Any idea why it costs $24.25 to ship a single mug? x.x

I wanted to buy a mug and ship it to Germany. But when I entered my address it said it costs $25 x.x.
This seems pretty high for me just for one mug. Two cost $35 shipping.
Isn’t there any slow shippping option?

1 Like

Quality shipping mean they should not lose packages, and likely slippage does not allow for the much loss of sending a second one, and the company can’t afford to have people annoyed at them.

But it does end up with me not buying much of anything and it annoys me. I only recently put in a big order with Gamers Nexus and it had to be very expensive to justify the shipping. Other wise I can’t buy things, usually the thing I want is just about the same price as the shipping.

1 Like

Mhm. And there is not a lot of saving when you combine some items as far as I can tell.
Tracking is cool but is this like a fast shipping? I wouldn’t mind to wait a month.

I will tell you how long it took but it is almost a month now as the order was placed 1st January, though that was not the shipping date, so when I get home and when it arrives I will tell you.

Edit: It started shipping the 18th Jan, I will let you know when it arrives.

There was also a decent saving with my order of 3 things I think it based on box size, so one item is a small box for example and 2 is the next size up and costs more so it might still benefit to buy more as it won’t go over the next size upp for a while again.

I have wanted to grab a mug, and have tried a few times, but cannot justify spending more on shipping than on the product itself.

image

Maybe for my birthday ill treat myself.

3 Likes

International shipping is extremely expensive
(honestly that is an item i cant justify either, have wanted to order more so often just cant)

Level1 needs a warehouse in Germoney!
Change my mind.

Would totally buy shit if shipping to eastern Europe would be cheaper.

2 Likes

Krista is searching for houses on the wrong continent, she could look for places in EU for her new house and manage the warehouse overseas :laughing:

3 Likes

international shipping sucks. when i order swords form europe 50$-100$ in shipping is pretty normal for a 1 - 4 pound sword except where the goverment of said country subsidizes shipping as in britain. i still normally pay 20-40$ for Britain sometimes 60+

their are a lot of middle eastern swords i would like to buy but the 80+ min shipping sometimes as high as 200$ deters me.

Australian shipping for swords usually ranged from 100-400$

their just isnt a cheap way for small businesses to have inventory in warehouses everywhere to ship cheaply. maybe amazon will solve this someday, or maybe you can start a company to sovle this as a modern day shipping FTZ warehouse for everyone.

3 Likes

Outside of Amazon. It costs blood to cross the ocean and deliver a trinket :frowning:

It’s not just shipping across the ocean that’s expensive; even shipping here to Canada is very expensive, which has been a limiting factor in me purchasing stuff from the store.

Why not sharpie a fake L1T logo on a normal mug, and donate $20 to them?

Then nothing gets lost, and you have an amazing mug, and they have a donation?

*Okay, not Amazing, but still…

5 Likes

Glad to not be the only one. I have a bunch of times added things to my cart just to end up not ordering cause of shipping costs per item. :pensive:

2 Likes

I’m puzzled that L1 and other YouTubers haven’t just used a merch/printing company which covers North America and EU so the shipping rates stay within reason. I forget who I saw on Twitch used a merch printing storefront, the markup on certain items remained fair enough–if you ordered a few items like shirts and a coffee cup, the shipping wasn’t going to be inflated by $12-15 for the fragile item.

Shipping certain kinds of fragile items tends to require specific packing, when I bought my dad a custom coffee cup with a coupon the shipping was equally pricey within the US–custom coffee cup was $18 USD before coupon and shipping was $12 USD. Package wise it was a fitted foam mailer box to make it near impossible for breakage in shipping.

Louis Rossmann did a good video about international shipping and how it isn’t very feasible for small businesses.

There’s probably better quality assurance, control (making custom designs, negotiating with the distributor), and margins in the merch production. If they relied on a single company, most youtubers would be a the mercy of the company for quality.

2 Likes

Not exactly a perfect answer to this, but, who ever it is that does their clothes printing is the best I have ever seen. It is the same one DeusQain, Bitwit, Pauls Hardware and a few others use. It annoys me now on the rare occasion I see a shirt I like from elsewhere knowing it will not be a good print like these are and will just age and break up after a few washes.

