Hey makers, it's Charlotte with the Wooden Wick Co. today I'm going to be talking about shipping costs.
If you are a maker and you are selling your products and you plan to sell them outside of your
local area, you've probably started to consider who you should use as your shipping provider,
how you're going to get shipping labels, and how much it's going to cost you. So that is
what I'm here to help you with today to walk you through a little bit about what options are
out there for you and how to ensure that you're getting the best pricing on your shipping costs.
With the world of Amazon that we live in today, most people expect free shipping or near free
shipping. The goal as a business owner is to try to always get your shipping costs as
low as you possibly can for your customers so that this doesn't deter them from making a purchase.
So if you're a small business owner and you're just getting started here's a few options that
you can check out first you can look through the main carriers USPS, UPS and FedEx, If you're
in the United States. And you can create business accounts with these providers.
Creating a business account will help unlock a account representative in most cases and also
help you get reduced shipping costs compared to what they consider retail pricing. So if you are
interested in using these carriers directly which can ultimately get you the most cost savings. I
recommend you start this process early on in your business so that you can start building
a history and relationship with the carrier that you want to do business with.
When you start this process you can also use one quote from UPS for example and compare it
to a quote from FedEx so you can determine which carrier is giving you the best rates. And you can
also use it as a negotiation tool from one vendor to another so if you get your quote from UPS and
your FedEx quote is lower, but you'd really love to see if you can get it a little bit down go back to
UPS and bring them that FedEx quote and see if they can beat it for you so that's a great place
to start. USPS is pretty easy to go onto their website and to unlock their business services
so they don't have account managers that they will assign to you, however, you can unlock
business rates. If you're selling on an e-commerce website, you also want to consider what shipping
services are going to easily integrate with your website. So if your website is on Shopify, Wix or
Woocommerce, those are some of the main website providers out there and most shipping softwares
will pretty easily connect with these systems. A few shipping softwares that are really popular
one of them is Ship Station. It's fast and easy to create labels, it connects on pretty easily to
your shipping software. There's also Easy Post which is another quite popular option and Shipping
Easy is another one to check out so those are a few options that you guys can again connect
your e-commerce store. Depending on the volume of packages that you're using, you may want to
test each one of them out. Many of these apps have 30-day free trials so you could try more than one
and figure out which services you like the best. If there are certain features that make the process
faster for you, or give you more accurate rates, then you want to just test that process out with
several different carriers. Just like what I mentioned comparing your options from the
get-go do the same thing with your apps and make sure that you're using the one
that has the best pricing and is best suited to your needs. There's also another option which are
some third-party shipping companies one that's really popular is called Pirate Ship and Pirate
Ship is a website that basically advertises to have the lowest USPS shipping rates out there.
They don't have much in terms of data to back up that claim on their website. And so I was
really interested in Pirate Ship and I wanted to do a little experiment and find out if the
rates were any different than USPS business rates. So I created a Pirate Ship account and I
went through the process and actually found the Pirate Ship rates were the exact same rates as
our USPS business rates. So, there wasn't a difference in cost, however Pirate Ship can be
a great tool for small businesses because you can create multiple shipping labels at once and it's
just an easy all-in-one system that you can use to quickly create your labels. So that's another
one to check out. One thing to note is that you can only ship with USPS using Pirate Ship and USPS
isn't always the best option when it comes to customer service or shipping internationally. So
last thing I'll touch on is if you plan to ship globally. If you want to ship your products all
over the world, that's something you definitely want to keep in mind when you're choosing who
you're going to use for your shipping services. If you plan to use USPS they're a great option,
because they're very cost effective, but they don't provide tracking on all international
packages so that can be a bit frustrating on your customers end just something to be aware of as you
make that decision for your business. FedEx and UPS although they're a bit more expensive than USPS
for small packages can be a more secure option for shipping internationally. So
that is a bit of advice when it comes to choosing who you want to use to ship. Check
out our other videos on how to properly package your products including your candles to ensure
that they aren't damaged in transit. So we'll leave a link for that below. And if you guys have any
questions, or you want to share who you're using for your shipping software, if there's someone I
didn't mention that you really love, share it with our community below so that we can check it out.
And we look forward to seeing you guys on our next video, so thank you for watching and be sure
to subscribe to our channel to stay in the know on all the latest makers tips and tricks. Happy making