As a first post to my blog, I’d like to start with something I’ve been hearing a lot about lately.

Shopping carts that don’t have useful shipping integration built-in – and away we go.

Many of the shopping carts I’ve researched and reviewed over the years lack a fundamental piece of the puzzle; a shipping solution.  More often than not, owners of open source and inexpensive shopping carts for their websites are required to go out and get an account with a carrier and integrate with the back-end.  Why? Because managing the shipping aspects of an online retail store can be a big headache at the end of the day.  What options do they have?  Fix the shipping price at $X and hope it’s enough to cover the costs OR offer FREE shipping and wrap the estimated costs into your product pricing and hope the margins are close to make it profitable.  I’m sure there are others, but the point here is that shopping carts are becoming more sophisticated because of the fulfillment needs of their owners. 

Now enter the logic, shopping is easy, shipping can be a pain.  How do you factor in your costs for integrating or which carrier to use?  Most are picking USPS Flat Rate shipping, if you’re an eBay’r or PayPal’r this is pretty common and has been for years.  Many of the marketplace websites, like eBay, offer a box for you to enter the shipping costs so it calculates at checkout, which is no different than the first suggestion above, sellers still have to hope it covers your costs if you haven’t spent the time to do the math and make sure it’s right.  This is where the store owner needs to spend the time to develop an integrated solution.  If you’re shipping more than a few dozen boxes of product a day, you’re in the realm of reality where integrated shipping makes a lot of sense.

Take the time, pick a carrier, spend the money and integrate a carrier.  Make sure your developer use address verification against your carrier or the payment gateway and negotiate a good rate.  Carriers want the business and need parcel shipping to increase to keep growing.  Once you find the carrier with the best plan for your business, pick a shipping software to integrate with your shopping cart or use the carrier provided solution.  Most use an API that a mid-senior level developer can connect your cart to for querying the rates and returning your labels. 

Once you’re done, make it easy on yourself, just print the label, pack the product and request your pick-up.  If your sales are there, this should be one of your next endeavors and a great way to prevent cutting into your profits by making under costing your shipping price.

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