If you are currently selling or starting to sell on marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Reverb, and others, you are probably familiar with or at least have seen shipping profiles. If you aren’t familiar with profiles and how they work, they can be extremely helpful for you to list items online quicker and even profit on the shipping amount. You can set up what is known as ‘calculated’ shipping profiles which will take your item’s weight and dimensions to calculate an exact shipping rate and then show this to the customer. However, when you do this, you will now have to enter the exact dimensions for all of your items that you want to post online in order to charge the appropriate amount of shipping charges. Also, while you may see a particular rate from your provider, this rate can change, causing you to potentially take a loss on the shipping.
Instead of doing calculated rates, another option is to set up flat rate profiles. When doing this, you will no longer need to enter all of the shipping dimensions into your point of sale or marketplace listing, which will save you a ton of time getting items live and available for customers to order. Also, you can even set these rates slightly higher than what it costs you to ship, which will allow you to profit on the shipping and make up for some of those, if not all, of the marketplace fees you have to pay for selling the item. Let’s say you have a small item that you know weighs under 1 lb and can ship First Class mail via the USPS. You could set a flat rate of $5 for the customer to pay for shipping. You can then ship this item for under $4, making yourself over a dollar on the transaction that goes right to shipping supplies, employees, or marketplace fees. Now think about all of the small items you could ship and make that extra dollar each time. It starts to add up and add up quickly! This same concept can go for larger items. You could set up a $25 Shipping Profile and apply it to a particular item or category of items. You may get an order from across the country where shipping could cost you more than $25 but you have gotten the sale because you offered a fair shipping price. Your next order for an item in the same category may come from a state away, and only cost you $15 to ship. Just like that…you’ve profited $10 on that shipment. Just like that $1 you profited on the small goods… These $10 profits on sales really start to add up.
By simplifying this process of selling online, you will be able to list more items quickly to more marketplaces, which will lead to more customers and more sales for your shop! Also, when using profiles like this along with Sync2Sell, you can quickly map these profiles at the category and down to the product level as well, giving you complete control over your inventory. When selling online, things can grow quickly so having control and a simple workflow is extremely important for growth. If you are tired of editing product dimensions and looking to simplify your overall workflow for your ecommerce business, give simple shipping profiles a shot and see how it works for your shop!