Last Updated on June 11, 2018

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Purchasing products online has been steadily increasing over the past 15 plus years. Shopping online is is more convenient and it easier to find the best prices. Even though in most cases shoppers are saving money on the products they are purchasing online they still do not want to pay for shipping. In this post, I would like to talk about how shipping costs affect art sales and what your different options are so you can keep your buyers happy and make a higher profit.

How Shipping Costs Affect Art Sales

Are customers contacting you about your shipping costs?

If you are constantly being asked about your shipping fees you might want to consider trying a different strategy.

The fact is that people do not like to pay for shipping.

How many times have you decided not to purchase an item online because the shipping costs were too high?

It was a common practice for sellers to underprice products and inflate shipping costs when I started selling my art on eBay over 16 years ago.

People soon realized the games sellers were playing and stopped purchasing from them.

Sellers had no choice but to offer the best prices while charging reasonable shipping if they wanted to continue to see sales rolling in.

Over time shoppers required more, they wanted the lowest price for the product they were interested in and they didn’t want to pay for shipping.

Can shipping costs affect art sales?

Yes!

Your shipping costs could affect your sales in a positive or negative way.

If your shipping costs are too high you will potentially lose sales. If your shipping costs are too low you might sell more art but you have a chance or it eating away at your profits if you are not careful.

Four Shipping Options To Consider

It is safe to say that you are selling your art to make a profit.

In order for you to make the highest profit from a sale, you will want to take some time to decide on what your best options are for both pricing your art and shipping costs.

Below are some shipping options that are available for you.

Take some time to become familiar with what your options so you can make a better decision that will work in your favor.

Calculated Shipping Costs

Calculated shipping costs charge the shopper a calculated shipping cost depending on location. What your shipping service charges for the shipping will be what the buyer will pay plus any shipping and handling fees you might include.

There are plugins for WordPress that will calculate the shipping costs for you. When the buyer goes to the checkout page and types in their address, the calculator will provide the shipping costs.

WooCommerce Shipping Calculator Plugins:

WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping Pro

Woocommerce Delivery Time Picker for Shipping

WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro

WooCommerce Weight Based Shipping

WooCommerce Multi-Carrier Shipping Plugin

WooCommerce Advanced Free Shipping Plugin

The plugins above are some of the most popular plugins for WordPress and will calculate:

Ups shipping cost
Usps shipping cost
FedEx shipping cost

Keep in mind that if you are going to provide a shipping calculator, the farther a buyer lives from you, the higher the shipping costs will be for the buyer. This might discourage a buyer who lives cross-country.

Flat Rate Shipping

Flat rate shipping is when you have a set price for everyone to pay. This works well if you live in the middle of the country.

If you live on the East coast like I do, flat rate shipping might not be the best option.

Shipping to California is a lot more expensive than to ship to Boston. No matter what price I charge for flat rate shipping would not be the best option for either me or the customers.

For example:

I set the flat rate shipping cost to twenty dollars.

For me to ship to Boston, I would pay the shipping service ten dollars. People from the Boston area would be overpriced and this could damage my business name. They would know that they were overcharged and probably would not purchase from me again.

For me to ship to California I would pay the shipping service thirty-five dollars. People from around California would be happy with the shipping costs but it would be lowering my profits.

Free Shipping

Free shipping is what will make your customers the happiest. Everyone loves free shipping.

There are two things that you will need to consider if you offer free shipping.

The first thing that you will want to consider is if you would need to add the shipping costs with the price of the artwork. You need to be careful not to overprice your artwork too much. It will not matter to the customers if you offer free shipping or not if your prices are too high, to begin with.

The second thing that you will need to consider is if you are planning on shipping internationally. If you are you might want to state that free shipping is only for US Residents. International orders must contact the artist for shipping costs.