How Much to Charge for Shipping on Etsy // How to Calculate: Full Explanation with Example!

hello hello it's a retail welcome back to another Etsy video I have gone through so many of your questions on the previous videos that I've done and although I can't get to all of them I do see them so thank you so much for for posting those and providing feedback the main question that I am getting that I that prompted this whole video is talking about shipping so how do you calculate shipping for your products so that you're not losing money in the end this is another convoluted topic that I could do many videos on for you but I'm gonna start with this one and at least from there I know it'll create another discussion you'll send questions and that kind of thing so we can really start to dive into those those questions that you have if you need them so how to calculate shipping on etsy so I'm gonna simplify this for you but I'm gonna start off by saying you're not gonna figure it all out from the start you actually have to take this information that I'm giving to you implement it and see for yourself and start to see if it actually works with your particular items with your store where you're sending your items to that kind of thing you're not gonna have everything perfect to start so my goal for you in this video is to just get a better understanding of how to calculate your shipping costs so that you don't lose money and you're able to actually set up shipping profiles in your store to get you going so before I started filming this video I threw together this really quick not very nice-looking presentation it's not really a presentation it's just something so that you have notes on the screen to look at since I know for myself I learned very visually so this might help you digest the information better so there's two separate methods for shipping two different ways that you can go you can either get Etsy to calculate the shipping for you on an item or you set the shipping fees and costs so with the calculated shipping profiles you will be providing the way and the dimensions of your item and based on where the buyer is and also what method they choose to receive their item Etsy will you know using their estimates with USPS and all that kind of stuff will estimate the shipping cost and then show that shipping fee to your buyer at checkout so it's a calculated shipping profile so with this the shipping costs are calculated by Etsy they use the weight of the item the dimensions the buyers address as well as the shipping method that they choose or the courier service that the buyer chooses will show them that shipping fee and that's that's how shipping is calculated the other way is you set up fixed shipping profiles for your items so you set the fee on how much you want to charge for shipping the smart way to do this would be first to estimate your shipping cost to make sure you're not losing anything and it's not just about shipping - right you have packaging costs and handling costs you know when you see shipping and handling the handling part is typically like if the time that it takes you to package an item if that is a significant amount of time so that's kind of the benefit to going with fixed shipping profiles because you can incorporate all of that in there but you also are more in control so there is a benefit to going with the calculated shipping profiles just because it's more automated you're letting Etsy do the work but you know I always say to my I always say to my clients that you know you don't want to automate something that you don't really understand fully because you might end up with a bad result or not so good result so it's only you only want to automate things that you for sure know and understand because you want to then achieve better results so I think it's a very good having a fixed shipping profile is a good place to start especially if you haven't sold anything yet on your store because that way you know you can understand what the cost is your you can better set the cost of the shipping and then better understand the profits that are coming out of that sale so how do we set up those fixed shipping profiles in your store it's really simple to do in Etsy to create those shipping profiles but you need to know what to put in in terms of amounts what you're gonna charge for your items so you kind of have to do the legwork and research ahead of time before you can actually get to that step of creating your shipping profiles in Etsy so I've laid out this process of doing the legwork in five steps here and this is like this is the way my mind works this is the way I simplified it in in my mind to make it easier to understand what you need to do so that you can get those estimates and then plug it into your Etsy store so step number one you'll need to look at the items you sell in your store and ask yourself which of these items are going to be different in terms of shipping that typically comes down to wait if there's a big difference in weight and a big difference in size so you want to take a look at all of the things that you sell in your store and ask yourselves which of these items will need different shipping profiles because you know that item over there weighs like 15 pounds and that item over there weighs like one pound or that item over there is you know really big and that one is really tiny because those differences will matter right they'll each need a different shipment they will each have a different shipping cost for us in our store we sell t-shirts and mugs now those are two items that need different shipping profiles because a t-shirt is you know very quite relatively light and the mug is it's a fixed size first of all it's not like a t-shirt that you can kind of put in like one of those baggies