It is not surprising that it can be difficult to figure out dropship shipping policies. You are not responsible for warehousing or shipping your products. Therefore, you need to decide the best course of action based on your supplier policies to determine shipping options. We are here to guide you and help you understand the process.
Dropshipping is a service where the shipping cost for each product is set by the supplier. Each supplier is unique, making it more complicated. Before you open your dropshipping shop online, it is important to check out the shipping policies of your suppliers. If you have only one supplier, it is easier to create your game plan. However, if you have several, it will be more difficult.
You will need to collect information from multiple suppliers about their policies. This includes the carrier they use, what they charge for (weight, quantity), etc. You will also need to know their expected fulfillment times. There are a few options available when you create a shipping policy.
No Shipping Charge
You will see a lot of ecommerce websites offering free shipping when you surf the internet. Many store owners will increase their product prices in order to offset the cost of offering free shipping. You want to keep your prices competitive when you are just starting out. However, you also want to offer great deals. Offering free shipping when you spend more than $100 is a great compromise. Free shipping could be offered for orders exceeding $100. This way, you can still make a profit by offering free shipping for orders over $100.
Flat Rate Shipping
Flat rate shipping means that you can offer flat rates for shipping regardless of product weight. Flat rate shipping is attractive to customers as they are able to know exactly what shipping costs will be for each order. However, it can also pose a risk to the online store owner. Flat rate shipping means that if your customer buys a heavy product, it will result in a loss of profit. You can reduce that risk by being very careful with your inventory selection. Dropship inventory management tools such as Inventory Source can help you filter out heavy products.
Match the Costs of Your Supplier
As a business owner, matching your supplier’s shipping costs is the best option. However, this can make it difficult to compete with stores that offer free shipping, incentives, or low shipping costs. If you want to offer lower shipping costs, you must differentiate yourself from other shops in your market in order to attract customers to shop with them.
Once you decide on your shipping policy, you will need to consider how you want to ship your products. Many suppliers have their own accounts with FedEx or UPS to ship your products. Most suppliers will allow you to use your own carrier account if requested. What do you do? You can ship cheaper if you use the supplier’s account. They often have lower rates and will pre- negotiate them. However, if you use a supplier’s account for your carrier account, you will have less information about shipping costs and can make sure you are still profitable.
When making the decision on your supplier’s carrier account, there are some things that you should keep in mind:
- Most expensive shipping cost
- Average shipping expense per order
- Shipping costs can be affected by many factors, including warehouses.
It is crucial to understand the shipping costs that could cause you to take the largest shipping hit if you wish to remain competitive in shipping costs. Knowing the most expensive products to ship can help you avoid losing profits. You may also want to keep that product off of your website. You can decide to not include any products that are heavier than a specified weight on your website (ex. No products exceeding 10 lbs.
The average shipping cost per order can help you decide where to place your prices to make a profit. The average shipping cost can be used to base your shipping policy and assume that you will be charged most of the time.
Knowing the location of each supplier’s warehouses can also help you to anticipate shipping costs. Split orders, which are orders that include products from multiple warehouses, will result in shipping costs being much higher than if they were coming from just one. You can’t prevent this from happening but it is possible to take preventative measures such as only including products from one warehouse in your website.
To the casual observer, working as a drop ship merchant is quite basic, inexpensive and successful all at the same time. Working online as a dropship seller is even easier, merely connect with a dropshipping provider (a maker or wholesaler) and enter into an arrangement. When you have actually done that, you can begin to offer their items at your site or online shop without in fact purchasing any stock. You will do this by putting the item images and information at your site.
The clients will concern your site and make an order, you will forward the recipient address to the drop shipping provider and they’ll dispatch the item. As far as your revenues are worried, you will be getting the item at low wholesale rate, while you can charge somewhat greater rates from the client. The distinction in between the market price and real cost is the revenue you can maintain. Dropshipping permits maker or wholesaler to conserve different overhead and marketing costs by merely enabling the drop ship merchants to do the selling on their behalf.
In spite of the abovementioned advantages, Drop shipping is not a magic strategy that uses a great deal for everyone. It has its disadvantages, and among the most significant ones is handling the shipping expense. Issue is that even if you have actually discovered a drop shipping business that provides less than market value, you’re going to wind up losing your earnings because of high shipping expense, as many dropshippers have rather high shipping costs.
Often due to the fact that they are simply being greedy, and often this outrageous charge is validated by far-off area of the purchasers. Offering to the consumers situated in close proximity is not constantly the answer to this situation, understanding that a Web service can barely make it through if it restricts itself to a little location.
Concern is, exists any other way, one can lower the shipping expense?
Among the very best alternatives is to carry out organization with more than one provider. Specifically, if you are getting bulk of your orders from a particular location, you can constantly look for a provider who lies in close proximity.
The low shipping expense will validate the time and resources invested in the search. In case, you can not discover a provider near the purchaser’s place, you can choose affordable shipping modes. There are a lot of relatively more affordable shipping approaches that perhaps slower however in many cases, the consumers would not mind waiting on a long time as compared to paying high shipping expense.
