Freight, What Is It Good For?

This blog post is long overdue. Unfortunately, there were a lot of more pressing blog posts that needed to come before it. Without further ado, this is a blog that should have been posted January 1.

As the title of this blog implies, this post is going to be about freight. Why, you might ask? The reason is that freight is a hot button issue for businesses and consumers alike who get stuff shipped for them or to them. The thing is that people just want their stuff and they do not want to pay for anything more than the item they are purchasing. Unfortunately, the reality is that someone has to pay the freight.

Recently, more and more companies are including the freight in the price of the item while saying the item was shipped for free. Or a company could require you to buy a certain dollar amount of goods to get free freight. There are all kinds of gimmicks. The truth is that it’s all smoke and mirrors because no company wants to ship stuff for free without getting any compensation for it. It becomes hard to stay in business as freight can eat deep into profits.

With that, I want to tell you what team Jaftex is doing. Going back to January 1, 2024, we have told our customers that we will charge them 10 cents a yard freight in the US and 15 cents a yard freight into Canada all using Fedex. I like to say that we are in the fabric business and not the freight business. This was the best we could do without charging zero for freight. In hindsight, we probably should have just raised the price 10 cents in the US and 15 cents in Canada and said free freight, but that has its own complications and that ship has sailed already anyway.

The plan is to test the waters on what we like to call 10 cents US or 15 cents CAD capped freight for the first 6 months of the year. If it proves to be fruitful and customers like it, we will continue with it. I am guessing that they will like it. The bigger issue for us is whether it will help us to increase our volume to help lessen the pain of the inexpesive freight.

Overall, we did this because it’s just another way for us to help our customers. If our customers are happy and know that Jaftex is not crushing them on freight expenses, they will continue to come back for more and more of our fabric. In the end, hopefully we will increase sales because of our freight promotion and hopefully the increased sales will help to mitigate the freight expenses that we will be covering for our valued customers. That’s the story and I am sticking to it.

In the meantime, I would love to hear your comments on this subject. GO!