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Thread: Add sort by price INCLUDING POSTAGE

  1. #1

    Default Add sort by price INCLUDING POSTAGE

    I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but since it's time for new year resolutions, how about 2017 to be the year we get the oh-so-important ability to sort by price including postage?

    Canny buyers really value such an ability. Trying to compare items without it is very frustrating.

    Please? Pretty please??
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  2. #2
    Administrator gazza's Avatar
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    Default Re: Add sort by price INCLUDING POSTAGE

    Hi John,

    Appreciate the input, here's the dilemma. It hasn't been left out due to laziness, it's a very complicated situation that we've been thinking about for quite a while now.

    We have FLAT RATE shipping everywhere which is hard-coded and could be incorporated into a system. BUT .. we also have CALCULATED shipping in some countries (US, CANADA) which can vary by zipcode. Then we have the weight and dimensions to account for and then the seller may well have more than one shipping method available.. eg. USPS First Class and USPS Express. (we normally promote the cheapest method by default for shipping costs)

    In theory, let's say a category has 300,000 items .... each of these 300,000 listings (in theory still) has CALCULATED shipping (which we currently only calculate on each actual viewing of a listing details page and subsequently cache). We could possibly have to call the USPS API 300,000 times to find the shipping cost for each of the 300,000 items for the person viewing just for a single sort. Each call will have weight, dimensions and the zip code. Then we have to add these 300,000 shipping costs (taking the cheapest if the seller has more than one method of course) to the sale price to get a total and then sort the results.

    Of course there will be the already cached results we have (if the user has previously viewed the listing details page for any of the search results) and also many duplicated weights and dimensions that we would not have to make a separate new call for but making 300,000 calls to the API just to cater for this one person (zipcode) in one category would take a very long time and make us very unpopular with the USPS techies

    For example,

    dimensions : 20x10x10in
    weight : 5lb
    from : 92101
    to : 33133
    method : USPS Express

    Once we have the result for this we can cache it and use it anywhere else on the site that this exact situation arises again. But with 43,000 possible "TO" zipcodes the re-use of this result will be minimal. For it to be reused the weight and exact dimension would have to match also.

    I hope this helps you understand the ridiculous number of possibilities we have to 1) obtain and then 2) store.

    I know there is a solution out there but we will need to sit down and get our heads around it more before we can implement something like this.

    Any discussion on the subject is welcome.

    Gazza



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  3. #3

    Default Re: Add sort by price INCLUDING POSTAGE

    I've been trying to reply to this for several days, but 'reply with quote' or even 'reply' just sits there with a whirling icon, so I'm replying to the thread.

    Gazza, you wrote:
    "Appreciate the input, here's the dilemma. It hasn't been left out due to laziness, it's a very complicated situation that we've been thinking about for quite a while now. [snip further explanation]".

    I thoroughly agree, it's very complicated. I never imagined laziness. Indeed, a few years ago, if someone had proposed sorting items including postage, I would have found it hard to resist being deeply sarcastic and telling them that a crystal ball would be a handy accessory too! I fully understood (or thought I did) why it ISN'T POSSIBLE! On any site. On any planet.

    And then [smacks self in the mouth] ebay did it! OMG, how did they do that, I wondered. It's hard enough to do it for UK bidders browsing UK items (a single postal area), let alone in larger regions such as the US.

    So there's an existence theorem, but we don't know how they're doing it. My guess is they're not doing it the way you propose.

    Let's consider the UK/UK problem first. That boils down to one extra field in the database, written at the time the listing is submitted.

    Ebay also purports to be sorting my queries with overseas items included, but I'm not sure they're doing it accurately. The American items often seem to have the same postage; I suspect a fudge. And, as a buyer, it really doesn't matter much to me, because those items are unlikely to be top of my list anyhow.

    So [TL;DR] I still agree it's a highly non-trivial problem and you would be a hero if you implemented this kind of sort. But maybe 'good enough' wins over 'best and correct'?
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