SoDesuNe wrote:
My "problem" with small online shops in this day and age is shipping costs.
Shipping costs vary greatly from shop to shop because they differ greatly from country to country and recently even differ greatly because different shops in the same country have to pay very different postages when sending to other countries. Ordinary Amazon shipping costs are higher than postages but, for physically printed books, nothing can beat free shipping from an Amazon branch to a destination in its same country if one has subscribed to Amazon Premium, sees its main value in streaming services and so pretends to oneself that books would ship "for free". Of course, smaller shops cannot compete with Amazon Prime for small orders. Some small go book shops offer free shipping for bulk orders.
EUR 20 postage for one book is, of course, much too high but, unfortunately, can be the actual postage some shops might have to pay. In some countries, this is the consequence of the new UPU regulations, which prohibit commercial goods in ordinary letters. Some shops are lucky to have access to reasonable postages for commercial letters while other shops are required to send every single book as a parcel, which is expensive especially overseas.
Electronic formats of books can be a solution for some shops but do not fit every business model. (And not every electronic format is equally viable commercially.)
I do not know the postages from Poland but can confirm that EUR 20 is an amount that can occur for some unlucky shops also in other countries. I do not know what the UPU thinks. Does it want to destroy businesses of as many small shops as possible and in the end destroy itself because the big players create their own global postal services?