Posted by How a business handles the shipping of its goods sold online can be crucial to its ability to retain and attract new customers. Forrester Research Inc., an American market research company has carried out a survey about customers’ behavior. A surprising result is that shipping and handling fees are the number one factor driving shopping cart abandonment with 44%.
It is well-known that retailing websites offering only one shipping method are less appealing than other ones that provide a larger number of options as customers are not allowed to choose the most suitable one. Let’s take a comprehensive look at several shipping methods in your site as well as your carriers and shipping labels in Magento 2.
Shipping Settings
In this setting, sellers register addresses of stores or warehouses where they store commodities. Therefore, the shipping fee to customers’ address is calculated and shown on screen during checkout process. Additionally, sellers are also able to turn on “Multiaddress Shipping” option to allow their buyers to make an order to several locations.
Basic Shipping Methods
In Magento 2, customers are provided with a wide range of available built-in shipping methods. They include:
– Flat Rate: a standard rate of charge is applied for per each item or per shipment, regardless of weight or size. This means you can place as mahy as you want and the shipping fee is fixed at the beginning.
– Free Shipping: one of the most attractive and common promotion in e-commerce. This method is only applied in some special cases.
– Table Rate: the shipping fee is flexible and depends on several couples of data of commodities.
– Real-time Online Rate: provides the most accurate shipping cost because it is calculated by shipping carriers at the moment of checkout.
Carriers
Carriers are agencies that take responsibility for making shipment for your orders. If you have made a long-term agreement with a supported carrier, you are able to provide customers with real-time shipping method, package tracking and labels.
Shipping Labels
Creating shipping label for an order is not difficult. Sellers can set up this feature in the admin system. Since then, labels for both existing and new orders are made in terms of PDF format and downloaded to your computer. You can choose to generate this in shipment or later.