[GMCPaul]

Originally Posted by Longhorn 70

I placed 2 orders with GMC Paul's today. It totaled a bit over $300 and I thought all was good as the website accepted my 2 orders. No shipping or tax was added at checkout which I LIKED.

I later received 2 emails telling me that the shipping needed to be added to both. OK I guess I could live with that. The second order BOTH parts had raised prices on them. All of a sudden I felt uncomfortable and cancelled both orders.

Has this happened to anyone else???

We buy from 47 different large suppliers and a ton of small suppliers. Every year at the beginning of the year we start receiving new price books from most suppliers where some prices change and some don't. So we then have to go through every part and examine the old price in our suppliers old catalog & then examine the new price. We then have to go through and update prices for the parts. I spend 60-70 hours a week doing this and other things to keep the business up to date and running smoothly but when you receive 7 different new price sheets from 7 different suppliers in the month of March like we did this year you just can't get every price updated for every parts that's increased over night when you offer thousand & thousands of parts spread over many year groups with differences occurring within the year groups also. So this is the reason That all business's have a disclaimer
""Prices are subject to change without notice.""
So when we receive a order that we've had price increases on that we have not had a chance to update we notify the customer of the change and they then have the choice to re-place the order at the new actual price we are selling the part for or they can decline to purchase it at the new higher price. Your 2nd order had 2 items that on one more than doubled in price from our supplier last month and what you were billed originally was way less than we pay the other item increased in cost us by a little over 30% this part on your order was again costing us more than you paid for it, and we had raised our price 22% on this item. neither of these items you had ordered had their prices updated yet to reflect their new cost. So since we can't stay in business by selling our parts for less than what we pay when we already have to pay 2.8% on the card transaction, overhead on maintaining a 6000 sq ft warehouse and employees to pay before I even see a dime for myself then yes we have to cancel a order that has incorrect pricing on it. I know of several other companies in this business that just charge the customer the new amount and ship. We don't, we notify you after canceling the order & card transaction and you then get the option to decide if you want to pay its actual price.
Regarding shipping there is no easy way for a company that's a small business to get their hands on software that's not in the tens of thousands of dollars that has a shopping cart software that can figure the costs of shipping on multiple types of parts such as non-oversized parts, oversized I, Oversized II, & Oversized III, & truck freight shipping. You can set the shopping carts up so they base it on weight and then the shopping carts figures shipping wrong on any oversized I, II, or III items and truck freight items in a order. The method we use seems to work best. But this method requires our customer to take 10 seconds to click on a drop down bar and select shipping. Some customers however don't take the time to select this shipping from the drop down bar on our web site. If you don't take the time to select the shipping costs that we ask on our check out page to select then no shipping is billed. If you haven't paid shipping then we have no way to get you your parts and the orders voided & refunded & we request you place the order again selecting shipping costs.
we don't hide the shipping drop down bar its directly below the bill to information boxes on our web site and directly above the credit card info boxes and it says
Select shipping Based Upon Non-oversized Parts total.
Then at the bottom of the check out page we place a disclaimer that must be checked by you that you have read it and In it it states to make sure you select shipping from our shipping drop down bar before clicking on the submit button. I even state if you don't select shipping you can be billed a additional $3.00 if we have to bill shipping separate. We don't actually charge this extra $3.00 but its there in my hope that helps prompt people to make sure to select shipping. because if you don't select it and we email you notifying you that you didn't select shipping and tell you the cost of shipping in this email and ask your approval to bill you shipping is alright. If you say yes we then have to go through and bill shipping separate. this all adds extra time to the processing of the order.
In regards to the shipping costs based on dollar amount it is based upon average costs to ship the items in order in that approx. cost range except for the low cost items if your just ordering a pair of outer rocker plugs and that's it we just sold you $3.00 worth of parts, my profit on that $3.00 in parts before expenses is .65ents before the credit card company takes .30cents per transaction & 2.8% of total cost so they get 2.8% of parts cost and they get 2.8% of the shipping costs, then this small order takes approx. 15 minutes from beginning to end to get out the door. First we have to print the invoice, pull the parts, inspect parts as its packaged, then print the label. In this case a pair of outer rocker plugs would ship priority mail for $5.15

So the credit card company got .30 on the transaction fee, then they got 2.8% from the $3.00 in parts and $9.00 shipping which is .336 cents they round it up to .34cents, so now we've been charged .64 cents on a part that we've made .65cents on, I've paid a employee to pull the parts & ship. 15minutes from a $12.00 a hour employee= $3.00 labor, then since its shipping Priority and the mails picked up in the morning we then take everything that shipped priority to the post office ourselves before they close so that the item leaves the same day, again time & fuel costs.

So I've got $3.64 in expenses on this order.

Transaction Fee .30

Credit Card Interest .34

Parts cost me $2.35

shipping $5.15

Labor $3.00

Total expenses on order= $11.14

Total delivered cost to our customer $12.00

My profit .86cents

Sometimes though I actually lose money on shipping though as a $15.00 glove box we bill $9.00 shipping on where as they generally cost $10.00+ to ship them.

I sold a little over $470,000.00 in parts last year, my profit for myself was $27,600.00 last year, if it wasn't for the fact I also farm & harvest woods grown ginseng for additional income I couldn't have supported my family.

How many of you want to work 60-70 hours for a yearly income of $27,600.00??

So we are definitely not taking advantage of our customers on our prices or shipping.

If we receive a order and shipping is way off to high we contact the customer and notify them of this and refund the excess. In example we got a customer that was placing a order at the beginning of this week that was almost $4000.00 in parts, because it had truck freight items, and oversized I, & II items in order the shopping cart couldn't figure shipping right because it was applying separate freight costs on each truck freight item and on each oversized item so shipping ended up being almost $1000.00 but when we calculated shipping on everything we discovered it was around $450.00 so we notified them of this and adjusted what was being charged on shipping and returned the excess amount charged.

There is so much more involved in shipping costs that the average person thinks about. Such as my example above had it shipping priority thankfully we get free boxes for this if not we would have had the cost of the box also included in our expenses, + tape, and if its fragile then we have packing material costs such as bubble wrap.

I offer the best quality parts I can find from the suppliers I buy from not the cheapest part that's available that's normally lower quality, and then I try to get it to my customer as fast and as safely as I can.

Paul @ GMCPauls