New shipping fees.

Anyone who's ever been ordering things online, especially from across borders, knows the pain that shipping costs can be. They are often surprisingly high, and sometimes downright prohibitive.

I know that I have myself abandoned quite a few half-filled baskets for orders because the shipping costs were more than I was willing to pay. Sometimes I also wondered how on earth these people could arrive at shipping figures that high...

And then I started my own online shop.

Let me tell you this: Shipping costs are a pain for both sides. As a shop owner, you have to figure out how much to charge - which means costs for boxes, wrapping paper, labels, tape, stuffing material, the postage itself, and so on. (So on, in Germany, includes costs for licensing fees that cover the cost of recycling.) You also have to figure in that packing stuff and bringing it to the post office will take up time, in some cases considerable chunks of it. The more you send out, the more alike your wares are, the easier it is to calculate things, and packing will go faster, and you can get better rates on all the package-related stuff and even on postage.

I spent a lot of time and brain power on trying to figure out shipping prices that would be as fair as possible towards my customers, and still reliably cover the actual costs that I have. From time to time, there is some reason for me to check the shipping costs again, and sometimes I find that I can re-calculate them - because prices have changed, or because I send out more of thing A as opposed to thing B, and that means I can add another tier to the price ranges to make things better.

That happened recently - and now there's an additional shipping price for those of you who would like just the printed pattern of Dread Pirate Roberts' Winter Hat. I have added a special, as-low-as-possible price for shipping for the pattern, which is 2 € inside of Germany and 3.60 € for the rest of the world. Happy knitting!