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Shipping is a Fundamental Part of your Ecommerce Business
Every store-owner wants their customers to be happy after using their product or services for that store-owner puts a lot of effort into making sure customers have a great experience.
Shipping is definitely the most important as well as challenging aspect for any ecommerce business. Shipping Challenges vary business to business. Each business may have unique challenges so need to work through and overcome that to develop the most efficient shipping strategy because shipping is a key part of your business.
Shopify can help you streamline your shipping, and apps to help make it all easier.
How Important Wholesale Shipping is?
Shipping cost is the most important aspect in your business to increase a profit margin. Although it’s an important aspect, shipping cost is one of the most critical issues to handle when you are dealing with wholesale customers.
While setting shipping cost you need to make sure it’s not too high and too low. If you set shipping cost too high then there are chances of cart abandonment and if you set shipping cost too low then you can hurt your profits. So it’s important to set shipping costs by considering all these aspects.
Most of the time we see some people don’t buy products online due to high shipping cost. Some products are sold cheaply but shipment cost is twice the product price. So before your customers decide not to buy anything from your products because of high shipping costs, know what you need to do in order to avoid that situation.
Factors That Affect Shipping Rates
You must know some factors that affect shipping rates before determining the cost of shipping.
- Product size
- Product weight
- Shipping origin
- Shipping destinations
- Shipping Options
Product size and weight, you can charge the shipping cost based on product size and weight. How heavy is the product? Do you need to charge extra?
The important thing to focus here is make sure your products have accurate weights and dimensions so that the rate you get back from a carrier is as accurate as possible.
Shipping destinations are also crucial as product size and weight.
Shipping destinations like domestic shipping, a flat-rate or free shipping option works well.
Once you have determined all these factors, you can then start calculating the actual shipping costs and find a reliable carrier to work with.
Set your Shipping Rates And Methods
Shipping is the most important and can be one of the more complex parts of a business to set up and manage. It can also be one of the biggest costs that you have per order.
To set up your shipping, it’s a good practise to get an idea about the different shipping zones, rates, carriers you can offer. Once you understand how shipping works in Shopify, then you can easily create your shipping profiles, decide on your shipping zones, and set your shipping rates.
There are several common shipping methods but which to use always depend on your pricing strategy for shipping, your choice is always informed by underlying financials of your business.
Offer Free Shipping
Offering free shipping to your wholesale customers is one of the best ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment. However, you’re thinking? What’s the benefit of free shipping? You can offer free shipping and it will not affect your profit margin.
Below are some options you can use to make a free shipping to your wholesale customer.
- You can increase product prices slightly to cover costs for shipping.
- You pay the full price of shipping out of your margins.
- Offer a discount code to your wholesale customers for free shipping.
- Offer free shipping on a minimum order amount.
- Set product based free shipping rules for your wholesale customers.
This strategy can help offset the costs of shipping by helping to increase your average order size and increase the possibility of your customers for the long time.
Charge Real-Time Carrier Rates
Charge real-time carriers rates are used to charge the real-time carrier rates for shipping. This allows customers to choose and pay for the exact service they want. Shopify integrates in real-time with various carriers like USPS and Canada Post (among others) to generate shipping options and live pricing from various carriers.
Charge a Flat Rate
Flat rate shipping method allows you to charge the fixed shipping cost to your customer. It’s the most popular method. Use of Flat rate shipping method is the best practise is to try and make sure you don’t drastically undercharge or overcharge. Flat rate shipping tends to become complicated and less effective if you sell a wide variety of products with different sizes and weights.
Shipping by state or country
If you are planning to ship internationally, the best way that you can charge shipping rates is to know the weight of the item. Countries outside the US have different rates so obtaining the real rates per country should be also on your list.
Shipping by weight
Determining the weight of the product you are shipping is important. If you choose by weight you can also check in with a shipping company as to how much they are charging per weight so you have a realistic rate to compare to.
Calculating shipping costs
All shipping couriers base shipping rates on a variety of factors including:
- Package size
- Package weight
- Origin country
- Destination country
Pros And Cons Of Setting Fixed Shipping Costs
Pros:
- Flexible
- Consistent for the customer – doesn’t vary daily
Cons:
- You might miscalculate and lose money on some transactions
- You need to be aware of how shipping affects your margins
Free Shipping Benefits:
- Attracts more customers to purchase from your store.
- Improve in conversion rates.
