Shipping & Custom Shipping

Question

Could you please explain how your shipping works? Also, what kind of custom shipping options are available to us?

When talking about shipping we like to divide it into two separate parts:

Checkout Shipping Costs
What the consumer gets charged at Checkout
Store Manager UPS Shipping Labels & Costs
What is done in Store Manager and what the store pays.

We have a TON of flexibility here and can pretty much write any shipping module and calculation that fits your business needs.

For example, the following example charges a flat $5 fee on all ground shipments but standard UPS rates all shipping methods.
Other customers have formulas based on the cost of the items being shipped (if between X and Y, then charge Z).

Writing a custom shipping modules typically takes about 1/2 a day to develop and test, and are billed at our standard rates.

Typically we recommend stores use UPS-sanctioned rates at Checkout because we believe this does two things:

allows you to show the UPS logo and say UPS in Checkout, which we believe lends some creditability
the consumer gets a competitive shipping rate

We also have the ability to pass-along Insurance and Signature charges to the consumer in Checkout. You can set these settings by going to Preferences > Shipping in Store Manager.

Of course you can also offer Free Shipping to your customers. This is another setting under Preferences > Shipping.

We have one other feature in Store Manager regarding shipping costs at Checkout, which is something called the UPS Rate Used at Checkout. UPS is very particular on how we show their UPS logo in Checkout, what you call their various service and of course the rates for these services. For those stores that would like to charge the consumer a bit more for shipping, while still using UPS-sanctioned rates, they can utilized this UPS Rate Used at Checkout feature.

You will want to use this feature if you would like to charge the consumer more for shipping in Checkout. Some stores use this feature to cover their "handling fees".
We often get asked to add a "handling fee" to the rates showing up in Checkout. Unfortunately we cannot do that while saying UPS Ground, UPS Next Day Air, etc. because that would violate our agreement with UPS. We also don't want to show "handling fee" as a separate line in Checkout. Therefore, your options include writing a custom shipping module for your store or using the above UPS Rate Used at Checkout feature.

Modern Retail supports the creation of UPS shipping labels directly within Store Manager but currently doesn't support the creation of FedEx, USPS, etc. labels. However, this does NOT mean you can't ship your pages using whatever carrier you'd like. As discussed above we have a ton of different ways to calculate rates at Checkout, and the stores can even use UPS to "calculate" the rates for them but ship using FedEx. In these cases we might not say UPS in Checkout but simply use their rates as they will be comparable to FedEx.

Most of our clients opt to ship with UPS because Store Manager does a nice job of creating the UPS labels, reprint labels, automatically sends the tracking number to the consumer, and even allows you to track the packages in Store Manager. Of course there's the added benefit of not needing to "re-key" the consumer's information into another shipping tool.

Again, you can use whatever carrier you'd like to ship your packages in Store Manager and can even make this decision on an order-by-order basis, we call this "Off-Line Shipping".

Many stores use Off-Line Shipping when sending packages internationally because they can generally get a better rate from USPS.