You sell traditional homemade sauces. They are so delicious that your business has grown from strength to strength. New orders are coming not only from your hometown, but from the rest of the country. You ship orders by known courier service and you want to be assured that glass sauce bottles will be delivered safely. You have to use lots of materials for packaging: bubble wrap, packing peanuts, tape. You do not want to increase the product prices though, but expenditure is running high. So what’s to be done?
We are happy to introduce new Ecwid features, which will help you solving this task: “Handling Fee” and “Shipping markup.” Now you can add additional cost to the order total, without increasing the product prices.
Handling Fee
The handling fee is fixed and is charged once per order. It doesn’t depend on the shipping rate and helps to cover any additional expenses related to order fulfillment.
The handling fee with description are displayed to customers during checkout. Here is how the handling fee looks on the store page:
In order to set up handling fee in your store, please open Shipping page of Ecwid control panel and proceed to Handling fee tab. You can set the name of the fee and its value.
Add a short description to inform your customers of what is included in the cost.
By default the handling fee is set as $0 and therefore it doesn’t show up on the shopping cart page.
Which orders does the handling fee apply to?
Handling fee is applied to each order, that requires shipping. The rate is static and will stay the same no matter the order subtotal, weight or number of items being purchased.
Handling fee is applied to each shipping method that is configured in your Ecwid control panel → System settings → Shipping page, including free shipping methods. Thus, in case you offer free self pickup shipping option to your customers, you are still able to charge them for packaging.
When the handling fee is not applied to orders?
Handling fee is cleared and doesn’t show up on the shopping cart page in three cases:
All of the products added to the bag have free delivery. The free shipping for certain product is set up in Ecwid control panel → Catalog → Products → a product page → Tax and Shipping tab.
Customer used the free-shippingdiscount coupon.
The digital products do not require shipping. Hence, the handling fee is not applied to the order cost as well.
This feature is available on Ecwid paid plans, starting from Venture.
Shipping markup for carrier-calculated shipping methods
Ecwid allows to calculate shipping cost of items in the customer’s order by retrieving corresponding rates from most popular shipping carriers. While the cost given by the carrier is precise, there may be additional expenses involved in shipping the goods (e.g. actually driving to a post office to arrange delivery of the ordered goods). Shipping markup allows you to cover these expenses by including a fixed fee into the shipping cost.
In order to set up shipping markup in your store, please open System settings → Shipping page of Ecwid control panel. Then open the carrier-calculated shipping method you wish to add a markup to for editing and proceed to “Account details.” Set the shipping markup value.
Once done, the markup will be included into the cost of the shipping option during checkout automatically. To disable shipping markup for a shipping method change the rate to $0.
In conclusion, we’d recommend you:
Make sure that fees cover additional expenses
Provide a clear outline of what the charge includes and how you will be handling the order before shipping. It will inform customers of what they are paying for.
Keep your handling fees low. It will help reduce cart abandonment.
Happy selling!