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Does anyone know if Square Market's shipping options have calculated shipping according to weight AND box dimensions? The calendars I ship are $5 to Chicago but

Does anyone know if Square Market's shipping options have calculated shipping according to weight AND box dimensions? The calendars I ship are $5 to Chicago but $9 to California. Distance, weight, and dimensions are really important. I can't do flat shipping charges. I refuse to over charge all my customers to prevent losing money on shipping nor undercharging and eating into my profit by $4 per order. Nearly all the marketplaces I've tried out (except for ebay) have terrible shipping options. It's 2013, everyone from USPS to FedEx to UPS have shipping apis that do down-to-the-penny shipping rate calculations, yet none (edit: not many of them) of the marketplaces and e-commerce stores take advantage of them. Apparently they think we business owners are just shipping 5 oz t-shirts. Edit: MUST have weight + destination + box dimensions shipping calculations. (wordpress e-commerce plugin is the only one I could find that does)

ricardobeat 13y ago
Almost every e-commerce platform has integration with shipping APIs. Have you tried shopify? Open-source CMSs like Magento, Prestashop etc also have that.
- tnorthcutt 13y ago
  The parent comment was referring to marketplaces, not platforms.
anigbrowl 13y ago
Why don't you just use USPS flat rate shipping? They offer a range of package sizes (certainly big enough for any calendar I've ever seen), they're cheap, and customers are well aware of the service's existence. As a consumer I'm interested in predictability, I don't care if shipping charges get averaged out a little unless it's absurdly high. As someone who ships stuff fairly frequently I'm conversant with the variety of shipping options available; I want shipping charges to be in a reasonable ballpark (eg I hate competitive-seeming prices that are then brought back up with jacked-up S&H 'fees'), but I don't really care about having it calculated down to the cent. In fact, it slows down my shopping decision having to put in my zipcode - I'd far rather see a flat shipping rate. As a matter of fact if the price differential is small enough I avoid sellers that want my to put in information for them to calculate shipping - on small sums, it's not worth my time to enter that information. I agree it'd be a good thing for Square to add that information, but in the meantime you might be better off selecting a flat rate and making your pricing as simple as possible. I honestly don't give two hoots whether a package ships from the next zipcode over or across the country, and perfectly OK with a vendor building that variance into the handling charge. Indeed, on some items I don't care at all - I buy used books from 10 cents on Amazon and pay a flat $3.99 S&H charge which I know includes the actual profit for the seller, whereas the 10 cents 'rpice' of the book reflects the amount of labor to stick it inside a jiffy bag and stick on a label. Quite OK.
auston 13y ago
UPS Mail Innovations does not have an API. Please someone from the internet prove me wrong, I'd love so much to be wrong on this!
subpixel 13y ago
You'd be way smarter to raise your price and offer free shipping. Especially when what you sell is unique - it's not like shoppers will find it elsewhere cheaper. Online shoppers love free shipping, and shipping charges are a huge cause of cart abandonment.
- weisser 13y ago
  So true... I wrote a guest post about this on Hypebot: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/07/free-shipping-sex-beer.html http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/07/free-shipping-sex-bee...
sjg007 13y ago
You should try www.ribbon.co (shameless self promotion -- I work there). We just released dynamic shipping.

ricardobeat 13y ago

Almost every e-commerce platform has integration with shipping APIs. Have you tried shopify? Open-source CMSs like Magento, Prestashop etc also have that.

tnorthcutt 13y ago
The parent comment was referring to marketplaces, not platforms.

anigbrowl 13y ago

Why don't you just use USPS flat rate shipping? They offer a range of package sizes (certainly big enough for any calendar I've ever seen), they're cheap, and customers are well aware of the service's existence. As a consumer I'm interested in predictability, I don't care if shipping charges get averaged out a little unless it's absurdly high. As someone who ships stuff fairly frequently I'm conversant with the variety of shipping options available; I want shipping charges to be in a reasonable ballpark (eg I hate competitive-seeming prices that are then brought back up with jacked-up S&H 'fees'), but I don't really care about having it calculated down to the cent. In fact, it slows down my shopping decision having to put in my zipcode - I'd far rather see a flat shipping rate. As a matter of fact if the price differential is small enough I avoid sellers that want my to put in information for them to calculate shipping - on small sums, it's not worth my time to enter that information. I agree it'd be a good thing for Square to add that information, but in the meantime you might be better off selecting a flat rate and making your pricing as simple as possible. I honestly don't give two hoots whether a package ships from the next zipcode over or across the country, and perfectly OK with a vendor building that variance into the handling charge. Indeed, on some items I don't care at all - I buy used books from 10 cents on Amazon and pay a flat $3.99 S&H charge which I know includes the actual profit for the seller, whereas the 10 cents 'rpice' of the book reflects the amount of labor to stick it inside a jiffy bag and stick on a label. Quite OK.

auston 13y ago

UPS Mail Innovations does not have an API. Please someone from the internet prove me wrong, I'd love so much to be wrong on this!

subpixel 13y ago

You'd be way smarter to raise your price and offer free shipping. Especially when what you sell is unique - it's not like shoppers will find it elsewhere cheaper. Online shoppers love free shipping, and shipping charges are a huge cause of cart abandonment.

weisser 13y ago
So true... I wrote a guest post about this on Hypebot: http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/07/free-shipping-sex-beer.html http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/07/free-shipping-sex-bee...

sjg007 13y ago

You should try www.ribbon.co (shameless self promotion -- I work there). We just released dynamic shipping.