Two of the important aspects of your eCommerce store are shipping and taxes. You will need to create shipping policies and determine what company you are going to use to do your shipping. You may need to offer more than one. Whatever you choose, you will also need to set up the options to work with your products so that your customers can choose the shipping options that they prefer. You don’t want to just have one shipping policy. Sometimes, your customers may be willing to pay extra to have their item delivered as soon as possible and a store that offers multiple shipping options that customers want is going to earn the loyalty of those customers.
The Various Shipping Options
There are several different options that you have when it comes to shipping. What you choose will depend entirely upon what sort of items you are selling, what you think your customers will prefer and what is going to be most cost-effective for you. Let’s go over the four different shipping options that you have to choose from when planning out your store.
Manual Shipping Rates
The first of the four options is manual shipping. In manual shipping you set the rates yourself and use whatever shipping services that you want to offer to customers, or even offer customer pickup in lieu of shipping. The advantage that this method has is that you can easily add in incidental costs or handling fees, which are sometimes necessary depending upon what it is you are planning on shipping. The disadvantage of this method is that the calculated costs are usually more than customers expect to pay for shipping and it will not match up if they decide to check on the shipping costs themselves, nor do you have the flexibility to ship a variety of different weights, sizes and the like.
For example, with manual shipping you might set a shipping cost that is based upon the expected weight of an item but if the item weighs more than you anticipating you will be paying the extra shipping cost yourself. On the other hand, if you charge a customer for shipping something and the weight is less than you anticipating, it will likely cost you less to ship, allowing you to pocket the difference, but your customers may not be happy with the price that they paid for shipping. Finally, you have the disadvantage of almost having to set up shipping costs for every product if you have a wide variety of sizes and weights because it can be difficult to calculate weight and dimensions across a wide variety of shipments.
The only time that this is the best option to choose is when you require special handling fees because of the products that you are shipping and all of your products are basically the same size and weight. So, you can set a standard shipping cost of $5 or $10 or whatever you choose to use as your manual shipping rate. Of course, if you don’t have a shipping option and you simply want to charge a handling fee for customer pickup this is the best option to choose for that because you can set it at a standard handling amount. Many store owners also use this for charging a delivery fee within their local delivery area.
Shopify USPS Shipping
The standard shipping method used by Shopify is USPS or the United States Postal Service. If you are sealing a variety of items, with various dimensions and weights, this can be a very useful option. For one thing, you get the benefit of reduced rate shipping because you are using it with Shopify. Another advantage that this method has is that you can set it up almost instantly without any real configuration. The only thing that you need to set up yourself is the weight and dimensions of your products. The Shopify USPS shipping option works very similar to the one offered by Ebay, so if you have ever sold anything on that eCommerce site, you probably already know how it works.
In case you have never sold anything on Ebay or aren’t familiar with how their shipping policies work, here is an overview of Shopify’s USPS standard shipping program. You enter the dimensions of the shipping container that you are going to be transporting your items in, and come as close as you can to the weight (after) being placed in the shipping container, and Shopify will offer your customers various shipping options depending upon how fast they want their order to arrive. The options that they will see will depend upon several factors, such as the type of item being shipped, the size, dimensions and weight, and the particular type of shipping being offered at that time.
There are several major benefits to using this option instead of any of the others. The benefit for your customers is that they can see exactly what the shipping is going to cost them and they can choose the shipping that they want and are willing to pay for. The benefit for you, the merchant, is that when you use Shopify’s USPS shipping and print their labels, you get a discount on the shipping cost.
Remember in the comparison of the different payment tiers offered by Shopify? One of the factors that were affected by which tier you chose was how much you would pay for the shipping. With the Basic option for $29 a month, you got a 50% discount on shipping labels. An upgrade to the Professional plan for $79 a month gave you a 55% discount on shipping labels and the $179 Unlimited plan gave you a 60% discount on labels. So, you can see that there is a direct correlation between what you pay and what you save when it comes to shipping and if you can estimate how much shipping you’ll be doing, you can calculate which plan to go with based on shipping costs alone. Of course, there are other features that come with the higher tier plans as well.
