Shipping Rates For Art On Your Ecommerce Site
Setting up shipping methods and costs on your art website can be a daunting task but this post will break down the basics and give you some practical advice. I’ll cover tips for setting up your methods (particularly for squarespace, but advice here for everyone), best practices for setting up your products, creating shipping labels once you’ve made a sale, and more. Let’s get into it!
Are You Trying To Make Money On Shipping?
The first thing to think through is if you are planning to make money on shipping or not. In most cases, artists try to get their shipping spot on. With most shipping options on your website, it will be very difficult or impossible to exactly estimate shipping, but the closer you can get the better. Some businesses try to make money by charging a lot more for shipping than it will actually cost. In my experience, this is very rare in the art world. For small pieces like prints, your customers are very intolerant of high shipping costs. For larger pieces, you have more room to get away with this but be careful not to get too excessive. Abusing your shipping rate can make your customers lose trust in you.
On the other hand, you want to be careful not to lose money on shipping. For larger pieces, shipping can easily reach $50 or more (or $100 or more if you are going to the UPS or FedEx store rather than using your own account or going to Shipist). And, don’t forget to factor in the cost of shipping and packing which might be $1 for prints and $30 for a large painting.
My advice: Aim to make around 10% extra on shipping and packaging. Sometimes you’ll lose a little, sometimes you’ll make a little, but overall you’ll come out slightly ahead.
Setting Up Art Shipping Methods
You have a few basic options for setting up your shipping:
Flat rate
Weight based rates
Percentage rate
Free shipping
Live rates from the carriers
Depending on your plan with squarespace or whatever CMS (content management system) you’re using, there may be limitations to these. No worries, in this post we’ll talk about how game the system a bit and bend these rules to work for what you’re shipping.
Flat Rate Shipping
In a lot of ways, this is the simplest shipping options (aside from offering free shipping). It’s a great way to go if you have pretty straight forward purchases and are fine with the shipping cost being approximate.
To get started with flat rate shipping, you’ll want to put your work into several different “buckets”. Usually this is based on how big the pieces are though sometimes you’ll want to consider how heavy things are. Don’t go crazy here with too many options! Ordinarily, flat rate shipping is used for different shipping options like Economy, Expedited, Next Day, etc. In the case of art, you’ll usually be bending this to instead have a different shipping rate for each type or “bucket” of art. This means that you’ll be relying on your customers to make the right selection during checkout!
Abbey Ratcliff uses this method on her site. She breaks down her pieces by Small and Medium prints and Small, Medium, and Large Paintings. In her product descriptions she lets her customers know what size the piece they are looking at so that they can make the correct choice during checkout.
Abbey includes language in her descriptions explaining what shipping option to choose during checkout.
During checkout, the customer selects the shipping method that corresponds to what they are purchasing.
Remember to set up your shipping zones! In Squarespace, you can specify what states each fixed shipping method applies to. Hawaii, Alaska, and international will have drastically higher shipping so you will probably want to have different shipping options there.
Once you’ve broken down your art into the appropriate categories, estimate how much it will cost to ship each one. Reach out to me to get Shipist quotes (I’m happy to run all sorts of numbers for you! You can also get a rough idea of what it costs at Shipist in these examples) or use your shipping software like ShipStation, FedEx, UPS, or Stamps.com to get shipping quotes to various states. Don’t forget to factor in packaging for your size. For paintings, I usually add 4” on the width and height and 2” on the depth. Those extra inches can make a huge difference if your painting is right on the edge of being oversized. Take an average of the costs, add whatever markup you’ve decided on, and make that the flat rate shipping cost for that bucket of art.
When setting up in squarespace, you can select the option to either charge per order or per item (or a combination of both). Per item is handy if someone wants to buy multiple pieces from you, but it can get sticky if they want to buy a large painting that you charge $100 in shipping for and a small print that you charge $5 for. In that scenario, either it would charge them $200 or $10, depending on what they select. People usually handle this in a few ways:
Let your customers know in your product description that you’ll charge them $200 but refund them $95 (gets the job done but customers often find this confusing).
Just charge $100 total and don’t worry about additional items purchased (great for painting + print, but not so good for painting + painting).