The quality really is excellent and I don’t know why the process they use has not taken over everywhere.

They also seem to have a good line is different mugs and glasses for everyone, where most merch shops are all the exact same mugs and glasses with different logos, the one that supplies these tech channels goes out of their way to get unique ones for each store and really nice ones too.

So the quality is worth it if you can bear the shipping, that said I did add a few things to my cart on the L1 store last night and wow, the shipping at $60 was more expensive than the items, 2 mugs, a T-shirt, a patch and a sticker. More than doubled the price.


Thought… It is the same supplier as far as u know and I know Kyle and Paul got a deal worked out where if you buy from both at the same time they will combine their orders and discount the shipping a little, still very expensive but they are trying. It would be nice if this was the case for all the people who use the supplier, I could take longer and build up a larger order across the 3 or 4 stores and have them all ship as one, though granted that order would likely have to be in the $300+ region to even start to justify the shipping which is a lot for what amounts to a few mugs and shirts.

I do wonder if, in general, there could be some way to arrange a ship-when-convenient option that would pool together multiple orders for customers who are willing to wait a longer time for their orders to ship. Then once crossing the pond, have items separated out in Europe for the last-leg delivery. This might not help with customs or the sort of VAT collection that Louis Rossmann’s video mentions (in the UK only, though comments mention EU members are planning something similar), but it would at least be an improvement.

For those cheesy business diagrams where you pick two of three options, this would be as though from:
timely × cheap × reliable
You focus on cheap and reliable, with shipping windows that customers can specify out to several weeks if it is something non-urgent.

This would also dodge the added costs of a true local distributor which would otherwise need to keep local stock in the warehouse to satisfy less-patient customers.


This reminds me of how Raptor (who sells those POWER9 machines I pine for) has a similar issue with US→EU shipping. It might eventually have an in-EU reseller (Vikings GmbH), but given how that situation has been coming soon for quite a while, I imagine doing so might not be as straightforward as I hope.

If this kind of distribution arrangement is difficult to pull off for higher value items, I imagine it is even less practical for lower value items like mugs and shirts, where the relative labour cost per-item is higher.

1 Like

I wasn’t saying every tech YouTuber should use the same place, they could find print shops which operate on both sides of the Atlantic so the price/shipping factors remain reasonable. Custom printing places typically have their own unique catalog of items, it can be fun to browse and then cringe at the cost of certain items in non-bulk print pricing(ceramic tea/coffee cups tend to cost more than the average 12-16 oz plastic coffee travel mug with a flip top).

Quite possible Raptor has to deal with EU specific requirements for a reseller, they may have run into the whole it maybe cheaper to ship the boards to the EU and figure out how a solutions provider(s) do the CTO/building the PC. Before the whole Raspberry Pi cluster trend took off during the Pi 2 era, a friend in the EU wanted a custom cluster case and it became unrealistic–easier to just email the CAD files and have the parts CNC-ed.

I mean they could go through the trouble of switching, but that would involve dropping their current shipping, warehousing, and logistics provider.
Paying extra in shipping seems to be one of the drawbacks of living internationally. They could totally pull a Louis Rossmann and just not offer shipping in the EU. As other people and Louis Rossmann have mentioned, using a uninsured international carrier is always a loss on the business. Your item gets losted, broken, or is multiple months late. The amount of work and loss is not worth the effort

Having a company in EU to handle the printing and logistics for both regions is more work than it’s worth for most techtubers (finding a print company, getting decent rates, making sure quality is consistent between the two regions, EU taxes). When you’re making thin margins on such products, it really isn’t worth the effort to establish a EU branch unless you are based in the EU.

If this bothers you enough, you could start your own printing company that makes high quality prints and ships on both continents with blackjack and hookers. Or just wait and bulk buy from the store to justify the $24.25 in shiping fees.

Started shipping the 18th January,

Arrived 09th February. So not even any quicker for it either really.