cover shipping
• an easy way for the buyer to add additional funds to their offer in response

While this requires more back and forth, it's at least fair to both sides and doesn't require us building integrations or getting data feeds from dozens of shipping companies. Having an easy way to revise your offer seems like a good thing for us to add to the UI anyway. It's already come up with a guest who booked our Soma apt and wanted to add an extra day to his booking.

[micahalcorn]

Are there any other compelling use cases for editing offers? Perhaps the shipping information is incorrect? Generally, the MVP solution for all of this is to withdraw and make a new offer. But, of course, we don't yet support making offers with different prices (or generally, escrowed amounts). Should we start there or potentially only allow for paying the sticker price and supplementing it with a dynamic shipping cost value?

[nick]

Ebay might be a good place for inspiration.

Have been looking around and shipping calculations can be crazy complex

[mikeshultz]

How many sellers, generally, are ready and willing to ship worldwide?

[joshfraser]

It's not clear. Keep in mind, lots of listings types (home-sharing, car-sharing, tutoring, etc)
don't require any shipping at all.