For most online businesses, shipping can be one of the most difficult aspects of running an ecommerce site. Based on their experiences and observations of other sites, shipping costs and delivery time-frames are the biggest customer complaint that online retailers receive. A recent study confirms shipping to be one of the most important things to shoppers. Even if the shipping is free, customers often have obscene expectations on how fast their order will reach them. If it’s not free, there are always complaints about the cost even when the merchant directly passes down fees with no markup.
It is very common that many customers leave the checkout page just because the listed shipping method is very expensive. Most businesses are careful about making sure that the sale price for items and shipping costs really cover the overall costs. Furthermore, a shipping method can be used to specify the charges for either an exact number or a range of item quantities. You can also set up shipping service options for customers to choose from such as UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL and Canadian Post.
When it comes to making a delivery, it’s important to select a shipping service that it most reliable to you and your customers. The set-up process starts by selecting the countries your business will ship products to. If your company is based in the United States and only ships product domestically, the shipping feature can be set to only accept orders that will ship within the United States.
The decision of which shipping methods that business owners will use for their stores is very important. By default standard shipping methods including Free, Flat Rate, Per Item, Weight Base Shipping and also established shippers including UPS, USPS, FedEx, and Royal Mail.
Sometimes a free shipping option can be offered on all purchases over the pre-defined amount set in the Free Shipping. Free shipping can also be defined for all zones or only one zone. For example, free shipping can be made for orders that exceed over 200 dollars for US customers.
A flat shipping rate is included when store owners don’t want to deal with individual product or basket shipping rates. No matter the order amount, a fixed shipping charge is still applied on it. The common method is to secretly reflect the shipping and handling costs in each product price. Another alternative is to analyze sales and find the average order value and average shipping costs for the store.
When a per item method is applied, there usually is a shipping cost added for each purchased item in your order. For example, if a store owner where to apply a per item cost of 6 dollars, it would be 60 dollars for 10 products in your order no matter what the prices of the individual items.
The weight based shipping method applies to the overall weight of the order. The shipping cost is determined by a set of ranges depending on the product in the basket. Although you would need to ensure that you enter a weight for each product for this Shipping method to work out the shipping price accurately.
When the Customer can Login to the Web Store, their Profile information is used to populate the Checkout forms, and the Customer can then edit the entries if needed. When checking out an anonymous Customer, the Checkout processing will collect their information sufficient to process the current order, and it will not save anything in a Customer Profile.
Registered customers usually have a stored address that is used for shipping. This address is populated to the Checkout forms. Anonymous Customers supply a shipping address. A Shipping Method must be selected in the Checkout process. These are set up in open taps as described in the following references to the Catalog Manager Application:
- Configure Shipping Methods
From Split Shipping to Instore-Pick Up, Adrecom’s ecommerce solution provides easily configurable and flexible ecommerce shipping methods for managing your online store. Our ecommerce solution provides easy shipping methods including:
- Real-time shipping rates for UPS, USPS, DHL, FedEx
- Flat Rate Shipping
- Free Shipping
- In-Store Pickup Option
- Local Messenger Service Shipping Option
- Forced shipping methods for perishable products
- Split Shipping Multiple Items to Multiple Addresses
