Are you tired of refunding buyers for shipping overages or not recouping their entire shipping costs?
March 30, 2015, Etsy released the feature to all US sellers where sellers can charge more accurate shipping rates to buyers by using calculated shipping.
What Is Calculated Shipping?
Calculated shipping will help you easily set up shipping costs in your shop. Now, buyers will have shipping costs for their orders automatically calculated by factoring in the weight and dimension of products and the location of the buyer and seller.
Etsy worked on the new features and updates based on the feedback they received from beta testers. After finalizing the set of new features, they opened the prototype to any US seller that was interested in joining. Now, they are launching the calculated shipping as an option for all US sellers.
How It Works
Calculated shipping is available as a new, optional setting in shipping profiles. Calculated shipping profiles will allow you to offer both domestic and international USPS mail classes to buyers. After you apply weights and dimensions to your listings, it will automatically calculate the cost to ship them to your buyers – whether they are on the same coast, or on the other side of the world, whether they’ve purchased just one item, or several.
The original version of shipping profiles (what you’ve been using up to now) is still available and will continue to work exactly the way it did before. You’ll continue to have the option to set your shipping costs the way you have been – either individually on each listing or using the original shipping profiles.
How It Appears
When buyers visit a listing that has calculated shipping, they can enter their location on the Shipping & Policies tab – either a US ZIP code, or for international buyers, a country – and see a standard shipping cost based on that location. After they add items to their cart, they’ll see the order’s total shipping cost and may select a faster shipping method for the order, if you offer one.
Why Use It?
Because calculated shipping will dynamically generate the cost to ship to your buyers, no matter their location, calculated shipping will solve many of the issues you may have experienced in the past while setting up shipping costs in your shop. You will no longer have to charge an average rate or a max rate to make sure you cover your shipping costs for all locations. This means no more overages for buyers that live close to you and issuing refunds when those overages take place, or undercharging for buyers who are far away.
It’s also easier than ever to ship internationally and offer faster shipping options. Just choose where and how you’d like to ship, and update your listings.
Maybe there are question in your mind now such as when you can use it if you’re a seller outside of the US and if you don’t prefer using USPS. Etsy is still hoping to offer a solution for other countries and to support more shipping services as the calculated shipping feature evolves.
You can read the full announcement on the Etsy website along with FAQs.
If this feature isn’t working for you, you can still find other apps that will solve your shipping problems.
So what can you say about this new feature? Have you tried it? We would love to hear it from you.
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