those malar baggies and then send it out the mug will need like a box and also some bubble wrap it's a fixed size box and also it it weighs a lot heavier than a t-shirt right so just estimate like that by looking at your items and identify okay this means I need to create two shipping profiles okay so I'll need one shipping profile for the t-shirt and one shipping profile for the mugs and then for each item once you've identified that for each item you'll need to estimate the packaging costs you'll need to the grab the dimensions of each item once it's packaged so not the t-shirt itself or not the mug itself but the mug in the Box the t-shirt in the packaging the bag that you'll be sending out so you'll need to grab those dimensions and then you'll need to using that information you'll go and estimate the costs for various locations so again I'll go through a set example with you guys so that you can really see this in action I am going to be talking about me as a seller in the US okay so because I know the majority of the people who are watching these Etsy videos on our channel are mainly from the US so I'm going to use the USPS website the US Postal Service website to estimate those costs of shipping out the t-shirt and the mug okay if you are in Canada you're gonna use the Canada Post site if you're somewhere else you're gonna use the relevant postage service site wherever you're at so we're gonna estimate those costs and then only then do we are we able to take those numbers and then put them into the shipping profiles that we will create an Etsy on our store so it's quite a process right but this is kind of the legwork that you need to do to ensure that you're not losing anything so let's go through an example number one we've already identified this in our our example store right so I identified we have we would be creating two shipping profiles one for the t-shirts and one for the mugs because they differ in weight in size they'll be packaged differently so they will have different shipping costs so now that I have those two items in mind number two I need to estimate packaging costs okay so let's get out of this presentation here and start to write some stuff down so for the t-shirts so let me back up here before you can estimate packaging costs you'll first need to know what how you're gonna package your items when you make a sale so decide on what packaging you're going to use you know do some quick research go online you know you can if you're selling t-shirts you can easily just type in shipping packages for t-shirts or you know shipping envelopes for t-shirts or you could do mug boxes for shipping you know whatever your item is put that into Google you will get suggestions you can start to look through those things you'll you know you'll see custom packaging and all this kind of stuff to make it look great and fancy which is awesome but for now keep it simple you can always change these things later you can always add on later but keep it simple for right now okay so I did my research I figured out what I want to use to package my t-shirts when I ship it out to a buyer as well as my mugs so let's start to estimate those packaging costs so for my t-shirts I'm gonna be using these guys right here so I found this on Amazon there are these like poly whatever mailer envelopes you know I found them on Amazon for a hundred pieces for $13 so that means these envelopes are 13 cents apiece right okay so is that it for my packaging costs what about you know is there anything else let's think about it so when I make a sale of the t-shirt I'm going to just grab one of these envelopes put the t-shirt in there close it up I don't need tape I don't need bubble wrap tissue paper nothing that because these particular envelopes are you know you can self stick them just rip off the piece of plastic there and just close them up and they're ready to ship so and it doesn't require much handling either much time it's super easy to send out so that's it for my packaging costs for the t-shirts it'll my costs are 13 cents a piece what about for the mugs so let's look at the mugs for the mugs I decided I'm gonna use these little guys alright this is a six inches by six inches by six inches a little box that I can put my mugs in now I'm not gonna just put the mug in like that into the box right I need I need bubble bubble wrap and I need tissue paper as well for extra padding these are all things that I need to add on and factor into my packaging costs it'll take a little bit of time to kind of like wrap everything up and tape it up not too much time but again I need to just be mindful of that so what are our costs well for these boxes I found this on Amazon for twenty-five dollars and fifty cents for 25 of these boxes kind of expensive I could have probably found a better deal but let's just say this was my research my bad research and so each box will then be a dollar and two cents okay that's just for the box so we need to factor in the cost of bubble wrap of tissue paper if I buy like a roll of bubble wrap or a thing of tissue paper I could do multiples multiple mugs so you know just kind of estimate the cost in your head you can I would probably say let's round it up and you'll notice I'm constantly overestimating with in reason right but it's good to overestimate so let's just say a dollar and fifty cents okay to factor in the cost of the bubble wrap the tissue paper the tape the time it takes for me to package it all up and send it so my packaging costs are done for each of these okay so let's just unbolt that that's not the total so thirteen cents each is my packaging cost for t-shirts one dollar fifty cents each is my packaging costs for mugs okay next step grab the dimensions of each item once it's packaged so you'll actually