When starting a business, one of the first and most important things to decide is who you want to reach with your services. When we first had to answer that question, we decided that we want to reach true tea enthusiastics all over the world. Including my home country, Japan.
We found that making this decision immediately answered some other questions, for example questions about the prices of the products we offer.
Since we want to offer high quality tea and tea accessories to both Japanese and foreigner customers, we had to build a pricing system that is equally beneficial for domestic and international buyers. That means that our prices are the same for everyone, no matter where they order from.
For example, we can look at the case of matcha teas: The prices of these teas are controlled by the matcha producers for domestic sale. This means that we are obliged to sell matcha at the official Japanese retail price. This guarantees that all our customers, no matter where they live in the world, can purchase the highest quality teas at the best price possible, the same price they would have to pay if they walked into a teahouse in Kyoto to buy it.
Another question that always arises is about shipping. Many people ask, why we don’t offer free shipping. The answer to that is also the result of our decision to ship both domestically and internationally, and also due to the fact that when really looking into it you can find that free shipping is actually never really free.
What we mean by that is that if a web store offers free shipping, the shipping cost is added to the price of the item. You might not have to pay for the shipping fee separately, but it is calculated into the price of the item. With that, the more items you buy, the higher the extra – in calculated – costs are.
All in all, we find that not offering free shipping is a lot friendlier and fair, and this way we can give our customers a chance to choose their personal preferences in shipping.
I hope that this note of our views on prices and shipping helps everyone understand better, why we do it the way we do and everyone will see that we try to give the best possible service to everyone on equal grounds.
If you have questions about this, please feel free to contact us here.
