Webifiable

Let’s take a look at something that just about any ecommerce website website will have to deal with: shipping. If not handled correctly, shipping can eat into your profits. Let’s take a look at some common ways you can deal with shipping.

Exact Calculations

Most of the shipping companies will let your website’s ecommerce software tie directly into their website, so that they can provide the shipping totals to you. This is called the shipping company’s API. That stands for Application Programming Interface. Nerdy, I know.

Fortunately, most ecommerce software comes with options for the most common shipping providers. Specifically, most ecommerce packages come with some combination of the following:

• UPS
• FedEx
• US Postal Service
• DHL

Note that these may not be built in. Many ecommerce systems are modular, meaning that if a new shipping option comes along, they can just develop a new shipping plug-in, and it ties into your existing ecommerce system. Instead of “plug-in,” they may refer to it as an add-on or extension. Sometimes those add-ons are free, and sometimes they cost money.

Setting up this kind of system can be a lot of work. If you are having a custom ecommerce system created, count on paying your web programmer more to tie into this kind of shipping calculations. Als, if you want to charge the exact correct shipping every time, you’ll need to weigh all your items and add extra charges for over-sized items. Oh, and then if they change the way their website works, you might have to come back and update your website, either updating your plug-in yourself, or paying a programmer to update your system.

Table-based Shipping

This is the method I generally recommend for two main reasons.

1. You don’t have to enter weight and dimensions for each product.
2. You don’t have to worry about the shipping companies changing how their API works.

I know from experience, it’s no fun with the shipping companies change their APIs. Your ecommerce software provider may not have the updated plug-in for weeks, maybe even months! By using the table method, you eliminate that concern.

When setting up table-based shipping, you enter a dollar range, and set the shipping for each range. Say the customer’s total is $0.1 – $20.00, you can charge $5 shipping. If it’s $20.01 – $50.00, charge $7 shipping. And so on.

This won’t be exact at first. But you can track how accurate your calculations seem to be and adjust them over time.

Another option is to do this with weight ranges instead of price ranges. In my opinion, that eliminates one of the two big reasons to go with this method: It’s less work. If you have to go through and input the weights of all your products, you’re back to doing a bunch of data entry again.

Hosted Ecommerce Services

If you don’t run your own ecommerce software, but use a paid service, you can get the best of both worlds. You get the exact shipping calculations, and because they’re providing the shopping cart as an ongoing service rather than selling it as a product with a one-time cost, they will keep those shipping calculators working for you.

Some options for ecommerce software as a paid service include:

• Quick Shopping Cart from GoDaddy
• nsCommerceSpace from Network Solutions
• eCommerce Solution from Web.com

The disadvantage with hosted ecommerce solutions is that they do charge you a monthly fee.

Being a cheapskate myself, as well as a programmer, I don’t have any personal experience with the hosted ecommerce solutions. I tend towards the table-based shipping in self-installed solutions. I don’t like to pay an ongoing fee when I can avoid it, and I have the skills to be able to manage an ecommerce setup myself.

Remember to consider your options and make up your own mind when it comes to the shipping options for your website. Table-based shipping will take a little bit of fine-tuning, but can be more fail-proof. Exact calculations using an API are, well, exact. But they’re subject to the whims of the shipping provider, and require a lot more data input and potentially more cost. And the hosted ecommerce services can definitely be more hands-off, but require an ongoing financial commitment.