One of the biggest factors for success when selling to customers outside of your direct delivery areas is your delivery charges. If your delivery charges are considered too expensive or too complicated, it can be a real sticking point for customers, pushing them away from your brand. However, with the right approach, you can position delivery charges in a way which are better than, or in line with expectations and easily understandable. In this post, we’ll discuss some tips on how to do just that.

Below are two main strategies for how you can charge for delivery:

This creates the perception of the desired ‘free shipping’ despite the customer actually still paying for some delivery charges. Essentially, the customer will see a shipped price for the product.

You can do this by creating a separate, nationwide price tier, and then adding your desired delivery charges into the price of each product item.

By keeping the item prices and delivery charges separate, this strategy is more flexible and lends itself better to use other methods like the free delivery threshold to encourage larger order sizes.

With the Courier Delivery Tier, your delivery charges must be defined on a per-item basis and/or a flat amount across their order.

If you use either of these two delivery charge methods, we would strongly recommend also implementing a free delivery threshold. This will give your customers a target to shoot for that will allow them to get free delivery - a valuable incentive. Based on what we’ve seen work well, we would recommend placing this figure anywhere between £100 - £300 depending on how competitive you want to be.

Trade buyers are time-strapped and need to understand as quickly as possible how your products are going to get to them and how much they will cost. We often see our partners fall into the trap of trying to pass on exactly what rates they get charged from their courier provider. This creates unnecessary complexity, and confusion and ultimately may lead to fewer orders as a result.

We would recommend sticking to consistent, flat rate charges per item type. Going one step above this, use whole numbers where possible to make it easy to calculate.

For example “£2 per case of cans, £5 per plastic keg, £7 per steel keg”

One of the reasons you use Sellar is that you value customers ordering directly from you. If your delivery charges are too high, customers will find your products through a route to market, which often ends up costing you a lot more margin. Or worse, your customer orders from a competitor with lower delivery charges.

Nobody likes paying a lot of money for delivery fees so either bake some extra margin into your nationwide pricing, or you can see it as margin you would have otherwise lost if the customer had ordered through a route to market. Making sure it’s cheaper for a customer to come to you direct, rather than ordering through an online distributor will play an important role in building lucrative long-term relationships with customers.

We would always recommend making your delivery charges as accessible as possible, especially if you’re looking to grow into markets you haven’t got a big presence in yet. You could even view the subsidised or free shipping rates you offer to nationwide customers as marketing costs to incentivise those customers to try your products.

Subsidised shipping rates are nice but free delivery is even better. Offering free delivery is an effective way to attract customers and encourage sales. However, you don’t have to absorb all of the cost when you offer free delivery - you could build the cost of delivery into your product pricing or require a minimum purchase amount for free delivery. By doing so, you can still offer free delivery while ensuring that your business remains profitable.

We would recommend looking at your average order size and aiming for about 10-20% above that to set your free delivery threshold. Giving customers a target to shoot for, that’s slightly above what they might normally spend, will give them that extra incentive to bulk up their order.

From what we’ve seen on Sellar, anything from £100-£200 works well. You could even use your announcement banner to highlight the fact that you offer free delivery over a certain point to draw attention to this incentive. You can set this up from here.

You can also set up your free delivery threshold here. This will then show customers how much more they need to spend with you before they qualify for free delivery.

Lastly, make sure you’ve set up your direct delivery areas. This means Sellar then knows which customers to show your nationwide pricing and information to. Read more about this update here and how you can use it.

Offering simple and competitive delivery charges is an effective combination for encouraging sales. If you’re unsure about how to position your delivery charges and want to make sure you’re pricing in line with the market, email us at shipping@sellar.io for feedback.