[rhapsodic]

> Well, that's confusing too. If you show a shipping cost on the item, your average consumer would expect that they could buy just that item for that shipping price.

Displaying it as "If you add this item to your current order, it would increase the order's shipping cost by an estimated $0.00" ought to allay any such confusion.

> If you have multiple warehouses this gets even more complex, you essentially have an NP-complete optimization problem. That may not even be possible to do in real time, let alone on every page load.

The shipping cost of the items in the cart could be calculated once whenever the contents of the cart changes, and the number cached. So you'd be doing one shipping calculation per page load, for the contents in the cart plus the item being viewed. And NPC or not, I don't think that would be prohibitively computationally expensive in most cases. After all, people don't typically order thousands of different products, that might ship from any of hundreds of different warehouses, in a single online order. If it made someone more likely to click the "Add to Cart" button on a given item, it might be worth it. And you could have some threshold (number of different products on the order, for example) above which the marginal shipping cost is not calculated and displayed.

[jkestner]

I think y'all are proving the appeal of "free shipping". Retailers provide convenience, and people expect that figuring out the nooks and crannies of shipping costs is part of the service.

If it were about cost and not convenience, Jet's algorithms would've beaten out Amazon.

[rhizome]

Displaying it as "If you add this item to your current order, it would increase the order's shipping cost by an estimated $0.00" ought to allay any such confusion.

This seems like bad IA, and visually expensive.