How to calculate exact international shipping costs for products?

[Lucisbookstore]

How can I find out how much exactly shipping will cost for my product to be sent internationally to customers? I am worries the the shipping will be more expensive than the product itself and will put people off buying.

lucia 

[Victor]

Hi @Lucisbookstore,

This can be a tricky thing to predict and while it's difficult to accurately forecast shipping costs, you can certainly get a better idea of shipping costs ahead of time by using a shipping calculator. For example, if you're in the United States, you can use USPS's shipping calculator to preview how much it would cost to ship an order to another country. Many other shipping services offer similar calculators to help their customers gain a more accurate quote when they plan to ship a package.

Can you tell me which country you are based in, and which country (or countries) you are thinking of selling to? Shopify offers live calculated shipping rates for a variety of shipping services to merchants in select countries, such as USPS and UPS to merchants in the United States and Canada Post to those based in Canada. The benefit of using live rates is that these rates are generally more accurate that flat rates based on price or weight, and they are calculated using information such as the weight of the package and the destination of the shipment to offer to the customer a rate closer to what you as a merchant are likely to pay.

You can also activate third-party carrier-calculated shipping rates on your store for more options in terms of couriers and shipping apps. For example, if you were in the United States and wanted to use FedEx, you could activate this feature and link your FedEx account to Shopify and offer these rates to your customers at checkout. This feature comes as standard for merchants on the Advanced or Plus plans, but can also be added to other plans for a fee of $20 USD per month. It can also be enabled for free if you decide to pay for your Shopify subscription on an annual basis rather than a monthly one.

Moreover, I'd also recommend checking out our ultimate guide to international commerce, which is a great resource for merchants looking to expand their business beyond their domestic borders. It covers the considerations you should be making and offers advice on how best to expand your business internationally. If you can also tell me more about where you and your business are based and where you wish to sell to abroad, I'd be happy to try and offer you some more tailored advice.

[Lucisbookstore]

Hello, thank you so much for your reply. I am based in Switzerland and France, so I could potentially ship from either one of these. My main customers I predict will be in the UK, Bulgaria, Eastern Europe, and possibly Germany. But also some in USA and Australia. So it’s really international. I am selling a book which I wrote. I used a shipping calculator before like you said, and my issue is that the cost of shipping seems to be just as much as the book itself. How do people manage to sell their products abroad with shipping being so expensive?

[Victor]

Hi @Lucisbookstore,

Thank you for that information. As you based in Switzerland and France, expanding your business to other European countries might be more cost-efficient as opposed to shipping to places such as the United States and Australia. These might well be markets you also wish to sell to, but it might make more practical sense to expand into more local markets before shipping around the world.

Unfortunately, shipping costs can remain high even when selling to a domestic market, so this is something you're likely going to have to deal with as a business owner and work around. There are a number of ways you can handle this. It might simply be a case of charging this fee to customers, or you could try and factor the cost of shipping into your product prices so your shipping fees that the customer pays can be lowered.

I'd recommend checking out our Help Center page on planning your shipping strategy as well as our blog post on the same topic. This can be a difficult thing to get right so it is worth spending some time reading up on managing your shipping and better understanding what strategies and options are available to you.

As you're selling a book, I also wanted to ask if you had considered selling it as a digital product? This would allow you to sell it as an e-book and this would of course allow customers to buy a version without the need for anything to be shipped. Shopify offers a free Digital Downloads app that would help you do this, so please let me know if this is something you'd potentially be interested in.