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How to setup Shipping options for BigCommerce?

Last updated: March 01, 2024
This article has been written and researched by our expert Avada through a precise methodology. Learn more about our methodology

Sam

Author

Daniel

Researcher

When it comes to running an online business, every merchant wants the best for their customers. From the very pre-purchase phase to the post-purchase phase, your service needs to be perfect. And shipping would be the delivery system to make sure that your products safely arrive at your consumer.

The more shipping options online retailers offer, the higher chance they can attract more customers. For this reason, BigCommerce shipping options will be the main topic of today’s article.

We will go from reasons and things you need to know How to set up your BigCommerce shipping options to a tutorial guiding you through steps to set multiple BigCommerce shipping options. Keep reading to find out more!

The importance of fulfillment and shipping in the eCommerce industry

It would be difficult to provide delivery solutions with affordable prices that do not eat into your profits if you don’t look about how you will reliably meet and export orders.

Customers will have the ability to pick out the right delivery choice for them by offering a variety of BigCommerce shipping options. The biggest reason is that each shipping system requires a diverse price range for the separated zone and most consumers tend to choose the most frugal one. When they need their order to be delivered in the shortest time possible, a fee for expedited shipping should also be available at your store.

You will offer better, more affordable delivery options while reducing travel times and shipping costs by identifying ways to maximize the supply chain.

Types of Shipping options for your BigCommerce store

Another important thing to consider in the pre-determined phase of setting up BigCommerce shipping options is to plan your fulfillment and shipping strategy. Below is four types of delivery choices you can choose from depending on the scale of your company and your requirements:

Live rates

Live rates are real-time transactions received from carriers such as UPS, FedEx, or DHL right from the moment your products are successfully delivered to their owners. This is considered the most effective BigCommerce shipping option.

There are substantial cost differences based on the item, the location, and the distance from your inventory to your customers’ addresses. Hence, it is more troublesome to utilize live rates as a marketing tactic. However, by charging your customers the lowest reasonable amount of what you will be paying your shipping providers, you can guarantee that this is the most economical delivery service out of the four.

Moreover, eCommerce is full of competitive brands, live rates are the first choice of many well-known ones. Whether your customer lives far or near your store’s locations, you can always undercut the market by increasing delivery rates while assuring the expenses are protected.

A more complicated case is that you want your BigCommerce shipping options to make up the total amount of money spent for packaging and administration, you can have a surcharge. Your rate of return is, therefore, lower than the average in your industry.

Freeship

In the present age, the “free shipping” term is everywhere, it is the easiest shipping option for online merchants and is also the most favorite type of shipping fee that customers love. The origin of it must be starting from the moment Amazon decided that their buyers do not have to pay any shipping fee if they shop for more than $25 every time.

BigCommerce freeship option

The difficult part of freeship is that you will still have to pay the postage and assure that your profits can cover up the shipping fees that you have paid for your customers simultaneously. Because of this, most large companies do not allow shipping free beyond a certain threshold and only for several categories of products.

Besides, some of the advantages of offering free shipping as your BigCommerce shipping options are:

  • Customers fall in love with it
  • Beneficial impact on your conversion rates
  • Require simple explanation

Do consider how you can affect the bottom line as you deliver free shipping alternatives. Even if you are getting further profits, it would be no value if you are losing money on each deal you get. So, the only scenario you can give it a try is when you realize that the sales margin would exceed the total shipping costs.

The best thing to do is put an appropriate weight limit on your business’s orders and do not include items that were too large or heavy to send them free of charge.

Shipping flat and table rates

The two definitions of flat rate and table rate might sound more unfamiliar than the two first ones. Let’s explain each by each together!

First of all, a flat rate acts as a uniform shipping fee for all of your orders despite their size or weight. An example of this is how Overstock.com only charges $2.95 delivery to most places in the United States. You can do the same thing by assigning a $10 shipping or lower for every order value.

Moving on to table-rate shipping, even though it is more elaborate than the flat rate, understanding how it works does not take much time of yours. Just imagine the further your customers live away from your distribution center, they will have to pay more money as the shipping fee.

Or you could charge per order depending on the overall amount of the order, $10 for small orders under $50, $5 for ones cheaper than $100, and non for the greater ones. Additionally, you might charge various prices with different weight classes.

One way or another, it will be a plus point in your plan for BigCommerce shipping options!

The mixture

Despite the fact that the three mentioned techniques are more common and mostly employed in the eCommerce industry, a distinctively non-conventional combination of these elements may also prove to be highly productive.

Alternatively, provide free daily shipment (with no commitment) alongside delivery services such as the Second Day or Overnight shipping depending on the order value.

Using “The mixture” would allow you to align your advertising and sales revenue goals.

How to set up BigCommerce shipping options

If you have made up your mind clearly about which BigCommerce shipping option will you go for, it is the perfect time to learn how to set it up in your BigCommerce control panel. Our tutorial today will guide you through three main sections:

When you go to the BigCommerce Shipping Manager, you will have the access and ability to make changes to your shipping information including your store’s address, your preferred shipping zones, and shipping options.

Without further ado, let’s start step by step:

Step 1: Set up Shipping Origin

Your Shipping Origin address, or the location where you are working, is utilized to estimate which delivery methods are possible for your target customers and answer questions about when will a shipment arrive in front of their house. Instead of showing them on your website’s storefront, BigCommerce will use them for the postage and logistics-related address.

If you are utilizing the Automatic Tax Setup, the value you input as your location would be charged with the right sales tax. Furthermore, if you are also one of the BigCommerce Shipping service’s users, they will automatically transfer the shipping details from your settings.

