Be Excellent To Each Other

Today I made a purchase. Of yarn. Because I don't have enough yarn and babies need to be dressed in rsinbows, obviously.

I purchased said yarn from a site that only sells yarn but loads and loads of it. It's a massive retailer for a big market, I think the biggest in the world.

Anyway, there's free shipping if you spend £25 or more. As it happens my order totalled exactly £25, and the postage showed on the cart page as £0.00.

So, I tootle through the checkout, choosing Paypal to use the money that's in there, but when I do it says postage is £3.99.

I can choose a more expensive postage option, but no free shipping.

After some faff with the helped so and woman on Twitter, someone from the IT department emails me saying it is a known problem with the Paypal checkout and only happens when the order totals *exactly* £25. They've known this is a problem for 2 years but have so far not been able to resolve it.

So... What's the obvious solution? Is there a reason the obvious solution will not work?

Do they sell anything for a few pence that you can add in there to trigger the free shipping?

See, I have what I think is the obvious solution, but I don't think it can be right otherwise they'd surely have done it, right?

Is your solution to change the free postage trigger point to be £24.99?

Yes.

Ask them to issue you a refund for the shipping after paying it?

Get them to change the wording to say OVER £25.

I'm worried that if i suggest it they'll think I'm a doorknob, though.

It's npt over £25, though, as the usual checkout (non paypal) and cart up until the move to paypal are £25 or more, so doing that still won't marry them up.

I've suggested it anyway, as they said they'd refund my postage if I checked out, so if it was stupid then oh well.

No harm in suggesting it. It would work around the bug they've got with their checkout process. If it's difficult to create a combination of products totalling £24.99, then people won't notice the change anyway.

and if it did mean that someone could purchase £24.99 and still get free postage somehow, then it's a penny difference in the very, very, very occasional spend, rather than putting off customers who would potentially abandon a £25 cart.

Yep. It's not the customer's fault, after all. My shopping cart sometimes undercharges the customer for postage because of the difference between Royal Mail's larger letter and small parcel rates, and because I've not added the dimensions for all the products yet. So I just pay the difference myself as it's not the customer's fault I'm a lazy sod.

Do you sell yarn?

Retro Yarn

Acrylic?

You have to blow on it before you knit it up.

Maybe I should. It would add a little colour to the house.

Although the Yoshis rather balance out the skulls I suppose.

One thing you learn in software testing is that the obvious is rarely obvious.

Always iritates me that Amazon do free delivery on a spend of £20 or more, but if you spend £19.80, they want to charge you £1.99 delivery instead of just the difference of 20p.

As it is, I always end up finding a filler item at a cost of 20p, which is usually not something I want or need, and usually goes to a charity shop or whatever.

No one benefits from this outcome, neither me or Amazon. I'd prefer to just give them the extra 20p.

The charity shop benefits.