physically need to put the t-shirt in the bubble envelope or whatever it is the mug in the box close it up and write down these dimensions remember it's once it's packaged so it's very important to remember that so t-shirts and I took down my notes ahead of time so oh this should actually be dimensions and weight sorry guys this is dimensions and weight once it's packaged so you'll need both of those things so I put the t-shirt in the envelope I weighed it and I found that it is five point four ounces so the can't type so the t-shirt is between four to five ounces depending on the size of the t-shirt Excel will be more and the envelope is about point four ounces so I'm overestimating right I'm taking the five ounces adding the point the point four to it so I would even just go and say six ounces just rounding it rounding it up okay so six ounces is the weight of the t-shirt now the dimensions for this is 12 inches by 15 point five inches and by the way guys you don't like physically you know if you're just doing the research and you're you're looking at these packaging options you haven't actually purchased them and you don't have them in your home yet that's okay because when you look at like for example when I looked at those t-shirt envelopes it says the weight of the envelope of the empty envelope on the listing it says the dimensions of the envelope there as well so you can estimate this without without actually having it you you know you can find out the weight of your t-shirt because you should have that in your home and it's just simple to to add these numbers up just keep in mind though you know the envelope for this t-shirt is 12 inches by 5.5 but when it has the t-shirt in it right it won't be flat anymore so let's just say it'll be about an inch thick so just keep that in mind you'll want to be mindful of all of the dimensions the height as well the height of this will be an inch thick let's say so that's done for the t-shirts what about the mugs so the my mugs weigh 13 ounces and the box itself is 3.75 ounces so if I add that up it'll be sixteen point seven five ounces let's just round that up to seventeen ounces which is a pound and an ounce so let's just put 1.1 pounds for the mugs that is again once it's all packaged up so again if you don't have the item with you just add a little bit extra like I did being mindful of there's the bubble wrap the tissue paper it'll add a little bit of weight to it not much so that's how you can estimate it but if you actually have the item and the packaging with you actually put the mug in you know wrap it up or your eye whatever your item is and then weigh it once it's fully packaged so that's the weight there and the dimensions is remember I said the box is six by six by six so that's that's all it is so I'm going to ship that box as is let's just say and those are the dimensions so we have the weight and the dimensions for each of these items now what's the next step let's go estimate the cost so now we can take those numbers we can take those numbers that we discovered in the previous steps and plug them in to our shipping or postage website wherever you're at in the States its USPS and we can discover what those costs are so let's go ahead and do that okay guys so I am on the USPS website which is the US Postal Service website because I'm just doing this from point of view of a seller in the States as I mentioned because I know a lot of people watching this video will be from the States so let's go ahead and hover over mail and ship go to calculate a price and we're going to use this to estimate our costs we want to estimate a few things we want to estimate how much it would be to send to to send within the country so within the states how much it would be to send to Canada so in North America and then internationally I typically choose Australia and UK as certain areas just because those are either the farthest or the the places where you'll find a lot of buyers on etsy are from I find a lot of them are from the UK so that would be like the main kind of international country could totally differ for your store though but let's just go with that so within the country within somewhere in the States Canada and let's look at UK and Australia so you'll be on the site for a while doing your little research I'll just show you how to do how to do one of them here so destination country let's do within the US what zip code are you mailing from list a say I'm in California nine oh two one oh yes I am Canadian so that is the only postal code I know so let's then look at sending to New York okay so I'm gonna look up New York and let's go this one one zero zero zero one okay you can just leave this date as today if you want you can select the time approximately which you would be mailing it out or shipping it would it be in the morning the evening but again doesn't matter we're just kind of getting an estimate here so let's just say in the morning is when I'll be doing that it's none of the stuff and because it's a t-shirt and a mug it doesn't require ground transportation so I don't need to check that what you will do here is you will you'll select calculate price based on shape and size so even though it might be in a small envelope or a box just choose this one and because we have those numbers that we can put in and it will help us estimate that way so you can choose which unit of measurement we did it in the standard measurement so what's the weight of your male piece okay so let's do our t-shirts first remember you'll be doing this for the different profiles of items in your store so let's start with a t-shirt let's go back here the t-shirt is six ounces and it has these dimensions so zero pounds six ounces and select from the following option so we know that we are going to be