Shopify Wholesale Shipping Guide: Tutorials & Strategies
Want to make B2B deals on Shopify, yet have little idea of what shipping options you have for your customers? Here we define the term and guide you through the process of creating and editing your Shopify wholesale shipping process.
What is Shopify Wholesale Shipping?
Shipping is unquestionably an essential factor that affects the customer experience. Compared to regular or retail shipping, wholesale shipping is on another level of commitment. Each order contains large quantities of various items, which have a tremendous value. To ensure safety and order security, wholesale shipping has a lot of regulations and fulfillment to follow.
The challenges of shipping differ from other companies to others. Its problems are usually shipping rates, fees or shipping time. Shipping is also related a lot to packaging, so if one fails, the other will end with the same fate. Even with eCommerce helps like Shopify features, shipping still requires a lot of adjustments.
How Important is Correct Setting for Shopify Wholesale Shipping?
To maximize profit margin, shipping costs are significant to your business, especially wholesale ones. It’s also one of the most important considerations to be made since it directly affects your profits and expenses balance.
When deciding shipping fees, be sure to consider them carefully before applying to the entire wholesale storefront. You’d want it to be just right, not too high or low. If the shipping fee and rates are too high, it’s possible that the cart abandonment rate would be extremely high, with customers avoiding making payment at the checkout page.
It’s not common for customers to avoid buying products (both retail and wholesale) because the shipping fee is unreasonably expensive. However, with a large number of products in line to be shipped for wholesale shipping, it’d be a disaster if customers abandon their cart at the doorstep of closing the deal.
To conclude, correct and fitting wholesale shipping rates are important to ensure your deal gets through the checkout process and becomes an actual sale.
How to Set Appropriate Wholesale Shopify Shipping Rates?
ALSO, take a look at these Shopify wholesale pricing discounts apps to improve your store functions!
With Shopify, you can easily set up your shipping rate. The process is the same for both retail and wholesale purposes. In addition, Shopify allows creating two types of shipping rates that would be applied to your customer’s order:
- Flat shipping rates.
- Calculated shipping rates.
Additionally, Shopify lets you set up shipping zones, which are essentially the bonus shipping rates for different areas.
1. Flat shipping rates
Flat shipping rates mean you only charge a fixed amount of shipping cost for each order. With Shopify, you can set up flat shipping rates that apply to all orders within a shipping zone, such as Europe or North America. In addition, you can set specific fees that vary depending on the total order value.
For example, you can set a flat cost of $20 per order valued under $100 and $30 per order valued higher than that.
It’s to note that when combining shipping costs for the orders, Shopify also combines all related rates for a final sum, which consists of weight shipping fees or additional charges for zones that you’ve set up.
Step-by-step instructions to set flat shipping rates:
- Follow the Settings section, navigate to Shipping & delivery.
- Select the profile to change shipping rates and click Manage rates. Don’t forget to click Add rates for the zone you choose to apply the rates.
- From here, you can enter the name and shipping rate amounts.
- If needed, you can click Add conditions, set the condition base to Weight or Value, and enter each situation’s maximum, minimum values.
- Finally, press Done and Save your configuration.
2. Calculated shipping rates
Compared to flat shipping rates, the calculated Shopify wholesale shipping rates are very convenient. In addition, since the shipping fees are calculated based on the exact cost checked by third-party shipping services like UPS or FedEx, the result might be much more accurate than flat shipping rates and help you charge your wholesale customers the exact fee that the shipping carriers required.
However, calculated shipping charges are only available for selective destinations. For example, you can only apply calculated shipping charges for both the United States & Canada area for Shopify Shipping users that use shipping carriers like USPS, DHL, and UPS.
As a wholesale seller, if you already subscribed to Shopify Plus or a higher plan, you are permitted to charge additional shipping rates with a registered, verified account of USPS, FedEx, UPS, and Canada Post. Moreover, this applies to any calculated rates from third-party shipping apps as well. Don’t forget that it’s required for you to link your carrier accounts with the Shopify shipping & delivery settings beforehand.
Since calculated shipping rates also apply a weight-cost calculation to its formula, you might need to enter the exact weight of your products so that the final sum is accurately calculated. By doing this, B2B customers are ensured to receive accurate shipping rates at the checkout page.
To set calculated Shopify wholesale shipping rates, please follow these instructions:
- Navigate directly to Settings and Shipping & delivery from the admin page of your Shopify store.
- Simply click Manage rates of the shipping profile you’d wish to make changes.
