Shipping rate quotes are a critical piece of the eCommerce checkout user experience. As the merchant, you can cause checkout conversion issues if the right options are not available or the rates are to high. Conversely, if rate quotes are to low you can end up losing a lot of money on shipping. With the advancement of low cost expedited shipping options from Amazon in the past few years, it has become critical for eCommerce sites to leverage rate quoting solutions that provide customers with all the necessary shipping options, quoted at the correct price.
Out-of-the-box Magento comes equipped with some very good basic tools for powering shipping quotes. These tools include:
- Live rate quotes via API per product weight and destination for the major carriers (Fedex, UPS, USPS and DHL)
- Free shipping per cart and product conditions
- Flat rate per cart
- Table rates per product weight or cart total per city, state and zip code
If you have basic shipping requirements such as shipping all of your products from one warehouse, to one country, through one carrier, then the basic tools provided by Magento could suffice.
However, your shipping requirements may be more complex and require additional features to support some or many of the following:
- Shipping from multiple warehouses
- Using multiple carriers
- Dimensional shipping
- In-store pickup
- Smart packing (choosing what box a collection of items should ship in)
- LTL freight
- Hazardous materials
- Date and time display or selection
In this case, you will need a more robust set of tools for powering shipping quotes. These tools can be sourced from one or all of the following:
- Third party apps
- Third party extensions
- Custom development
Third Party Apps
One of the first and best options for employing a robust set of shipping quote tools is to connect Magento to a third party software as a service (SaaS) app like ShipperHQ. Third party SaaS apps work by connecting to Magento via APIs accessible through an extension installed into Magento. Once connected, Magento sends details about the items found in the cart to the app and the app returns to Magento shipping quote options that can be based on many variables and rules. Rules such as, but not limited to:
- Live rate API connections to the major carriers (UPS, Fedex, USPS, DHL and other major LTL Freight providers)
- Shipping from multiple warehouses
- Comparing and displaying lowest price per multiple carriers and tables
- Dimensional shipping
- In-store pickup
- Smart packing (choosing what box a collection of items should ship in)
- LTL freight
- Hazardous materials
- Date and time display or selection
Third party apps are often the most reliable and cost efficient method for getting high quality tools to power shipping quotes. Since these apps are SaaS they benefit from the advantages gained through many users sharing the same set of features on one platform:
- Feature rich – since one platform must serve many types of business needs
- Lower cost – many users are shouldering the cost of development
- Higher quality (fewer bugs) – there are so many active users, bugs are usually reported and fixed quickly
- High uptime and performance – the app is critical to the checkouts of thousands of merchants
The one downside of SaaS apps is that they cannot always cover every feature you may require for powering shipping quotes. However, some apps, like ShipperHQ, do provide custom flexibility in their Magento extension that allows their output to be filtered and adjusted within the Magento checkout code. This allows for additional extension or custom custom module output to be integrated with the ShipperHQ shipping rate options in the Magento checkout.
Third Party Magento Marketplace Extensions
Another option for gaining additional shipping quote tools is to install third party shipping quote extensions to Magento. Many extensions exist with features such as:
- Shipping from multiple warehouses
- Dimensional shipping
- In-store pickup
- Smart packing (choosing what box a collection of items should ship in)
- LTL freight tables
- Hazardous material surcharges
- Date and time display or selection
Third party extensions often do a good job at addressing one specific feature (ie. in-store pickup) but don’t necessarily integrate well with other shipping extensions. If, for example you need in-store pickup and LTL freight tables, you would have to install two separate extensions. That could pose an issue since those separate extensions were not likely developed to work together. It could take a good deal of custom code to make the LTL freight tables extension work with the in-store pickup extension and as a result there may be many bugs to work through with shipping rates. A further issue is that as Magento releases future upgrades and patches, additional effort will be required to maintain and update the integration of the two extensions.
A third party extension can be a great solution for one specific shipping rate feature, but combining many third party shipping extensions is typically not a good idea. This is because development costs to integrate the multiple shipping extensions will be high and you’ll likely spend a lot of time and effort resolving bugs.
Custom Development
Sometimes there are no third party apps or extensions that can deliver the features needed to power a shipping rate quote. In these cases, custom development is required. Typically, custom development does not account for all the features and functionality needed in a shipping rate solution. Instead it is used to extend or bridge the functionality of native Magento features, SaaSfeatures or Magento extensions.
For example, in-store pickup. While there is a third party marketplace extension to provide this feature, the extension may not sort the closest stores available for pickup based on the shopper’s geo-ip location or shipping address. In this case custom development could be used to leverage geo-ip data from another extension and shipping address information to provide the user with a list of in-store pickup locations that are closest to the buyer.
Custom development is often the last step in producing a first class shipping rate solution on Magento as it allows us to streamline the SaaS app, native feature or third party extension output to provide an optimized set of shipping or in-store pickup options at checkout. In our experience, most sizable eCommerce merchants use custom development in conjunction with SaaSapps, third party extensions and native Magento features to create robust and competitive shipping options.
In Conclusion…
Providing your shopper with the shipping options they want has always been important, but now with the competition from Amazon Prime it has become critical. Magento, together with its out-of-the-box features, SaaS app options, third party extensions and custom development options provides great affordable tools for helping you provide the shipping options today’s online shoppers are seeking.
To learn more about Magneto shipping options and how to get the absolute most out of your eCommerce site, contact us today. We are a certified Magento partner and have been developing eCommerce sites since the 1990’s. Put our experience to work for you.