sending that envelope it's important to note any dimension over twelve inches is considered a large package so actually it wouldn't be a large envelope if it's over twelve inches which it is let's go back here it's twelve by five fifteen point five so we'll need to select that and I'm going to put twelve actually the length is fifteen point five the height is one inch thick the way is 12.2 or sorry it was 12 and then let's go continue my package is rectangular so if it's like an odd shape you would choose non-rectangular but we'll leave it at that go continue and now we have our estimates okay don't let these prices scare you this is Priority Mail express one day right so that's not something that you'll you'll be getting you'll want to look at the standard shipping price so let's look at what options we have here okay Media Mail is basically if you're sending educational materials they just kind of name it Media Mail like books and that kind of thing so that's something you can look into if it applies to your store otherwise you will be looking at for two-day shipping it would be nine thirty and four standard so three day shipping would be four eighty one so technically you could go and create these separate options these separate profiles so if you want to do standard shipping forty one priority mail today nine thirty you could do that and then the one-day Express definitely account for that but to keep it simple I just want to start off by creating a shipping profile just to start so I can have something in my store and I can start selling and then I can add those upgrades as they call it on Etsy for faster shipping so I'm just looking for standard right now again keep it simple guys otherwise it can get totally overwhelming and probably it's it is overwhelming already so let's go with the first-class package service 481 is our estimate our shipping estimate for sending our t-shirt to a buyer in the u.s. across the u.s. so I just I chose something that was on purpose across the country because I'm in California in this example so this right here is 41 I would add a lip I would round it up so put five dollars so that is your standard shipping cost that you were charged to the buyer to send your t-shirt out okay so I'm gonna note that make sure you record this so t-shirt us five dollars okay it's not - but that's too hot okay now we're gonna look at Canada for the t-shirt and we're gonna look at international for the t-shirt okay these are all standard I'm just looking at standard shipping and we'll do the mugs next but okay let's go back and do Canada now so let's go back to the start so destination country is Canada so I'm going to choose that the value of the item being mailed let's just say twelve dollars from my t-shirt I'm gonna leave that the same what are you mailing that doesn't apply to me okay let's go here calculate price based on shipping dimensions and size okay so what is the weight of your mail piece again we have that let's go back here six ounces and then twelve by fifteen point five so let's put that in zero pounds six ounces it is the large package so I'm mailing from California - let's just say I'm gonna continue is your package yes it's rectangular okay so what are the dimensions we're gonna do this again one inch in height twelve inches and width continue so for standard its 1050 and again I'm gonna round that up just to be safe so we're going to do $11 we're eleven dollars for standard shipping from for me to send the t-shirt to a buyer in Canada so let's put that on here eleven dollars okay international so we go ahead and do that the process again will be similar this videos already very long so I I just want to kind of take a little bit of shortcuts here to make sure that you're still hanging on with me let's just look at the mugs because it's a little bit different here so let's go back to start how about this I'll do the mugs international with you so you can see how I'm doing that so let's just say right we said Australia let's just choose that and I'm choosing that purposely just because like whatever is the farthest away from me I'm going to choose because that will be you know typically it will cost more we're overestimating here where we're always overestimating to be safe what's the value again I'll leave oh right this is the mug so let's just say it's a little bit more of $15 that doesn't apply we always go here calculate price based on shape and size now the weight of my mug is different it is one point one pound so one pound one ounces okay and is it a large package an envelope or a package so is it more than twelve inches no it's not it's six by six by six so it would be a package and here we go standard International pricing let's see here this priority mail priority [Music] first class yeah it would be this one right here so to send to Australia 23:50 round that up let's do $25 just in case you could again it's totally you could do 24 25 I just like to overestimate so we'll use $25 as that overestimation just put this international $25 for the months now that's I mean you're looking at that and like that's crazy you know the mug if you purchase let's just say I price my mugs at $15 on Etsy and the shipping is $25 yes you do have to keep these costs in mind I mean you don't want to lose money right so you you either have to charge that shipping or you just don't send internationally you know or you you find you can actually set specific countries that you were will ship to so maybe you don't choose Australia you'll choose other international countries you can select those things so definitely keep this stuff in mind because buyers do accept or do expect free shipping nowadays just the nature of Amazon and online shopping and that kind of thing they always are looking out for those