How To Setup Domestic Shipping Rates For Dropshipping?
Before you start selling you want to ensure you have setup your shipping fees within your eCommerce website to ensure you are charging your customers the appropriate amount of money to ship their orders.
Some Common Goals And Strategies For Setting Up Shipping Rates
When setting up your store you have the opportunity to configure your shipping rates however you want. You can follow different strategies to achieve the outcomes you would like; however, you cannot pursue all goals at once. It's best to choose a single strategy and implement it.
- Maximize Profit - If your goal is to maximize profit, we recommend taking your shipping costs and marking up the costs. That means charging your customers more for shipping than it costs you. While this sounds great, charging money for shipping may hurt sales as customers typically don't like to pay for shipping. These additional costs may scare away potential customers.
- Maximize Conversions - If your goal is to get as many sales or top line revenue as possible, it may make sense to offer free shipping on all your products. Of course, this means that you are paying the costs to ship your products and customers are not. The downside here is obvious, you maybe hurting your overall profitability. An alternate strategy here is to include the shipping costs in the cost of the product, then offer free shipping.
- Maximize Average Order Value - Lastly, you can set a free shipping threshold for order size. For example, orders over $50 ship free. This free shipping incentive works to increase the average purchase price on your website.
Apliiq recommends charging your customers the same shipping fees Apliiq charges you. This is super simple to setup and ensures that you don't make money or lose money shipping your products. In fact, this is the default configuration when the Apliiq Print On Demand Shopify app is initially installed (after 4/20/2023, installs prior to this time are manually configured).
Use the Shopify App To Setup Rates
You can access your shipping rates setup within your account under the Settings page, within the Shipping tab;
The Shipping locations section allows you to configure your shipping rates within your store for Apliiq products. The shipping rates the Apliiq app creates and manages will only apply to Apliiq products.
Activate Shipping Locations
Select one of the 3 shipping setup options, to align with your shipping and pricing strategies for your store, then click activate.
Activating shipping profiles will setup a shipping location, profile, and shipping zones within your Shopify store. By default, Apliiq Print On Demand will create rates specific unique rates within the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. These English speaking countries account for the vast majority of all shipments and have developed reliable postal systems. All other countries will be added to a "rest of the world" zone with shared shipping rates.
If a shipping profile is not created within your Shopify store, you may need to enable multi-origin shipping, within your Shopify account.
Shipping Profiles For Stores With Many Products
If you have already sync'd over 300 apliiq products with your store, the apliiq app may not be able to link all of your products to the apliiq shipping profile in a single request. Shopify limits the number of calls the app is allowed to make to your store in a given time period. If this is the case, once you activate the shipping profile, you will be prompted to link additional products. Continue to link additional products to your profile until all of your products are linked.
Any products that remain unlinked to a shipping profile may not be able to be purchased by your customers.
De Activate Shipping Locations
To deactivate Apliiq's shipping profile, simply click the deactivate button.
Please note that your customer will not be able to checkout with Apliiq products on your store until you add Apliiq products to a shipping profile. You can do this by re-activating Apliiq's shipping profile, or by manually setting up a shipping profile in your Shopify store.
How Setup Rates Manually In Shopify
In the below video, you can see how to manually setup shipping rates within your Shopify store.
Understanding Your Shipping Costs
In order to implement any of the above strategies it requires you to know your shipping costs. Apliiq has setup a simple shipping rate structure based on the weights of products. As our shipping couriers measure by the ounce, all weights listed below are in ounces (oz.). All shipments have an additional $1.00 fulfillment fee included in the shipping costs below.
As you can see in the above table, Apliiq uses rates by weights. The commerce platform that you are using should provide you instruction for how to setup shipping rates by weight. Additionally, the Apliiq dropshipping app will populate weights for each product variant that is sent from the Apliiq website.
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