Recently I have had to ship some things; first to my son and then secondly to my wife, who was traveling for business. In both cases these were items that were small and the cost of shipping using any of the current services, and particularly Overnight, Next Day - this can be costly.
In the case of our son I was going on about the qualities of a new pen I had purchased
(see note at the end of this post) and what I could do with it on my Android Phone. I use a swipe keyboard and I like to sketch a lot. I use
Autodesk Sketchbook on my phone and my iPad Mini, this pen is wonderful. I am extolling the virtues of the pen when I realized that the product came with two pens in the box. I said I will ship you one - he does a lot of sketching and this could come in handy. When I went to ship one I discovered two things; 1) it was cheaper to purchase the pens at
Amazon (where I had made the original purchase) and have Amazon ship it, and 2) he would get it quicker.
I did this and not only saved my time, and cost, of packaging as well as the cost of USPS (which would have been cheaper than UPS or FedEx, but would have still been costly - and he got two pens as well. Great deal all the way around.
In the second case, my wife forgot to take with her the cable to charge her Motorola phone. Of course it is a USB-A to USB-C, not currently the common cable. I did a little research on Amazon and discovered one for under $7.00 with same day delivery at under $6.00. Same Day delivery, not Overnight or 2 day,
Same Day. I can't ship anything Same Day. Overnight, per USPS is $24.70 to start with - don’t even mention UPS or FedEx. I ordered that cable from the Cincinnati Area and it was at the hotel in Denver later the same day. Not only do I not have to package and ship, I did it better, while having my morning coffee, and for less cost.
With today's retail competition online this will be a big hurt on the smaller Mom & Pop stores. Perhaps there needs to be an alliance of these small stores that can work with each other to provide this same kind of service. Perhaps Gift Shops should have an association where they can work with each other, for a fee for a friend of course - perhaps split the markup. It could be that or lost the sale.
NOTE: The pens I mentioned above were
Mixoo 2-in-1 Precision Disc & Fiber Stylus with Replaceable Tips for Capacitive Touch Screen Devices (Black/Blue), really unique and a pleasure to use especially if you sketch on your phone. They are available on Amazon.
They also work as a mouse on my Surface Pro, however, they will not work as the drawing pen that sketches on the computer.