What I want to achieve
I want to provide all-inclusive pricing to my customers.
My business claim is: “No matter where in the world you are, always have Shipping & Duties included and always pay the same price for our product”
Let’s say my product is listed at €450 on my product page and a customer from Singapore adds it to cart. At check-out, they would see:
- no additional taxes is added because I have checked taxes are included in price
- only one shipping option available: Included — 0€ and (copy reminds it include all duties (DDP)
- thus, an unchanged total of €450
So far so good. Now I must ship my product to the customer. My store is based in the EU and over 85% of our orders come from outside of it, so I deal with customs a lot.
When I ship this product to a country where I have to pay duties, I don’t want to be charged those duties on the entire €450. That price is not just the product price; it is composed of the item price + a shipping & duties contribution. I should declare an item value of total price - shipping & duties contribution. In this case, the item price is €340, the shipping & duties contribution to Singapore being €110.
I want to declare and be charged duties on €340, not €450.
This is all feasible manually, of course. But at our scale that’s not an option. We use Easyship to turn our Shopify orders into Shipments and bulk-print our labels. And here problems arise..
The problem
My orders are auto-synced to my shipping solution, and my shipping solution doesn’t allow me to edit line_item pricing in bulkier via an automation/workflow (This appears to be true for all Easyship competitors I have tried..).
So my order would arrive into Easyship as €450, and dozens of other orders like it, and I would not be able to bulk-adjust the item prices to prepare them for shipping and customs. I would thus be charged too much on duties.
Solutions I’ve considered
- Update orderdata in Shopify
Create a workflow, triggered when a new order is created, that:
- edits the order to remove the currently selected product (priced at €450)
- adds an almost-identical alternate product (priced at €340)
- and adds a custom line item, title: Shipping & Duties Contribution, marked as not requiring shipping, dynamically priced at €450-340 (€110)
- (so total stays the same €450, but composition is different. because the Contribution custom item doesn’t require shipping, it won’t be passed onto Easyship. There, my shipment will only include one item at €340)
This workflow be achieved as a UI bulk action, nor can it be done in Flow, but can be done via the Shopify API directly or an app like Arigato.
- Create custom Shipping solution
Leave the data as-is in Shopify, but switch from Easyship to something custom-built. That feels a bit overkill when such good software already exists, but I also know that different players in this space expose an API and it may be simpler than I think to build something that suits our workflows.
My ask from you
How would you do this?
Also (but secondary): do you see any solution that would keep my shopify back-end clean, with shipping, taxes and all neatly stored in the right column to still benefit from my analytics?
I have budget available as this is a huge conversion lever for us.
Back when we could operate this manually, we converted 48% more people at check-out than we do with the same total, but the added step of selecting a shipping option (!!!)
I am specifically looking for help from people like @HunkyBill , who have built custom connectors for shipping/customs or have worked on a similar use-case, but all perspectives are welcome