With regret, we’ve had to remove free postage for US customers at Libriz. The price had shot up considerably for us, and those of you who have been checking out the site will know that this was carried out last week, and has nothing to do with a certain meeting at the White House.
Compounding this was a Woocommerce software glitch at Libriz that would not allow us to have contemporaneously free shipping for US customers on US editions, and free shipping for UK customers on global editions. Or we simply couldn’t figure out how to do it. At least in our logic, following how the software is designed, the program couldn’t do it, leading to potential abuse: a US customer could select a UK-only free postage option for themselves, and we’d be out of pocket. In fact, this did happen recently—we have every reason to believe it was accidentally. We chose to wear that one, despite the postage having gone up a lot.
During 2024, the wholesale printing price of one of our US editions went up 80 per cent. This was long before any talk of tariffs by their current president.
With these pricing pressures, we ultimately couldn’t keep offering free postage.
I should point out that we don’t make anything from handling and postage. What you see at checkout is exactly what we are charged on our end.
Knowledge should be disseminated, which is why I don’t enjoy removing the free US postage option. The sad thing is that these forces outside our control have become another barrier in having easy trade with US customers. We disconnected from certain US Big Tech companies long before the 2024 election because they were dishonest. Some people are doing that now because of a mistrust with the current government, and they don’t like seeing their tech providers kowtow to it. I don’t know what effect this will have—for example, Meta share sell-offs in the wake of bad publicity never last for long and the stock tends to rebound. Odds are many businesses will choose to leave things as they are, but there will still be some impact on revenue.
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