What Do I Need For Ecommerce Shipping
In today's face paced world there's many ecommerce websites popping up all over. Their success/ failure are subjective to many variables. Could be genuine ignorance of the task and the labour involved or genuine brilliance for talking the time to overturn every stone? However, what I have noticed is that there's a little tidbit which most do not explore to save money and to make money at the same time - shipping.
Like every other business, shipping companies are looking to make money. To do this they have branched out to resellers of their services. Meaning I could be Vipparcel Shipping service and really sell USPS Shipping. The great part is, generally these shipping companies need business bad and need high volume shippers - McDonald's principle, make it cheap and sell allot. The best part is that you still get the same service and value as USPS Shipping.
So how does this work to your advantage?
As a customer of the principle shipper (USPS in this case) you have an account at a discount rate from Vipparcel Shipping. Depending on your shopping cart (open source or SaaS (hosted)) you can either plug in the USPS API to the open source or attach your USPS ID in the SaaS. Just a note, API is usually much more expensive and requires a developer who gets' ecommerce better than you and speaks perfect English and lives on the same continent.
So where do you save and make money? Well did you know that you can reassign the shipping discount you receive to the customers check out? Yep, most API's and SaaS allow you the options when creating your integration to assign full pricing through the code. Say you have a discounted rate at %30 on your shipping, you can assign that shipping savings back to your customer and make that money.
Just think, your shipping fees each month are say $2000, that's $600 back to your business, that's $7200 a year.
Over the years we have all seen free shipping on shopping carts to offer incentive for the user. Reality is, there are still enough companies out there charging for shipping to warrant charging for shipping. Most sites offer such an added value discount on the product that paying for shipping is still worth the buy for the user.
Furthermore, if you are selling B2B then shipping is no big deal, it is the cost of doing business and your customers will pay it. If anything, they are simply looking for the lowest upfront cost.
There are many factors to determine the best way to treat your shipping fee. My theory is simple, good product, good price, centralized marketing/ customers, no problem. Get into overseas and border crossing and now you are into some headaches.
Posted on October 23, 2018
