International Shipping Rates

Ask Me Anything Q&A Sell Internationally
1

  • What’s the best way to configure accurate international shipping rates (real-time carrier rates vs flat vs 3PL-calculated)?

  • Can Shopify natively support DDP (Delivered Duties Paid), or do we need a third-party tool?

  • How should we structure shipping zones and profiles to cleanly separate domestic vs international logic?

2

Hi Stephanie,

  • Real time carrier rates are certainly an option, but I would actually advise you against using them, at least for your most important international markets. To increase your checkout conversion and sell the most to international customers, I recommend thinking about shipping prices as a part of your overall pricing strategy. Rather than trying to accurately pass the whole cost of international shipping on to customers as a shipping line in their checkout, price it into your products a little and pick a compelling flat rate to show in checkout. £5 to £10 for standard delivery is a price you can advertise and it will drive sales.

    But you can still recover that cost by altering your product prices internationally. Go to Markets and create a catalog for your important international markets, and you can increase product prices by a percentage in order to cover the increased cost of shipping. Work this adjustment value out based on your average order value, and the difference between your flat rate and your true cost of shipping labels: check out the Average Profit Margin by Market report in your Shopify admin.

    Customers are more likely to buy a £100 product with £6 shipping than they are a £80 product with £26 shipping costs.

  • Shopify does support DDP shipping. You can enable Shopify’s duties calculator, (or use Managed Markets if you are in the US, Canada, or the UK) and then we will calculate and collect duties in checkout. Those funds collected from your buyer will cover the duties cost when you buy a DDP label.

  • As far as structuring shipping zones, there are many good ways to do it. One point to note, when you are setting flat shipping rates to show to buyers, you only have the option to define those rates in your customer’s currency if all the regions served by the shipping zone use the same currency. So if you want to be able to advertise compelling shipping rates up-funnel, you’ll want to configure single-currency shipping zones for your most important international markets.