Shipping Transparency

Hiya! We are updating our shipping rates this month (May 2022) and I just wanted to provide some insights and transparency into why!

Since May 2021, Floofy Pooch has been offering free shipping to all orders shipping to Canada and the US. Admittedly, we were offering this to boost our conversion rates on the website. We were really brand new, and were willing to lose a bit of money on some sales to gain a customer base.

For those who don't own or operate a small business, you may be surprised by how much we pay for shipping. Before we started this business, I thought that we would be able to ship locally with tracked shipping for $3, maybe $5 max.

Now, I want to tell you how much we really pay for shipping, using 3 Canadian location examples. Currently, we use Canada Post to ship all of our orders and we have a small business account, so we do have some discounts. Here is the final price of what we paid to ship a single 0.25kg parcel in April 2022, excluding HST/PST/GST:

• Shipping within Toronto, ON: $9.17
• Shipping from Toronto, ON to Burnaby, BC: $15.23
• Shipping from Toronto, ON to Salmon River, NS: $19.85

I want you to understand that we don't get the same discounts as larger retailers like Amazon. If you were to buy a single poop bag holder from Salmon River, Nova Scotia, we would have made $15.99 in revenue. We would have paid $19.85 to ship this to you. We would have lost $3.86 in shipping alone, not even considering the cost of the poop bag holder.

Our previous free shipping model no longer works for us at this stage of our business. We are now charging a flat rate of $8 shipping for orders under $30. Shipping for orders over $30 are still free. $30 was calculated as our approximate break-even point, meaning if you have a $30 order, we won't be profiting at all, but we also won't be losing money. We're happy with this.

Changing our shipping policy also allows us to put more of our items on sale! Before, we wouldn't really be able to put items steeply on sale because we would just lose way too much money on shipping! So soon, you can expect to hopefully find items at much cheaper prices!

Two other questions I want to address are below.

Q. Why use Canada Post, and not another smaller but cheaper shipping company?

A. We did try a few different companies when we launched, but for us, Canada Post was the most reliable. Our goal is not to save money on shipping, but to find a reasonable shipping service that is reliable to get the delivery to the customer. Canada Post did the best job for our goal.

Q. Why not use the traditional stamp method to ship (non-tracked)?

A. First, we want our customer to be able to track their package and to be excited for it to come. Second, we know that 99.9% of our customers are honest and good people, but we also want to be protected from anyone being able to say we never shipped their order, or that something was shipped late. We will have our Canada Post data and receipts.

I hope that after reading a little more about the shipping rates that we are charged, you can understand our policy change!