I's gots a rants ....

I hear you on the shipping costs, and the larger companies that are processing tons of orders can offer less expensive shipping options. I own a mail order business to sell some items I designed and are unique. After fussing with doing all of the order processing, packaging, and shipping myself, I hired a fulfillment company to handle it all for me. So for each order that comes in, there is a processing fee for them to put the order into the system, a fee to take the item out of inventory and prepare it for shipping, a fee to package the order, and of course the cost of the box and the actual shipping costs. I did adjust product costs to capture some of this, but the residual gets calculated into the shipping costs which we call "shipping and handling." Some of this can be saved by using usps supplied shipping supplies, which I have done, but I had problems going that direction and have ended up shipping everything fed ex.