Hello Vickie,
First thing I will advise is list out all the shipping options like Fedex , UPS, TNT, USPS etc. They will have sales representative who will be ready to discuss with you why you should choose them for shipping. So have a complete pricing information from them so that you have a price comparison available with you. May be for USPS you can have advice over phone.
There are a few things to be considered before you arrive at how much you should charge for shipping
1. Are you going to sell only one product or many products?
2. How much are the weights of the products
3. Are the products perishable/ fragile?
4. Are you expecting high volumes of orders?
5. What policy is your competition adapting with respect to shipping rates.
6. Once ordered whether your client would be interested in very quick delivery or the client can wait for a reasonable period of 7 working days to get the delivery?
There are different strategies you can adapt for deciding shipping cost.
1. Free shipping- You may have to add an average shipping cost internationally in the price itself. Whether the buyer will be ready? If this was a special e commerce site where buyer is price sensitive , buyer may not be ready. But since most of the customers of Tripleclicks are going to earn VPs ( this is my assumption) against the price they pay I think they would not mind to this idea and will be happy to earn more VPs. This option will be preferable when you are going to sell very few items and customer is ready to pay shipping cost and you will be adding it in the price.
2. Charge actual cost for shipping : Your study of cost quoted by UPS/FEDEX/USPS/TNT etc will be helpful here. In this case it will be fair to both , you and your customers if you select the the service that has world wide reach and still priced less than others. Here you may have one or two items to sell.
3. Charge average cost of shipping based on product price. For example if product price is below $25 you may charge $ 10 as shipping charges and price the product $ 35. If the product price is between $ 25-$50 you will charge $5 for shipping and price the product as say $40 including shipping. In this case . in some orders you will spend less in some orders you will spend more than what your customer is paying for shipping. This options looks similar to option no 1 but there is a little difference. This option will work when your selling volume is expected to be more. This will also work if you have more products to sell.
4. You can allow Tripleclicks to charge extra automatically. You can rest assure about fairness for you and your customer for this option.
Hope my answer is useful to you .
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Hello Vickie,
First thing I will advise is list out all the shipping options like Fedex , UPS, TNT, USPS etc. They will have sales representative who will be ready to discuss with you why you should choose them for shipping. So have a complete pricing information from them so that you have a price comparison available with you. May be for USPS you can have advice over phone.
There are a few things to be considered before you arrive at how much you should charge for shipping
1.
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