Eagle Paint has had its doors open since 1948, and the world has changed quite a bit since then! We’re talking about a time period where rotary phones and the typewriter were the norms. Mankind would not yet land on the moon for another 2 decades, and Google was still 5 decades away. Over those decades, new challenges and opportunities have presented themselves. In decade number 6 of operation, Eagle joined the world wide web.
www.eaglepaintandwallpaper.com version 1 looked like this:
From the launch of that first website, the builders knew ecommerce was coming in the future – and they were excited about it. Under the roof of Eagle Paint and Wallpaper, the business to business operation The Color Factory had been shipping paint across the United States, and across the globe, to places as far as Asia and the middle east. The hard-earned lessons of how to reliably ship paint were a set of solved problems!
Shipping paint is a bit more complicated than shipping say, pop-tarts or frisbees. You have heavy, space consuming items, that can break open and spill, and would cause an absolute mess if they did. Bulk-packaging pints and gallons improperly together could and would result in those small pints becoming projectiles, flying into the precious gallons in transit.
Thankfully, with time, experience, and some good packing? The potential problems were solved, and turned into the procedures we still use today. We are pleased to report that “lost gallons” in shipping are a VERY rare occurrence, to the point that can’t remember the last time it happened. Knocking on wood- it has been years since our last lost gallon!
In terms of cost, there are more challenges. These boxes are both heavy (at close to 50lbs for a box of 4 gallons), and on the large side. When loading this into a plane, where takeoff weight is a significant concern – and opportunity cost of how much space a package takes up is also a concern? Both contribute to cost.
Letting you in on some inside baseball here, that gives our shipping plugins the fits. The shipping costs you see on our website, are the best and most accurate costs we can deliver, after years of tinkering, trying out plugins, you name it. Many man hours have been poured into the shipping settings to deliver shipping prices that in some cases, are actually below the real shipping cost to us! To us, our priority concern is making sure the paint arrives intact and in one piece – but not far behind that, we consider value to the consumer with every change we make.