Business Questions     Ecommerce and Shipping

2023-02-05 19:16

Ecommerce and Shipping

Hi All,

I was just wondering what others have found to work well for the the online and ecommerce side of their business or what you all recommend? What I'm using now is working, but it's not the most efficient, and to make it efficient, it means pretty steep monthly fees from my web/ecommerce provider...the biggest advantage is real-time shipping rates. The two biggest things I'm looking for input on has to do with payment processing and shipping.

For payment processing, most sites (based on what I've found so far) charge a monthly fee for the website, then a fee per transaction, plus whatever your payment processor charges (like with Squarespace for your site and Square as your payment processor).

Also, how do you all handle shipping? Who do you use? Do you have it integrated in your website (like does your website have a shipping plugin offering realtime shipping?) or do you use something different? I have to manually figure out costs based on size and zones and then create shipping "profiles." It's super time consuming and not 100% accurate.

Thanks all.

Keep on roastin'

Ender

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2023-04-19 11:06

I use Squarespace, Shipstation, and Stripe to run my online sales and shipping. It's all integrated once set up. Also use Square to send invoices to my wholesale customers.

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2023-04-19 12:43

Hey Ender -

I have my website and storefront all set up on Shopify. The platform is wonderful, quite honestly, and worth the base monthly fee which is reasonable. I also use the POS app when I hop out to farmer's markets, and it's all nicely integrated.

Applications, to add extra features, is where the monthly fee can get out of control. The fees go out to the developers, and it adds up. Reviews and subscriptions were the two I thought were important to add on.

I use Shopify's payment provider as it was reasonable for the base package, and has lower fees as volume increases to justify higher tiers.

For shipping I have integrated USPS, which does live rates... which is good as rates seemingly increase every week :| Shipping is what kills the business, though. Regular customers buy a couple bags at a time and the shipping fee is reasonable, per bag. But for new customers who want to try one bag, seeing a base shipping that is half the price of the coffee sends them running.

Dave

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2023-04-19 18:42

I use WIX as ecommerce and really like it. For shipping I have it integrated with Shippo and get great discounted rates. It also gives the customer real-time rates based on what shipping company we have setup within it. We can also schedule a pickup within shippo as well.

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