How do I calculate shipping costs for my online store?

Shopify Discussion
1

I am still so confused a bout shipping, How do I know what I will be charged for shipping? I have my store set up for free shipping. Some products show me shipping prices that are sometimes much more than the product itself. How should I implement the shipping into the cost if I don’t know what I am going to be charged on my end?

2

Hi @KellyB0421 ,

what kind of products are you selling? What kind of fulfillment or delivery service are you using?

I can give you a simple example. So let’s say you sell t-shirts and you have 2 kinds of boxes. With the smaller one you can ship up to 5 t-shirts. The bigger one can hold up to 10 t-shirts. Now you can just check the sizes of the box and the average or max weight they will contain. Based on that you can get the prices from your delivery service (DHL, FedEx, UPS etc. for example).

What you can do with Shopify - you can create different profiles and rates based on the products’ weight or total price. So let’s say a t-shirt of yours costs 10$ and weighs 0,2kg. Now you can create a rate for >10$ or >1kg orders, which will be the cheaper one and one for >= 10$ or >=1kg for the more expensive one.

There are various apps in the app store that will give you options to create more complex conditions to base the shipping rate on as well as apps to connect your delivery service with Shopify to automatically calculate the shipping rate and print the shipping label via Shopify. It really depends on the specific needs.

3

I do drop shipping from my supplier.

4

Hi @KellyB0421 ,

well in that case the fulfillment and shipping really isn’t in your hands.

Since most dropshipping suppliers are located in Asia (China, Pakistan, India etc.), it makes sense that slightly bigger items will be quite expensive when it comes to shipping. For example, I once ordered something very small from a chinese supplier to Germany, which was like 5€ shipping. A slightly bigger item that needed a box instead of an envelope cost me almost 30€.

If you want to continue with dropshipping there’s really only one thing you can do - select the items you’re selling carefully and select the ones with acceptable shipping prices.