Shipping is an important process for all ecommerce businesses. While shipping is a simple concept (pack it and ship it out) it will always play a vital role in your business. There’s a wide range of shipping options business owners can consider, from flat rate and expedited shipping to same day shipping or free shipping.
With so many different shipping strategies to choose from, which one is going to be best for your Shopify business?
With Shopify, you have the opportunity to setup your own shipping rates. Before you can start adding shipping rates, you need to make sure you fill out your shipping zones first. Once that is done, you can begin looking at the shipping methods you want to use.
Now, with Shopify, you can add multiple shipping methods per shipping zone, which gives your customers multiple options to choose a shipping option that best fits what they want.
Shopify Shipping Options
There’s a few different ways to set up your Shopify shipping options;
- You can create weight-based or price-based shipping rates for regular postage shipping.
- If you have the Shopify Advanced Plan or higher, you can offer calculated shipping rates from USPS, FedEx, UPS, Canada Post and many others. Calculated rates are available to those who have Shopify Shipping.
- You can choose to partner with a Shopify fulfillment provider or a dropshipping partner.
How Will You Be Shipping Your Products?
If you’re doing your own self fulfillment, the shipping options you have are across the board.
Ultimately, the shipping strategy you use is up to you. While we always recommend listening to your customers and gathering feedback to determine what to offer, you also don’t want to lose money every time you ship a product. If you do lose money when you ship a product, you better make sure you’re making it up elsewhere.
Outsource Your Ecommerce Fulfillment
For companies that are shipping products daily, the cost can quickly add up. This is why as companies grow, they choose to outsource their ecommerce fulfillment so they don’t have to worry about shipping and fulfillment.
On top of that, business owners know they can save money as fulfillment centers often have some of the best shipping rates you’ll be able to find. You can save on shipping cost and the cost of your fulfillment.
Here at Thill, we offer full scale order fulfillment services. Even better, our order management software easily integrates with Shopify. Our software enhances all the data you get back from Shopify with real-time data points that will allow you to optimize your fulfillment. We also provide a full range of other services, such as;
- Warehousing
- Returns Management
- Value Added Services
- Order Management
- Customer Care
- Business Analytics
Your Shipping Cost
For those of you that choose to do your own shipping and fulfillment, Shopify does have a shipping calculator. You can access it here. There’s many options here to help you determine what may be the best method of shipping for your business. You can also see how the shipping cost differs from one option to the next.
You have to look at your shipping cost from 2 angles, the dollar amount and customer satisfaction.
You need to use a shipping strategy that doesn’t cost a lot but you also need to make sure your customers are getting their orders quickly as possible. At the very least, you want to have multiple shipping options for customers so they can choose the best shipping option for them.
Shipping cost is always important and with different shipping strategies, you’ll need to understand the cost for all options.
If you’re planning to charge shipping based on weight and dimensions, you’ll find this article useful: https://thillinc.com/shipping/understanding-dimensional-weight/
Shopify Shipping Settings
All of your shipping options is located in Shopify’s Shipping Settings.
What If I Have Multiple Locations?
If you do have multiple locations, it’s much easier to provide flat rate shipping or same shipping rates.
