Shipping is one of the consequential parts of eCommerce businesses. Shipping rates are the prices you charge customers to ship the products they order, and its definitive cost is shown when the customer reaches the checkout point of their order.
As simple as the definitions of shipping and shipping rates might be, companies very much struggle with determining the prices. That is because an array of aspects can greatly affect the actual cost of shipping, which means the rates can be hard to determine since you have to factor in all these things that are liable to change yet mind the fact that your customers would not appreciate extra high costs of shipping.
Some of those aspects that affect the costs to move goods are general inflation, increased demand for products online, higher prices of fuel, and so on. So, it is no wonder that it is so difficult for businesses to set their shipping rates while still being mindful of the fact that it should not be too high in order to retain their customers.
There are ways in which you can optimize the cost of your shipping, thus decreasing the price of your shipping rates which should lead to more customers as a lot of them are turned off by a costly price of shipping. Some of these are: shaving the dimensions of your packages, negotiating with a few carriers to achieve the best price, using third party insurance, and so on.
There are also a few plugins that can help you with your shipping rates, and some of the best ones are both the free and the premium version of WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping.
Firstly, let’s talk about the completely free version of WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping, which offers an abundance of features to make your life easier when it comes to common problems with shipping.
You can use it to set up shipping zones that allow you to create areas to apply shipping to (local, regional, state, or country). Handling fees can be applied to each individual zone you set up, as well. This allows you complete control over how exactly shipping is charged on your products. That means saving some money for both you and your customers. So, table rates are basically choosing the appropriate rate for your shipping while keeping in mind on what exactly is in the customer’s cart. This way, you have more control over shipping in general, which leads to saving money for both your business and your customer because you can more precisely optimize it.
Furthermore, you can select the option for the shipping to be taxable or not, and the option to set a shipping rate determined by the weight of the products or the total price of the items the customer bought. The user interface is completely user-friendly and requires no skill or special knowledge to use. The installation process is as simple as it gets, just add the plugin, install it, activate it and it’s ready for use.
Then there is the premium version of the same plugin, WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping PRO.
It is affordable, yet offers even more useful features than the free version. Of course, it offers all the features the free version offers, with the addition of other features. Important aspects of shipping such as the planning of your shipping rates are a dream with this plugin, and you also have the choice of attaching handling fees to either individual or group orders. Not to mention it offers you comprehensive supervision of shipping amounts, and you can set them to the lowest, highest, or middle value. Setting different ways of shipping (including Express, Standard, Freight, etc.) is also an option.
Different rates and shipping zones you can set means that you can make a shipping rate plan that matches your business in every way. So, you can precisely tweak your shipping rates. Not to mention you can make unique shipping rules that apply only to users that are logged into the website which lets you provide special rates for those logged in. Furthermore, you can even choose to hide the shipping method if there are specific items in the cart, and customize the text to show a specific label when a customer has specific items in their cart. The plugin also allows you to force a shipping method of your choice for specific products in your store. This comes in handy if you have some items of considerable size that you simply can not ship using standard mail. So, if a customer purchases those kinds of products, you can necessitate a certain kind of shipping method. If you have any problems at all, their customer support is at your service to help you with any issues or questions you might have.
Conclusion
Setting the best shipping rate for your eCommerce store can be a bother, and there are a lot of calculations and thinking involved in optimizing the rate so it fits perfectly into both your business and your customers’ plan. However, with the WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping, and its premium version, you can achieve greater flexibility. Best of all is it does that while still remaining very user-friendly and clean. You will not be disappointed if you check the plugins out.