The Achilles heel of this way of shipping is that you’re leaving it up to your customers to pick the right thing during checkout and you’re taking up valuable space in your product descriptions explaining it to them. Check out this next method for a way to hack weight based shipping into what you need.
Weight Based Shipping For Art
Weight based shipping is really good for your small stuff. For prints, puzzles, mugs, and very small paintings, this is a great way to go! Generally, you’ll set a few different shipping rates for various weight ranges. The first range is usually 0-0.9 lbs (this is the weight range where you can ship First Class Mail). Remember to include packaging in this calculation since a 0.9lb item still needs to go in a box and can bump up to 1 lb. Either change your weight range to something safe like 0-0.85 lbs, or bump up the weight you list each item at on your site a bit.
The next ranges will vary, but often you’ll see 1-5, 6-10, and 10+. Unfortunately, squarespace doesn’t have a way to do a percentage shipping amount once you get above a certain range, so fill in as many ranges as you think people are likely to order.
For those shipping larger pieces, you are going to run into dimensional weight. That’s just a fancy way of saying that FedEx and UPS will charge you based on the dimensions of your box, not how much it weighs. Be careful here, your final painting might only be 8 lbs but FedEx might bill it as though it was 50 lbs because of its size. For these larger boxes, this is where weight based shipping really starts to fall apart.
Here are a few hacks to get weight based shipping to do what you want.
I don’t normally condone lying… but to get this to work you’re going to lie to your website about how much things weight (don’t worry, squarespace will get over it 😜). I’ll cover two different methods here.
Hack One: Make Up Random Weights and Assign Each A Shipping Cost
Forget about weight meaning anything related to weight. This can get a touch complex, but can help you get the shipping exactly the way you want (below, I round everything to even numbers. Depending on your website, you might need to adjust 1-2 to 1.01-2 for example). Here, you’ll take the buckets of paintings that we discussed in flat rate shipping. For this example, let’s say we have Prints, Small Paintings, and Large Paintings.
Now, assign each one a random weight (prime numbers that aren’t right next to each other are good here). For example:
Prints - 3 lbs
Small Paintings - 23 lbs
Large Paintings - 47 lbs
Then when you set up your shipping, you can charge what you want for each type. Let’s say that you want to charge $5 in shipping for prints, no matter how many people order. Then, set up your ranges from 0-22lbs to charge $5.
If you want to charge $50 for small paintings, no matter how many people order, do a range from 23-46 where you charge $50. If you want to charge $50 per painting, do a range from 23-45 for $50, and a range for 46 where you charge $100 (46 lbs is how much two paintings weighs according to what you told your site they weigh).
Now, repeat this for your large paintings. Do a range which includes 47 where you charge $100.
From here, consider what you’d want to do for various combinations. If someone orders a small painting and a large painting, your website will think that’s 70 lbs, so define a shipping charge for 70. Do this for all of the combos you think are likely.
The downside of this is that it can be complex and a bit wonky. After all, if you go this route, you aren’t using weight as it was intended. Also, if you use an automated shipping tool like Shipstation, be sure to adjust the weights before you produce the shipping labels.
Hack Two: Input Dimensional Weights, not Actual Weights
In this version, we’ll still keep the concept of weight, we’re just going to adjust it based on the weight that FedEx and UPS will actually charge you on.
Let’s consider one of your “Large Paintings”. Let’s say that it’s 24” x 36” x 2”. I add 4” to the length and width and 2” to the depth to get a rough idea of how big the box will be. In this case, that’s 28” x 40” x 4”. Multiply those together to get your cubic size, in this case 4,480 cubic inches. Now, divide that by 166. That gives us our dimensional weight of 27 lbs. So, this painting will be billed as though it’s 27 lbs, even if it actually only weighs 5 lbs. Enter 27 lbs as the weight of the product on your product page.
Dimensional Weight = (Length x Width x Depth) / 166
Once you’ve done that for your various sizes, create your different weight ranges and corresponding shipping costs.
This method works really well, but watch out for unexpected surcharges. Once your box is longer than 48”, an additional handling fee of roughly $20 will kick in. Once your girth ((Height x 2) + (Depth x 2) + Length) is over 130, a roughly $100 fee kicks in. Ouch.
Charging A Percentage Of Item Price For Shipping
One of the simplest ways to handle shipping is to just do a percent. Sadly, squarespace doesn’t support this, but some other sites will.
