Shipping to customers

[soylights]

How do you determine your shipping rates? We currently charge shipping based on the amount of the sale. We know we need to come up with a better solution as we lose quite a bit of money this way.  The majority of our orders are local so it’s only about 10% of our business, however, we were just approved for Faire and things are picking up on the retail end. 
 

I am of the opinion that people don’t want to pay shipping so keep it low as possible. My business partner feels we should charge our cost including shipping materials. 
 

For example, orders between $1-50 are $5 to ship, orders from $51-75 are $10 to ship and so on.

 

What do you find works best for you? 

 

 

[TallTayl]

I got really cozy with boxes, pirate ship and go shippo to pack test configurations and charge accordingly. In my case, shipping by weight was the closest to not lose money on shipping.  

 

USPS has regional rate boxes which save a nice amount for shipping to nearby states. Flat rate has gotten spendy. the "cubic rate" promoted by Pirate Ship is the same cost usually as regional rates or any first class size box.

 

UPS and FedEx are nice options for larger / heavier orders. Both are offered through Pirate Ship and FedEx now.

 

Even though many boxes are "free" from usps there is the hidden cost of about $.40 in their rates. I build in the cost of boxes, void fill, tape, etc. into my item pricing and a small handling fee of less than $1 to cover miscalculations of shipping by the shopping carts.

 

I charge by weight and to an extent dim weight (accounts for larger boxes that cost more to ship through all carriers.

 

Shipping is my biggest cost, and I don't want to give up any of that as it steals from profit. The increases this year have hit hard.

[soylights]

On 11/4/2021 at 12:03 AM, TallTayl said:

I got really cozy with boxes, pirate ship and go shippo to pack test configurations and charge accordingly. In my case, shipping by weight was the closest to not lose money on shipping.  

 

USPS has regional rate boxes which save a nice amount for shipping to nearby states. Flat rate has gotten spendy. the "cubic rate" promoted by Pirate Ship is the same cost usually as regional rates or any first class size box.

 

UPS and FedEx are nice options for larger / heavier orders. Both are offered through Pirate Ship and FedEx now.

 

Even though many boxes are "free" from usps there is the hidden cost of about $.40 in their rates. I build in the cost of boxes, void fill, tape, etc. into my item pricing and a small handling fee of less than $1 to cover miscalculations of shipping by the shopping carts.

 

I charge by weight and to an extent dim weight (accounts for larger boxes that cost more to ship through all carriers.

 

Shipping is my biggest cost, and I don't want to give up any of that as it steals from profit. The increases this year have hit hard.

Thank you! We are using ship station which we have found is fairly easy to navigate.

Do you find people are still willing to pay the shipping costs on larger orders, say wholesale orders where you are shipping many cases of candles? 

 

It gets difficult for me to determine what is reasonable. For example, we had a retailer reach out to us interested in our candles for her store in New York. Once we told her the shipping costs she was no longer interested. It would have been $20 per case and that was with us eating a portion of the shipping expense. We have all local retailers and fundraisers currently for that reason. It has been great but we know that in order to keep growing we need to figure out our shipping. 

Thank you for your insight! Appreciate ya!!

[TallTayl]

2 hours ago, soylights said:

Thank you! We are using ship station which we have found is fairly easy to navigate.

Do you find people are still willing to pay the shipping costs on larger orders, say wholesale orders where you are shipping many cases of candles? 

 

It gets difficult for me to determine what is reasonable. For example, we had a retailer reach out to us interested in our candles for her store in New York. Once we told her the shipping costs she was no longer interested. It would have been $20 per case and that was with us eating a portion of the shipping expense. We have all local retailers and fundraisers currently for that reason. It has been great but we know that in order to keep growing we need to figure out our shipping. 

Thank you for your insight! Appreciate ya!!

Well, someone has to pay the freight.  Since wholesale orders are already getting a nice discount, free shipping on top of that is only hurting myself. You can play games with numbers to appease them into thinking they are getting a “deal”, but at the end of the day it is a shell game.  You can raise all prices to make the WS % work, but then everyone else you sell to is subsidizing the shipping of another customer. The $20 a case to NY would work out to, what, $1 a candle? They can tack that, plus a few extra on top of the normal markup $ and make a healthy profit. 
 

if the WS customer is not willing to foot the freight bill, then it’s not worth it to me either. Let them work with someone closer. I prefer to not work for free. Time is the one and only resource that is limited. I can’t make more of it. What I have left is precious. 
 

If you want to extend your reach, maybe look into FedEx accounts. Sometimes their less than load, less than pallet freight savings are worth it. Sometimes. 
 

freight on large orders  for us got to be too much practically overnight.  When plywood went from$20 a sheet to hundreds it made pallet packing like $1,000. No way I want to cover that and give discounts.  It was time to suspend that part of the operation and focus elsewhere for a while. 

[MilosCandles]

This might be a little out dated since I made it a few years ago - https://716candleco.com/candle-business-usa-shipping/