One of the peculiarities of the shave.com store is that almost all of the products we sell there are mostly water (there are some important exceptions, as Andy Hill points out in this interesting post over on his green blog). There's obviously something a bit perverse about packing any amount of water into a box and sending it in the post. Apart from the obvious green concerns (why ship water when it's already present almost everywhere on the planet's surface), water is dense. Really dense. I learn from this fascinating article in Fast Company that if you were to fill an ordinary cargo truck with water it would be too heavy to move!
So, our challenge here at shave.com is to sell and ship water (plus the King of Shaves 'secret sauce') with relatively low average order values and still make a profit. I remember reading a long time ago that Jeff Bezos settled on books for his fairly successful online store by spending some time in his kitchen weighing and measuring different products. Books were the closest to the optimal size and weight for shipping: decision made (I know there were some other factors in this decision!).
Looking for material on the tricky trade-off between product density, unit price and shipping costs, I came across this fascinating blog post from a couple of years ago about the mind-blowing economics of shipping bottled water from Fiji to the USA.