- Click Add rate and Use carrier or app to calculate rates. Then, from the drop-down menu, select the desired shipping service to make calculations. Also, you can choose other methods as optional ones for customers to choose from.
- Shopify also allows you to set handling fees, so you can add them to the shipping profile if needed. Finally, finish the process by pressing Save.
3. Shipping zones
Shipping zone consists of several countries and regions, all of them are set to achieve the same shipping rates. So, for example, if you create a shipping zone that includes all countries within Europe, any orders from these countries are set to achieve the same flat shipping rate.
It’s advisable that you should configure shipping zones before setting up any shipping prices to make them truly accurate.
Don’t you know that you can also use zones to set your shipping area? If your customers’ country or region desires to get their order shipped to is within your zones, then those products are permitted to be shipped.
To create or edit your desired shipping zones, try these steps:
- First, go to the Settings section within Shopify admin, then choose Shipping & delivery.
- Choose the shipping profile you wish to make changes to and press Manage rates.
- Click Create shipping zone or press Edit.
- Fill in the name of the zone, select any country or region that you’d love to modify shipping rates.
- Finalize the steps with Done and Save.
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#3 Possible Shipping Strategies to Improve Your B2B Sales
To improve your cart abandonment rate, boost your sales as well as making shipping cost less of a burden for both you and your wholesale customers, these are strategies that not only apply flawlessly to Shopify but eCommerce in general.
We recommend that you test each of them once at a time and learn what’s most fitting for your product rosters and your selling strategies.
1. Free shipping offer
Usually, free shipping should only be applied to B2C orders. However, if your order value far exceeds the calculated shipping cost, then you might want to consider free shipping as an appreciation to your customers for a great impression of long-term relationships.
Or you can just apply free shipping to lower the cart abandonment rate and change your product prices accordingly to cover all possible shipping costs. Don’t forget that you can also:
- Increase prices just slightly enough to cover your costs.
- Offer customers chances to receive a free shipping code.
- Allow free shipping applied to a minimum order value/weight.
- Only apply free shipping to a set of products.
To apply free Shopify wholesale shipping rates, follow these steps below:
- Navigate to your Shopify admin page, click on the Settings section, select Shipping & delivery. Choose the shipping profile that you’d like to make free, then click on Manage rates.
- On the side of the zone, press the Add rate. Then, enter the name of the rate. Fill the number 0 into the Price field.
- From here, you can also add weight or value conditions to apply free shipping rates by clicking Add conditions and select Weight or Value. Don’t forget to enter all the maximum and minimum values.
2. Fixed shipping cost
Instead of setting auto-calculated shipping rates, you can set flat rates for most of the wholesale products offered. Since the Shopify Wholesale shipping rates aren’t accurate as the automatic ones, you might earn some or lose some depending on the order weight and value.
On any occasion, we recommend you set the shipping costs in tiers to ensure you won’t lose too much money on the wrong case. Fixed shipping rates give you total control over the aspect with a lot of flexibility for manual adjustment. Since the cost is fixed, customers can calculate their total cost much easier with better consistency.
However, you should be aware that fixed shipping costs might affect your margins greatly without careful and consistent tracking. It’s also advisable to modify the shipping cost from time to time to lessen the chance of losing money because of any miscalculation.
3. Discounted shipping rates
Another strategy of adjusting shipping fees to decrease abandoned cart rates is to set markups or discounted shipping rates.
To explain, if the shipping cost exceeds a mark-up value, a discount will be automatically applied to increase sales. On the other hand, if the shipping cost is too low, which exceeds your mark-up value, then an increase will be applied to make the price look more reasonable.
Moreover, Shopify allows you to create mark-up shipping rates via both methods:
- Adding a flat fee to the total cost.
- Adding a percentage of the total cost.
If you choose to add both of them, then a calculated percentage will be added to the final cost.
Then, how to set discounted shipping rates? You can follow the steps below:
- Navigate to the admin page, select the Settings section then go to Shipping & delivery.
- Click the Manage rates line that is next to your chosen profile.
- Select the drop-down menu, click Edit rate in the rate you wish to make adjustments.
- Set the shipping rate adjustment in the Handling fee section.
- After finishing adjusting, select Done and click Save.
With BSS Commerce’s all-in-one Shopify B2B/ wholesale app, you can create a great ordering experience for your B2B customers. This app has everything you need to run a successful wholesale business on Shopify.
Conclusion
We have listed all the terms above and guide you through the basic steps to making changes in Shopify wholesale shipping rates. Our shipping strategies are recommended and can be used as you see fit.
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