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Shipping and Associated Costs

One of the most common reasons for customers to drop out of a transaction before purchase is shipping costs and we allow many different ways for you to calculate shipping for your online sales.

There are six types of shipping costs as standard available for you to choose from:

 

  • Included (Free Delivery)
  • Flat Rate
  • Flat rate international shipping per country
  • Free for specific postcodes and flat rate outside these
  • Charges by Postcode listed and flat rate outside these 
  • Calculation by shipping weight

 

Included (Free Delivery)

The vast majority of online retailers tend to focus on either included shipping where the cost of the shipping is already calculated into the price of the product.

 They either include shipping in the price of the product, or they charge a flat rate on top. 

The best and most effective shipping cost for flowers sales is to include it in the cost of the product.

To work out how much to include can be difficult to begin with if you don’t know where most of your orders will be delivered.

As a general rule of thumb if 80% of your orders cost say $7.50 to deliver with the rest ranging from $10 - 12.50 then include a $10 margin in your products for shipping costs.

On some orders you will make money and on some you will lose money on the shipping, but it all equals out in the end if you do the calculation correctly.

You do not need to do anything to provide free delivery on your website.

Flat Rate

One of the simplest ways to charge shipping, flat rate shipping is a very simple way of adding additional value to your sale without much fuss.

The benefit of a flat rate shipping cost is that it’s easy to set up and easy for your customers to understand.

You will see many website which actively use the flat rate shipping as a sales value proposition.

To calculate how much to charge it’s pretty much the same calculating included delivery charges.  Analyze your orders and look at the average cost per order, add a little more and then use that as your flat rate cost.

Click here to activate flat rate shipping

Flat Rate International Shipping

Many websites do not ship internationally for various reasons, however if you wish to ship internationally you have the option of listing a flat rate charge for each country.

Generally speaking this only works where you have products which you can do an approximate cost per order.

Then in the checkout process the customer has the option of choosing a delivery country from the drop down in the form and the flat rate cost of that country will be added to the order total.

Click here to activate Flat Rate International Shipping

Free for specific postcodes and flat rate outside these

If you have a local delivery area that you do not want to charge for, but need to charge a fee for all other areas you can set this up too.

Fort example: say your local delivery area is four postcodes, you would add these postcodes to you free (included shipping area) and then enter an amount for flat rate shipping for all areas outside this.

For example say you delivered to:

Surry hills 2010

Darlinghurst 2010

Sydney 2000

If a customer chooses one of these delivery areas they are not charged a delivery fee, however if they choose any other delivery area they will be charged your standard flat rate shipping fee instead.

It’s a good idea to think about how you set up your included delivery area carefully and then equally carefully how much your flat rate will be.

Many websites set up their shipping costs this way to discourage people from ordering outside their delivery area.  And they will have a prohibitively high flat rate cost outside their delivery area to do this.  Further to this way of calculating shipping costs the actual cost of the delivery is usually factored in to the cost of the product.

This is however a relatively easy way to set up shipping costs that save you money but still allow you to server customers in far flung areas without losing money on the order.

Click here to set up included delivery areas.

Charges by Postcode listed and flat rate outside these 

One of the more complex ways to setup shipping cost calculations is to list each suburb and a cost for that postcode / suburb and then charge a flat fee for all deliveries outside those areas.

The idea is that you can better target all the suburbs that you know you deliver to and then charge a much larger flat rate fee for everywhere else.

You can also include Free delivery areas simply by adding the postcode / suburb and an amount of 0 for the fee.

The downside of this approach however is that you may end up having hundreds of different delivery costs and updating and managing these can be a significant undertaking.

The upside however is for areas where there is a great geographic distance for delivery you can charge a decent amount for the shipping.

Click here to setup postcode based shipping

Calculation by shipping weight

For websites that sell products that can be shipped based on weight the software allows you to enter a weight and the shopping cart will calculate the cost based on weight ranges.

This generally works well with Australia Post Parcel Service, which calculates on weight.

Click here to learn how to setup weight based shipping

 

 

 

 

 

Added: 2013-7-15 and last modified: 2018-10-19
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