free shipping deals because people hate paying for shipping myself included so keep that in mind you know you do want to play around with these these different shipping strategies but at the same time you don't want to lose money so don't purposely offer free shipping if you know you're going to be losing money that's not smart what you can do is factor the cost of shipping into the the product item and then you know test out have the offering free shipping with that item there's you know I'm kind of going off-track here but there's lots of things you can do I actually created a video talking about free shipping on this channel so I'll put a link down to that in the description below if you guys are into hearing more about offering free shipping in your stores so I'm gonna just pause the video here I will pump out the other numbers here just so you don't have to watch me do every single one and and then we'll come back and finish off the rest all right guys welcome back so I did the I took the extra time to come up with those shipping estimates the shipping cost estimates for each of these things and I wrote them down here now one thing I noticed and wanted to point out when I was on the USPS site right here is that you know for all of those examples when we for all of those those estimates they were all as I mentioned the standard you know the lowest standard shipping costs but if your standard if for your standard you want to offer two-day shipping then by all means go ahead and do that and let people know that your standard shipping is two days with in the States or whatever the case may be and you can take those numbers you are the one who is creating the shipping profile so you decide what goes if you want your standard to be within the States if you want that to be two days Priority Mail shipping then grab this number over here and put fifteen dollars as a shipping cost rather than the standard which is right here thirteen dollars which isn't very much of a difference right so it's actually worth it to go ahead and set the priority mail to day for this particular example so take a look and see what makes sense you know it's totally you're like I said you're creating these fixed shipping profiles so it's up to you to decide okay so now that we have these numbers we can finally create these shipping profiles the fixed shipping profiles in our Etsy store so let's go ahead and do that that's the final step right here okay so to create your shipping profiles once you've logged into your Etsy store and you are in your store manager dashboard you'll need to go to settings and then shipping settings and once you are in those shipping settings you can click on shipping profiles and as you can see these are all the shipping profiles I've created for the sake of creating them but here we're gonna click on add a shipping profile so I'll just go back this is the at the very bottom you won't probably won't have anything in here so it'll be at the very top it'll say add a shipping profile and this is where you know remember from the beginning of the video Etsy asks you do you want us to calculate it for you or do you want to create the fixed so here you will choose I'll enter fixed costs manually all right and now we can start to create our profiles so we are shipping from the states so I'm gonna select the state's processing time how long does it take you to ship an item once purchased so meaning what is that time in between when a buyer actually purchases to you actually being ready to ship the product so that's the processing time for I'm starting off with my t-shirts so for my t-shirt it takes about three to five days to to print it and to make sure it's all good checking making sure it's you know there's no errors and everything looks good so three to five days now we come down here okay so this is why we did it in this way looking at estimates for the US for Canada and everywhere else meeting international because it is set up this way so for the state's you select the shipping carrier so you know I'm just gonna go with USPS because that's where we did our research if you wanted to do all of your shipping with FedEx or all of your shipping with UPS or anything else you can select that in here again you set what goes but I'm keeping everything simple so you guys can actually get started so we're gonna select that the male class remember we chose everything as when we were looking up our our estimates it was typically all first class mail not ground so we're gonna choose first class mail what I'll charge is a fixed cost so for the t-shirt let's go back here and again if you forget if you're like what male class was it you can go and grab that information from here right for the t-shirts I remember it was a first class thing that was kind of like the lower thing that was available these are the mugs so that's different so first class mail for the one item let's go back here t-shirt within the states it was five dollars now they're asking you you know if let's say a buyer buys two shirts or three shirts how much will you charge extra in terms of shipping for that extra weight included and you kind of need to think here because if I was doing the mugs it would significantly increase for each additional item because it's an extra pound over a pound to have another mug sent and it's an extra box so more packaging is involved there right that additional item cost will be significant for a mug for a t-shirt I can slip in you know three t-shirts in one mailer so in terms of additional items it would be negligible especially like the weight of a t-shirt isn't very much and I'd be using the same mailer in most cases if someone orders ten t-shirts and I won't be able to fit it in that mailer but let's again keep it simple you're not you're