At your BigCommerce Dashboard, find Store Setup > Shipping, this is how your screen will look like:

Store Setup > Shipping, this is how your screen will look like:

Here is how a typical Shipping Origin label will appear:

BigCommerce shipping origin

There is an “Edit” button where you can adjust everything related to your BigCommerce shipping options: the company name, the street, the city, the country, or even the postal code is included.

Adjusting your adress

With that amount of information to fill in, do not forget to double-check your address so that your customers and shipping companies won’t get mistaken!

Step 2: Set up Shipping Zones

While setting up a BigCommerce online store, it is recommended that you need to provide your customers with multiple shipping zones. These are the regions that your products are able to be shipped. If an address is not found in either of your delivery areas, an error message will be shown.

E-tailers can separate their BigCommerce shipping options into nations, states, or provinces or simply just their postal codes. It is possible to have multiple transportation facilities in various shipping areas.

At your BigCommerce Store Setup > Shipping page, scroll down a little bit then you will see there is a button saying “Add shipping zone”:

At your BigCommerce Store Setup > Shipping page, scroll down a little bit then you will see there is a button saying “Add shipping zone”

In the image, we have set up three typical BigCommerce shipping options for our clients to choose from, you can “Edit” or “X” to delete any of the available zones based on your current situation.

When you click on this button, BigCommerce will require you to choose out of these three options:

BigCommerce will require you to choose out of these three options:

Select whatever fits with your expectation, with every choice you click on, there will be a form for you to fill in further information related to the BigCommerce shipping zones. For example, below is when you divide your shipping locations into different countries:

BigCommerce country zone

The most important thing is not to forget “Submit” the form after all the questions have been answered!

If “Rest of the world” is your choice, where your buyers would be able to choose a delivery service from every corner of the world that has not been specifically set elsewhere. The outstanding feature about this very option is that online merchants will have the ability to provide their customers with nationwide shipping without losing the $10 fee for a flat rate. This is the only selection that no form will appear later on.

Step 3: Set up Shipping Options

Usually, retailers stock several BigCommerce shipping options so that they can meet the different needs of customers. There are two types of consumers here: people who value expediency over cheap prices, willing to spend a couple more days for the items to arrived and some want their products to be delivered in the shortest amount of time by paying an extra fee.

As we have mentioned diverse types of BigCommerce shipping options in the previous part, now is the time for you to set up and configure your choice. At your Shipping control panel, next to the Shipping Zones that we have just built, there is an “Edit” button for you to click on:

there is an “Edit” button for you to click on

Then there will be four types of Static shipping quotes and a toggle underneath each of them:

Then there will be four types of _Static shipping quotes_ and a toggle underneath each of them

Based on your preference, please turn on or off any type that is suitable for your store and customers.

The next thing you see is Real-time shipping quotes, where delivery companies will appear for you to connect and work with them:

The next thing you see is _Real-time shipping quotes_, where delivery companies will appear for you to connect and work with them

Last but not least, choose “Done” to save your work!

Best apps for BigCommerce shipping services

Advanced Shipping Manager

Advanced Shipping Manager

Receiving 5 stars out of 5 on BigCommerce App Marketplace from 26 reviewers in total, Advanced Shipping Manager is at the top of the list.

Officially running their business in 2005, Advanced Shipping Manager has handled internet shipping and distribution for up to thousands of retailers. To learn more about how this BigCommerce shipping application can affect your store’s profitability, let’s take a quick look at their capabilities:

  • Shipping tables: you will be able to keep separate shipping rate tables for each customer and ship to them depending on size, quantity, weight, and addresses.
  • BigCommerce shipping options for blocks: When there is an irrelevant individual item with their specific shipping methods, then it will be denied to be shipped.
  • Real-time shipping rates: You can connect with over 50 delivery and courier partners and give your customers up-to-the-date shipping quotes all in real-time.

If you are still wondering about their functionality, Advanced Shipping Manager offers their users a free trial version lasted for 14 days, then you will have to pay $85 monthly.

ShipperHQ

ShipperHQ

Another beneficial application for BigCommerce shipping options that you can hardly miss out on: ShipperHQ!

You have direct discretion over the checkout and distribution preferences until a consumer is able to make a purchase. Their main long-term goal is to gives their clients access to an immediate shipping network. So if you are on the same page with them, it makes sense even more!

Within only one dashboard, online store managers can maximize the logistics suppliers and get rid of unneeded solutions by a few steps. They are integrated with over 50 package and delivery companies such as USPS, FedEx, DHL, or UPS, where you can receive live and current pricing fees.

Moving on, ShipperHQ can also design a strategic shipping approach on rationality in the eCommerce industry. Practicing free-dependent shipping rules, marketing, and handling concessions or surcharge over the whole checkout period can also be covered with the help of this spectacular shipping app.

If mentioned features satisfy your needs and want, it’s time to pick up the phone and dial them. And of course, you can totally try out their free trial before paying a subscription fee, which is $50 per month.

ShipStation

ShipStation

With ShipStation, it is simple to take care of all of your shipping orders in one place using integrations with 70 different networks. Now, wherever your customers are, no need to worry about the limitations!

In addition to that, retailers can gain control and knowledge into all the orders from their various marketing platforms, and provide accurate information to their consumers across any step in the delivery phase.

The most exceptional part of ShipStation is that whether this is the first online business you have ever managed or not, there is a supporting team willing to help at every little step of your journey. You can also build a self-service Branded Returns Portal using the corporate colors, logo, and social media icons to provide superior customer support.

ShipStation provides a 60-day free trial version and they only charge users $9/month. What a deal!

Conclusion

To sum up, setting up various BigCommerce shipping options can gain you access to better customer service, and obviously, as a result, higher profits seem to be more reachable. However, before making any decision relating to this topic, it is important to have a certain amount of understanding about it.

We hope that this article has fulfilled both of the goals and then you can deliver the best experience possible to your consumers!


Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.

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