Shipping Costs Calculated by the Carrier
UPS and FexEx, as well as a few other shipping companies, will provide you with a shipping API that will allow you to calculate real-time shipping costs for those shipping services. Obviously, this is a major benefit to customers who prefer a different shipping method than USPS or who can save money by shipping their purchase with FedEx or another shipper but this method has a decided disadvantage for you in that you have to choose the Unlimited plan to be able to use it. Of course, if you are choosing the Unlimited plan because you are going to be shipping enough USPS to warrant the extra cost than it would make sense to offer additional shipping options as well. You won’t get the discount on any UPS or FedEx shipments however.
Drop-Shipping or Fulfillment Services
The fourth type of shipping option that you will have access to is that of a drop-shipper or fulfillment service. This is where you sell products that are then shipped to the buyer by the person you are buying the products from – your supplier. So, your supplier will charge you a certain amount, which may or may not include shipping, and you will set your rates by this cost. The advantage that this method has – besides the advantage of not having to warehouse your products of course – is that you can charge a specific price on all of your products and offer “free” shipping to your customers. The best way to make use of this method is in much the same way that Amazon and Walmart does – where they offer free shipping when you order a certain amount. If a customer chooses not to order that amount, you can calculate a manual rate to charge them but in most cases, they will order the minimum amount that qualifies for free shipping as long as it is reasonable, which means you make more money off of that customer.
How to Set Up Your Shipping Options
All of your shipping options are configured in the ‘Settings’ menu. You begin by navigating to settings and then clicking on ‘Shipping.’ We’ll go through the ways that you configure these options step-by-step.
The first part that we’ll cover is the return address that you’ll be using. By default, Shopify fills in the name of your store (which you may have chosen in haste and want to change later one since it is the first thing that they make you choose) and the address and telephone number that you entered when you signed up, which might be your home address and mobile number. Obviously, you may not want this information on your shipping labels. Many eCommerce websites uses post office boxes that they rent and many smaller companies do not have contact telephone numbers at all. Luckily, Shopify allows you to easily change this information by clicking the EDIT ADDRESS link and entering in new information.
Shipping Zones – Manual Shipping
If you want to set up manual shipping you can do it with the shipping zones section of your shipping options. You’ll have two basic options – domestic and the rest of the world. Within your domestic shipping zones, which you can set to be whatever countries or states that you choose, you can set a standard shipping amount and a heavy shipping amount. You can set other shipping rates that you choose as well, based upon weight or based upon price.
With the ‘rest of the world’ option you only get several shipping rates as well. As discussed, this gives you a little freedom when it comes to your shipping costs and configuring them for multiple sizes and weights but is still rather restrictive compared to other shipping options. .
Shipping – Carrier Calculated
If you have an unlimited plan, then you can use carrier calculated shipping. Shopify doesn’t give you the option to configure that until you have upgraded your plan, but once you do, you can enter the API information and get shipping details directly from the carrier.
Shipping – Shopify Shipping & Labels
If you want to use Shopify shipping labels and shipping services you have two options to configure in the shipping section of your admin area. The first is setting up the printer that you are going to use to print labels on. This is important because the Shopify labels will only print out on certain printers.
The second part of the Shopify shipping is defining various package sizes so that Shopify can set a price. You’ll be able to set a product type like ‘box’ and then create dimensions that will define what sort of prices are shown when the customer chooses a particular product.
Finally, there are options to connect a drop shipping service. If you are doing order fulfillment through a third-party company, it is easy to set them up to work with Shopify. By default, Shopify supports Shipwire, Rakuten and Amazon order fulfillment. However, you can create custom order fulfillment as well if you choose. You do this via email, by specifying where customer information should be sent when someone places an order so that the fulfillment company can then send the order to the customer. However, the three fulfillments services supported by Shopify have more features and custom configuration that can be done.
