The world of shipping and fulfillment can seem daunting when you’re not familiar with it, we’ve put together an overview of everything you’ll need to know to make the best choice for your business. If in doubt you can always contact us here for some expert advise.
There are a few basics to bear in mind when you set out planning your shipping strategy, these inital decisions will set a foundation for the rest of your shipping.
- Your shipping rates and methods.
Are your customers going to cover shipping costs or do you plan to offer free or flat-rate shipping to absorb some or all of the cost? How will you get orders to your local customers? - Product weights.
To streamline the process, measure and update the weight of each product you sell. Having that information available to you will help you get a good sense of your total costs as well as passing along accurate prices to your customers. - Choose your preferred packaging.
While there’s more to be said about what kind of packaging is right for your products, once you’ve selected it, you can add that information to Shopify so you can calculate accurate shipping prices. - Source your packaging.
You can order free packaging from a courier or invest in branded packaging if that’s part of your strategy. Did we mention we can design branded packaging as well.. 😉
Offer Free Shipping
Before you can ship your products, you’ll first need to decide your pricing strategy for shipping. There are several common methods, but your choice should always take into account the underlying financials of your business.
For example offering your customers free shipping is one of the best ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment (it's a placebo affect, sneaky ey!). However, in the same way that nothing in life is free neither is as you might suspect is shipping. Someone always has to pay. To make free shipping work, you have a few options.
- Increase product prices to cover costs for shipping (customer pays).
- You pay the full price of shipping out of your margins (you pay).
- Increase prices of products slightly to cover partial costs of shipping (you and your customer pays).
- Offer a discount code to certain customers for free shipping.
- Offer free shipping when a customer spends over a certain value.
Some other shipping strategies include:
- Charge Real-Time Carrier Rates.
- Charge a Flat Rate
- Offer local delivery
We are always happy to advise you when it comes to the best shipping strategy. With a wealth of experience with a host of different companies and different shipping plans, we know what works.
Calculating Shipping Costs
All shipping couriers base shipping rates on a variety of factors including:
- Package size
- Package weight
- Origin country
- Destination country
Plus additional shipping options like tracking and insurance.
It can be difficult to compare services exactly as they all offer slightly different options, and every business will have their own unique variables.
You can use Shopify's shipping calculator (USA only) to get yourself a ballpark figure to work from.
e-Ship
e-Ship is a New Zealand Post cloud-based internet application that simplifies and automates the process of delivering your customer orders. It allows you to ship using New Zealand Post and CourierPost domestic and international delivery networks. It can also import your customer orders from popular eCommerce, accounting, and CMS systems. It is easy to set up and integrates well with Shopify. You will need an NZ post account before you can set up e-Ship, this is straightforward, simply sign up here.
Find Out More
How to Integrate
Packaging
There is a lot to consider when it comes to packaging, from weight and integrity to appearance and it todays climate whether or not it is recylcable or reusable. This can impact everything fromcost of shipping to whether or not a customer will choose to order from you again so great care should be taken when choosing the best packaging for you.
Fullfillment
If you set your orders to fulfill automatically, then the order is automatically marked as fulfilled after it's paid. Automatic fulfillment can be used if you exclusively sell digital downloads or digital gift cards. Customers who purchase digital products are automatically emailed a download link and the order is marked as fulfilled. You can fulfill part of an order manually by fulfilling some line items. This is also called partial fulfillment. To make the manual fulfillment process faster, you can fulfill multiple orders at the same time.
Shopify have a comprehensive guide to manually fullfilling orders which you can view below.