Subscribe to Dropship Digest and grab your self a copy of our free report for beginners! Link on feed.What should I charge for shipping
When I first started my first store, this was perhaps the hardest thing to figure out. For most of us, free shipping is very hard to do. My feeling is that you should do your best to break even on shipping. With rising shipping costs, consumers are becoming more and more conscious of it. The store that tries to sell items really cheap only to charge big time for shipping will be out of business fast. Customers simply won’t be fooled and will shop elsewhere.
So how do you find a balance? First of all always be up front with what your fees are. Make sure your store has a FAQ page that explains all of your store’s policies, including how shipping is determined.
One of the most popular ways to charge shipping is with a tiered approach. Almost every catalog that you get in the mail has a shipping table. $0-$25 ships for $x; $25.01-$50 ships for $x; and on. This works really well if you don’t have any heavy or large items. I collected a bunch of catalogs in my industry, looked at all of their shipping tables, and created my own that was similar. This is a pretty good way to do things; you’ll overcharge some, and undercharge some. But hopefully will land somewhere in the middle when all is said and done.
You could use flat rates. If all of your items are pretty much the same size, and you’ve got a pretty good idea what they’ll ship for, make it easy. “All orders ship for $8.99”. Or maybe “The first item ships for $6.99, each additional item ships for only $.50 more”. This can work on big stuff also. Most of the big stuff I carry has flat shipping from the supplier. So I know it’ll cost me $50 to ship every time. I can adjust to make it work.
Finally, there are plenty of third party applications that can help. Yahoo! Merchant Solutions
hosts my stores, and I use accuRATEship from Solid Cactus to configure my shipping. It costs me $75 a month, but I never have to worry about losing my shirt, or losing customers, due to shipping costs. It figures real time shipping costs based on weight, to and from zip code, box sizes, etc. An awesome tool. I’m sure there are other things out there for different store platforms. Search around and see what you can find.
Let’s share our knowledge. How do you configure shipping costs?
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March 14th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
[...] Justin from Drop Ship Digest answers the age-old online retailer dilemma – What should I charge for shipping? [...]
June 15th, 2009 at 1:09 am
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