It's common sense that as an online store owner you must know all the ins
and outs of how your ecommerce business functions and that includes shipping. When
you're just starting out some things might seem difficult to understand. That's why I
invited our expert Ksenija to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about shipping
So let's start from the very top. Let's say I'm a customer - who ships my products? Our shipping
carrier partners ship your products. We work together with all the major ecommerce
logistics companies, regional services such as Canada Post, Australia Post, Royal Mail but to
ensure fast shipping times everywhere we also work with many smaller regional companies, for
example Latvijas Pasts, which means Latvian post. We use them to deliver orders from our facilities in
Latvia to other European countries. But we never use shipping to gain profit. To ship your order we
will always choose the carrier that is best value for money, based on the delivery address and the
type of the product you want to ship. Sounds good. So if Printful doesn't get profit from shipping
who pays for the shipping? Technically we will always charge you as our customer but I imagine
that you don't want to pay for shipping from your pocket so you can always choose to offset
the cost to your customer. We usually charge you flat rate that covers shipping expenses but there
are four ways how you can handle these expenses. First, you can simply choose to charge your
customers the full Printful shipping price. You just choose to show on your storefront
our flat shipping rate this is the easy way how to cover the expenses without losing any
profit. You can lower shipping price and add the difference to your product retail price. This way
you will manage to attract more customers with your competitive shipping prices but again you
won't lose any profit. The third option is to offer your customers free shipping. It can be
for specific products, for specific destinations, or you can offer it only to your loyal customers
as a reward. And again, to not lose any money, you should add the shipping costs to your retail
product price. Another way to handle shipping costs is to set up Printful's live shipping rates that
will vary depending on the destination of the order. But I will tell you more about live rates
a little bit later. OK, I'm looking forward to it. So can we go back to that free shipping idea
a little bit. How can I set free shipping for my customers? How you set free shipping depends
on which ecommerce platforms you're using. So one option is to simply set up shipping price
to zero on your storefront manually. But if you use Shopify, eBay and Etsy, you can set up free
shipping during the product push in the product pricing step, and we will automatically hide the
shipping prices on your storefront. Just remember that we will still charge you for shipping, so as
I explained before, add shipping costs to your retail product price and you will be good.
Alright, sounds good. So very often we get the kind of questions about default selling regions. What are
they, what are the benefits of using them? For our customers the default selling regions of Printful
let you set up a target market that you will be focusing your sales on. By doing that you get a
selection of products based on the availability in your regions and shipping speeds. So the goal
of the feature is to filter out the products that will have long delivery times, or simply
aren't available in your region, so you don't run the risk of offering bad customer experience to your
customers, because they would have long waiting times and very pricey shipping. So let's circle
back a little bit to what you mentioned with flat shipping rates versus live shipping rates. Could
you explain a little bit what the difference is? The flat shipping rate is location based
regardless of the facility where we fulfill your product, so for example we will charge you
the same $3.99 for the order going to the US, even if we fulfill it in Europe. The actual
cost of shipping might be more for us than what we charge you but it doesn't matter because we will
still always charge you the same flat shipping rate fee. Live rate, however, is calculated using
the location of the fulfillment center while we produce this product, and the destination
address. So in some cases when our facility is located close to the delivery address, the price
we charge you will be smaller than it would be when you use flat shipping rates. But in some cases,
unfortunately, it will be higher. Live rates are available only if you use specific integrations -
Shopify, Woocommerce, Ecwid, and Launch Cart, or if you use Printful API. OK, it makes a lot of
sense now. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with me. I had no idea about any of
this stuff. And thank you for coming. You're welcome. I'll be honest it does take time to get your head
around all the intricacies of shipping, but I hope our overview of the basics will help
you master this aspect of ecommerce business faster. That's all for now, let me know in the
comments what other topics you want us to cover on future episodes and I'll see you next time.