How Do I Make Sure I'm Not Losing or Overcharging on Shipping?

[Billington_Insp]

Hello!

I have recently launched a Shopify store as a new avenue for our business, and I realized that I didn't understand how the shipping worked until after we got our first order. 

We are currently using the carrier calculated shipping rates and what I would like to know is if there is a way to make the shipping prices calculated at checkout for the customer be based off of the weight of what they ordered or really anything besides the default box that we have to select?

In our industry sometimes people make very large orders of the products we sell, so I feel like the default box size is a bit of gamble for us as we don't know if a customer is going to order 1 or 100 of our products at one time, so I guess what we're looking for is something that would give our customers a more accurate shipping price to ensure that if they place a large order, we aren't out money on shipping, or if a customer places a small order, we aren't overcharging on shipping if our default box is larger than what they ordered and causes them to receive a larger shipping charge than they really need.

I have also read about using the custom/flat rate shipping profiles and making weight based rates, but I want to know if there's a way to make sure that I calculate accurate shipping rates for anyone in the US. 

If anyone has figured out a good way to set up shipping or if there are apps that help make sure we aren't losing or overcharging our customers on shipping, that would be extremely helpful for us!

[Kimi · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Billington_Insp.

I totally understand your concern, particularly in regards to Shopify's default packaging and how only one default package size is always used to calculate the final shipping cost. At this stage, there isn't a way for the Shopify admin to natively assign different package types for each order that comes in. The workaround to this issue however, is to install a third-party shipping app, as it should help with calculating a more accurate shipping rate for your store. There's a few apps that you can take a look at, but I'll list some of the most commonly used ones below:

• Advanced Shipping Rules
• Boxify
• Parcelify
• Bespoke Shipping

It looks like Advanced Shipping Rules has a Lite option for $9 USD per month that you can look into, to see if that will suit your specific business needs. Otherwise Parcelify is perhaps the most affordable option for $14.99 USD per month. If you have any further questions concerning the apps I mentioned though, because they are all third-party apps, you can get in touch with their support team directly, as they're best equipped to answer app-specific queries.

I completely understand how important it is to not under or overcharge shipping rates on your store. I can also see the benefits of adding a feature natively on Shopify to help with this, as it would be extremely beneficial for your business and others in a similar situation to you. I've submitted this feedback along to our developers, so that we can look at further ways of improving our platform for you and all of our merchants. Just a note that we can't guarantee when and if changes will be made, or provide a timeline for updates on this request. However any updates will be listed in our changelog here.

[Billington_Insp]

I see, thank you so much for your answer Kimi, and thank you for your app suggestions! I very much appreciate it!

[Kimi]

No worries at all, @Billington_Insp!

How has your store been since you launched? Let us know if there's anything else that you need help with!