Shipping your products to your customers costs money, and determining who pays for this cost impacts both your profits and a customer's likelihood to place an order. While your Shopify store comes with a set of shipping rates that are based on your store's location and insights from established merchants, adjusting these rates to best suit you and your customers will help your business succeed.
Before you start selling products, decide which shipping strategy you want to use and how much you want to charge for shipping. There are three main strategies for offering shipping rates to customers at checkout:
- flat rate shipping
- free shipping
- carrier-calculated shipping
You can also offer pickup in store and local delivery for customers that are located close to your store location.
On this page
Overview of shipping strategies
In most cases, you want to balance your own shipping and handling costs with maintaining attractive prices for your customers.
Review the following table to learn more about different shipping strategies, and their benefits and drawbacks:
| Shipping strategy | Benefits | Drawbacks |
|---|---|---|
| Flat rate shipping | | |
| Free shipping | | |
| Carrier-calculated shipping | | |
Flat rate shipping
You can use flat rate shipping strategy to offer consistent and predictable shipping costs to your customers at checkout. You can offer a single flat price for all products or set price-based or weight-based conditions that display a specific shipping cost at checkout.
When you use this strategy, you need to calculate your shipping fees yourself. To avoid charging too much or too little for shipping, you need to consider the average price for shipping a package. An example of a flat rate can be charging 5 USD for all domestic shipments.
Flat rate shipping is predictable and sets clear expectations for your customers. You can add a table with your flat shipping rates to your shipping and delivery page where your customers can check shipping costs before they reach the checkout.
You can also activate transit time and processing time for your flat shipping rates and show expected delivery dates at checkout.
Free shipping
Free shipping usually has a positive impact on your cart conversion. You can use free shipping as a marketing tool and advertise it in your online store with a free shipping banner.
You can combine free shipping with a flat rate shipping strategy. You can offer free shipping based on the cart value and increase your total order value. For example, you can offer free shipping for orders that are over a 50 USD value.
However, shipping is never actually free and you need to include a portion of your shipping fees into your products' prices. To account for this, you can calculate the average cost to ship your product, and then add the buffer into your product prices. For more information, refer to Create free shipping rates.
Carrier-calculated shipping
Carrier-calculated shipping lets you charge exact shipping costs at checkout. If your business is still new and you have limited resources, then passing along the exact shipping cost can be an easy way to protect your profit margin.
Calculated shipping rates are calculated only at checkout and the shipping costs depend on many factors, such as origin and destination country, product weight and size, and delivery time. You can't surface your shipping costs before checkout. This can lead to unexpected shipping costs at checkout and cause your customers to abandon the purchase.
To use calculated shipping, you need to provide accurate weights of your products and packages.