really not going to be able to account for every single case right in the beginning when you're starting off your store so just be willing to let those things go and you'll figure it out along the way once you have those cases come up it's it'll be okay guys so each additional item for a t-shirt it would be like under a dollar I would say I'm just gonna put 75 cents so if someone orders two or three shirts they'll be charged five dollars shipping plus let's say for two shirts will be charged five 75% of for shipping so Canada okay still using USPS I when I looked it up again it was the Priority Mail International definitely not free shipping to that it will be and see how easy it is because we did the private or the private the previous research it's so much easier once you know those figures you can just plug them in cuz you know when you first start in your store you probably opened up this window and you're like I don't know what to do with this so we put that 11 dollars in there additional item again it's like negligible so 75 cents and it's okay it's going to Canada so this is just it's it's about the same it's not significant for a t-shirt your case will be different every item will be different so I'm just going with this particular example here everywhere else yes - still USPS we did Priority Mail international and that fixed cost will be fifteen dollars alright and here and you can read what it says here you can hover over it it says this amount will be added on top of the one item amount for each additional item and additional item will be 75 cents alrighty these are my shipping profiles that I've created again if you wanted to offer upgrades you don't want to do that right off the bat again keeping things simple but if you did the research to come up with those numbers for one-day shipping one-day priority Express Mail that kind of thing you can add those upgrades right here and also in the case of if you don't want if it's too it doesn't make sense for you to ship internationally you can easily just trash this thing and get rid of it like so and only ship to the US and Canada you can also choose specific countries as well so if I'm adding another location here you can put that back and choose everywhere else or you can you know select certain countries and specifically create those things but you don't need to guys keep it simple so that's our t-shirt standard shipping profile for now so that's what I have right so I've created that that's over here and now I can create create the shipping profile for my mugs I'm gonna do the fit fixed costs I'm doing this from the US processing time for the mugs one to three business days so it takes me one to three days to print that mug make sure to make it to make sure it's printed and everything looks good and then putting in our numbers here right so going back here mugs was thirteen dollars these prices are crazy to send a mug out but let's just go with it for the sake of this example and for the month it was ground so the cheapest one was the ground option so we're gonna go with that now each additional item for a mug it's extra weight okay and it's extra like an extra box maybe you need to order bigger boxes in these cases or you just ship to you know separately it's it's up to you or you can put those two boxes in a bigger box you need to think of those scenarios and how it applies to your particular I you can also just to be sure before you fill out this piece you can go back to the price calculator and say and you know factor in that additional weight so again let's say I'm sending to the States I'm gonna go back here one mug was 1.1 pounds so I'm gonna now put this to see how that goes and it was a package okay so here now it's going to have changed it is now 16 rounding things up 17 dollars which is a difference of four dollars okay so I'm going to put five dollars and I need to charge five dollars additional shipping for every extra mug that you order from me just a factor in because of the additional weight and that sort of thing so you guys can start to see the idea of how I'm doing this and you know name your profile create profile and then you'll have that shipping profile show up when someone is at checkout they'll see that fixed cost amount that you put in all right so that is how you calculate your shipping profiles as well as put them in and set them up in your store this has been a super long video and I really thank you guys for watching all the way if you're still with me here I know some of you need that kind of detailed explanation in order to fully understand it because I found you know just with the articles and the videos that are already out there explaining shipping it's not enough it didn't help me so I wanted to really go in depth in this video and and really explain it so I hope that's been helpful for you if you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments below and let's create a discussion let's help each other out and figure this out because that's the only way that we're gonna succeed together all right guys well thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video bye from the dead [Music]

Channel: Essetino Media - Create Profitable Content

Views: 53,030

Keywords: how much to charge for shipping on etsy, how to figure out what to charge for shipping on etsy, how does shipping work when selling on etsy, what to charge for shipping on etsy, how do you know what to charge for shipping on etsy, etsy shipping tutorial, how does etsy shipping work, how to sell on etsy for beginners, shipping explained for etsy, etsy seller tips, etsy tips for beginners, etsy shipping profiles, tips for selling on etsy, etsy, #essetinoartists

Id: c-JDaGFsSX8

Length: 44min 27sec (2667 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019