Pricing Your Shipping
"Pricing Your Shipping" When you're selling on the Internet,
shipping costs can create problems. You're charging your
customer UP FRONT for the cost of shipping their product. That
is really the best way to do it, for one very good reason:
Customers don't like to be charged twice. I've seen sites that
tell the customer that they may be charged an additional amount
later to cover unexpected shipping costs. Yikes! If I saw that
when placing an Internet order, I'd be headed for the hills. I
would definitely go somewhere else. Who wants to give someone
they don't know a license to charge their credit card an
unspecified amount at a later date? Not me. That's a great way
to lose sales. Unfortunately, when dealing with distributors who
drop ship, you really never know how much a shipping charge is
going to be on any given order. Most of them ship UPS Ground as
a matter of course. Some of them will ship US Postal Service if
they feel it's more expedient. Well, alright, you say, UPS and
USPS have rate charts, don't they? Just figure it out! Not as
easily done as said, unfortunately. Some distributors have
contracts with UPS that change their rates. Some don't always
use UPS, as I've said. But the real killer is that you can't set
one shipping price on your site for an item, because the item
may be shipping anywhere in the country! Many kinds of eCommerce
store software allow your site to directly access the UPS Online
Shipping Tables to calculate our shipping. You would think you'd
be covered, right? Nope. You see, in the Shipping manager of the
store software that I've worked with, you have to enter a Zip
Code of Origin for the entire site. ONE zip code of origin, for
ALL your products. There's no way to enter more than one. The
software wants to know where all of your products are shipping
FROM, so it can go to the UPS tables and calculate how much it
will cost to ship TO the address on the order. The problem is
that not everything on your site will ship FROM that one zip
code. Your products can ship from distributors all over the
country, as I said. Say I entered my zip code, 34711, which is
just outside of Orlando, Florida, US, as the Zip of Origin for a
site. I get an order for a product to be shipped to 32818, which
is IN Orlando, near Disney World. The site is going to calculate
a very small shipping charge for that order, since the distance
is very small. But what if the product that was ordered actually
ships from a distributor of mine in California? The actual
shipping I have to pay the distributor is going to be a good
deal higher than the site has charged the customer for shipping,
and that cuts into my profit. That's a BAD thing. The first
remedy I tried was to enter a central Zip of Origin in the site
software, hoping that shipping losses and gains would even out.
I chose Billings, Montana, figuring that it was north-central
US. Nope again. Turns out that Billings is TOO central a
location. It's too easy for UPS to ship from there, so the rates
are lower, and you still lose money. Then I realized that we
were talking about UPS ground. If I was shipping from Miami, UPS
ground has to travel the entire length of the State of Florida
just to begin to get anywhere else! I entered a Zip of Origin in
Miami, and the shipping came into line. Yes, a customer who
lives in California and orders a product that is distributed in
California pays more for the shipping, because the site thinks
the product is coming from Miami. It only comes out to a small
amount, though, and it offsets some of the losses you'd suffer
because of shipping situations that go the other way. (A product
that ships from California to a customer in Miami...you lose on
that one). Is your customer being cheated? No. Internet
customers will virtually always check their total (product plus
shipping) price before completing an order, and they'll go
elsewhere if they can get a better deal. Your site may work
differently, and you may be able to use your site software to
come up with a better solution. I hope this gives you a little
insight by showing you how I've handled the problem in the past.
There are other shipping problems I'll reserve for another time,
such as Motor Freight (heavy items) and including the varying
drop ship handling charges you pay. Please check back in the
near future to read about how I've handled those. Chris Malta
WorldWide Brands, Inc. For more information, visit
http://www.YouCanDropship.com