If your site supports this, you can simply choose a percentage of the product price to charge. A common one is 5%. If your store has flexibility, you can set a minimum shipping amount (say $5) and then a percentage once you want to charge once the order amount gets over a certain amount.
This is super simple and a good way to go if you don’t want to mess with some of the more complex set ups described above. However, it isn’t very precise, so expect a lot of variance in how much you make or lose from shipment to shipment.
Offering Free Shipping For Your Art
Perhaps simplest of all is to simply build the cost of shipping into the sale price of your art. This is tough to do with small prints, but is easy to work into paintings. You can offer free shipping across the board, on select items, or when your order is over a certain amount. In squarespace, this can simply be implemented as a fixed shipping rate where you charge $0. That’s how Denver artist Maryam Miller does it.
Free shipping on all orders from Maryam Miller.
Free shipping is also a great option for local orders that you can deliver or have picked up. You can either offer a coupon code for local customers to use or set up a fixed shipping method that only shows up in your local zone. That’s how Denver artist Mallory McCamy handles local orders.
Mallory offers a coupon for local orders to give free shipping.
Remember to include language about shipping restrictions if you do offer free shipping. For example, let your customers know that you don’t offer free shipping to Hawaii and Alaska.
Of course, you should consider carefully if you want to offer free shipping at all. It’s come to be expected in many industries but not necessarily with art. When someone falls in love with one of your paintings, what are the chances that shipping during checkout is going to make them change their minds? If you give free shipping, you might be leaving money on the table. Your local customers that pick up may also feel jipped since they won’t benefit from free shipping.
If you aren’t sure, maybe try an experiment. A few experiments you could try:
Release a collection with free shipping and a collection without. Track how many people abandon their cart in each case.
Send out an email to half of your subscribers offering free shipping and one without the offer. See which gets more clicks.
Create a popup with a free shipping coupon that shows up on exit intent. See how often it gets used.
If you have a plan that supports it, you could also send an abandoned cart email with a free shipping coupon to help capture lost sales.
My advice: Don’t offer blanket free shipping on your art. Charge your shipping cost and make free shipping offers occasional and special.
Charging Live Rates For Your Art
Charging live rates is the gold standard. In this case, your customer puts in their address, your site estimates the final size and weight of the package, that info is sent to FedEx, UPS, or USPS, and the carrier sends back the exact cost. If your store supports this, go for it!
Unfortunately, if you’re a squarespace user there are some serious limitations here. First, you have to be on their highest tier Advanced plan, which is a lot more expensive than the plan you probably need otherwise. Second, squarespace currently doesn’t support negotiated rates. So, if you have an account with discounts (likely through ShipStation, or if you ship with Shipist), you can’t display those lower rates to your customers. FedEx and UPS list rates are very high, so you’ll only be able to display those higher rates.
If you’re using Shopify or BigCommerce (I’m a BigCommerce fan), you have a few options here. ShipStation is a great choice because it can display live rates in your store and handle producing your shipping labels.
But, in most cases art isn’t that complex to ship so live rates aren’t necessary. You can easily get by with flat rate shipping or weight based shipping.
Make It Easy To Get The Shipping Quote
Here’s a bit of bonus content to update this guide based on two great examples I found recently. Regardless of what shipping options you select from the above, you want to make it as easy as possible for customers to get their shipping quote. Though I’m not a huge fan of Wix (less flexible than Squarespace, which is already super easy to use), this feature is pretty slick.
When you add something to your cart and then go to your cart, a shipping estimate is automatically filled in based one where it thinks you are located (thinking this comes from your IP address?). You can change it, but if it got your location right you don’t need to change anything. So easy! Here it is on Jessica Magee’s site:
You can see the same thing on Kristen Abbott’s site. She also lists a drop down with different shipping options but has standard shipping selected automatically.
Conclusion
Well, that’s your intro to setting up shipping on your ecommerce site for selling art. Getting things set up properly takes some up front work, but it’ll pay off in the long run.
Need help getting shipping rates to use in your flat rate shipping? Give us a call at 303-900-7214 or email at hello@shipist.io. I’d be happy to break down the rates you’d pay shipping through Shipist.
Other comments or questions? Comment below, I’d love to hear from you.
