Is choosing a shipping method with tracking necessary for Oberlo?

[ArniBarni]

Hey guys.

In order to make tracking possible, is it required to select a shipping method that provides tracking? I was importing everything with oberlo and used 17track (like probably most of you) to provide that service.

My girlfriend just bought a test product, got a confirmation, but we can't find any tracking activities. Does it maybe take a while, to get the system check the order or is it because I choose a shipping method, where the tracking was not included (the cheapest one).

How do you guys deal with that? Do you choose a more expensive shipping to get that tracking service or do you have another ideas? (I really want to give that service to my customers). 

[Lilith]

Hi, @ArniBarni!

My name is Lilith, I'm on the Social Care team at Shopify.

You're on the right track! The only shipping methods that have tracking available will be labeled when choosing the shipping option. Tracking is always an extra cost for any courier in the world no matter which country is shipping where, so in this case I do recommend opting for the higher price in order to provide tracking to your customers.

Oberlo has a pretty fantastic summary of some of the shipping options available and which ones include tracking. You can use this as a guide to prepare you for selecting shipping when you fulfill orders. Since your products will take longer than 2-3 days to be delivered to your customers, choosing the trackable shipping option will be far better in the long run for your service and communications.

To help make sure you save time and also choose the right shipping option you can set that up in your Oberlo settings if you're using Oberlo. The guide will walk through some options to allow you to select a default shipping option you want to choose from the supplier if they offer it.

Even though having the tracking option is a bit more expensive, you can work with the pricing on your site. One way that shipping has worked really well for myself and other merchants is to incorporate the price (or part of the price) of shipping into the price of the product. This does a couple of things:

1. Allows you to maintain a steady profit without compromising too much on shipping costs since you're passing on some of the cost to the customer within reason. You'll be able to keep a growing profit and lowering your own costs to fulfill the items.

2. Gives you a chance to reduce the visible cost of shipping on your site to your customers. Most people would rather pay $50 and free shipping for an item than $35 and $15 shipping. Shipping is one of the areas that can make or break your final sales conversion so try to reduce the shipping rates on your site and increase the price of the product just a little bit to cover some of the shipping costs that you will pay to fulfill the item.

Just bear in mind that shipping shouldn't be used as a method to make a profit in any circumstance. This is not sustainable in the long term and your customers will not want to buy something if shipping is too high.

We have a really thorough free course on our Shopify Compass site that can help you with learning the basics of dropshipping and marketing for your store. I definitely recommend it as a way to check off things as you build and sell.

Let me know how you do with the information above! I'm happy to answer any questions you think of as you work on your business.