When planning to launch a subscription business, one of the first questions that comes up is: How much is it going to cost to ship my product? Shipping is a huge expense. In fact,
Shipping can represent as much as 20% of your cost of goods sold.
Nailing shipping costs is critical when choosing your packaging and product. The size and weight of the packaging and products you choose can dramatically change pricing. International rates represent a particular challenge. You need to decide whether to allow international orders when building your pricing strategy. You also need to decide whether you’ll offer Free Shipping. Clearly, planning for the costs of shipping is incredibly important.
Up until now, the process of calculating shipping costs has been a painful, manual process. There is little to no information freely available. In fact, you often end up on backwards corners of the internet, desperately trying to decode charts that look like this:
What the heck does this mean?
On top of all this, most of the resellers of USPS postage are hesitant to share their shipping prices!
I’m excited to release to you two calculators designed to demystify the cost of shipping products. These calculators communicate with the USPS servers. They then use Cratejoy’s volume discounts to find the best price for postage.
Note to our UK and Canadian friends: The calculator does not yet support Royal Mail or Canada Post. Sorry 🙂
First, there is an educational version of the shipping price calculator, which explains how USPS cubic pricing support works. It is a great primer on shipping in general.
Check out the Subscription box shipping cost calculator
Next is the power user version.
We’ve optimized the power calculator for quick entry. The power calculator requires you enter exact dimensions and weight for the packaging.
Check out the POWER subscription shipping price calculator
Both calculators offer the option to export your shipping rates as a spreadsheet.
You can pair these tools with the Ultimate Subscription Box Calculator we released earlier this year for the perfect subscription business planning suite.
And remember: You’ll need to decide whether you’re going to ship internationally, as it is more expensive to ship to other countries. For example, the UK and Canada make up about 7% of all subscription box orders. Deciding to not include those countries may or may not make sense depending on your business. Fortunately, the shipping calculator breaks down the cost to the other countries, and its based on real subscriptions from actual Cratejoy sellers.
If you’re wondering if you should charge for shipping, we’ve noticed that the best subscription box businesses do tend to offer free shipping. If you consider shipping costs from the beginning when planning your business, though, you can build free shipping into your pricing model. The shipping calculator makes it simple to figure out the exact right price point to cover your shipping costs.
We hope that you find these calculators (and all of our subscription commerce tools) useful when planning your subscription business.
We’d love to hear any feedback (or bugs!) you have on the shipping price calculator. Leave a comment here or on the calculator itself.
