Set calculated and flat shipping rates per price list
Soon suppliers will have access to new and improved price list and shipping features on Shopify Collective. This upgrade will give suppliers the flexibility to charge retailers calculated shipping rates, or flat shipping rates per price list shared.
Today, you can only charge retailers a single flat rate for all Collective orders.
Payment of shipping flat rates and calculated rates will pass seamlessly from retailer to supplier where both stores have automatic payments turned on in Collective.
New calculated and flat shipping rates
Soon, you’ll be able to set flat shipping rates, or calculated shipping rates, when you create a price list. This means you can charge different shipping rates for different products, and for different retailers.
Calculated at checkout
This method will allow your retailers to fetch your shipping rates live at checkout, directly from your supplier store, and display them to the customer.
Unlike flat rates, calculated shipping rates use rules you configure in your shipping profiles to calculate shipping costs live at checkout. For example, by weight of shipment, customer location, or a 'free shipping for orders over' price rule.
Using calculated rates can help ensure you never overcharge some retailers, or lose money on others.
Flat rate
Selecting ‘Flat rate’ will let you manually specify a fixed sum flat rate per order, which is passed to the retailer’s Collective shipping profile when they import the products you’ve made available to them through a price list.
When a customer reaches checkout on the retailer store, the flat shipping rate you set for the given products is fetched live from your store using the retailer’s Shopify Collective shipping profile. The shipping rate is then displayed to the customer. This rate is fixed, and does not vary according to the product’s weight, the customer’s location, or other criteria.
Managing shipping rate conflicts
To help suppliers manage multiple price lists shared with multiple retailers, Collective will mitigate shipping rate conflicts by favoring ‘calculated at checkout’ rates over ‘flat rates’.
When a product is added to multiple price lists, if ‘Calculated at checkout’ is specified on any one of those lists, then Collective will always display the calculated rate to the retailer in their app, and to the customer at checkout.
Where a single product contains different flat shipping rates across different price lists, Collective will always display the highest-cost flat rate to both the retailer in their app, and to the customer at checkout.
Rates will combine at checkout according to the retailer’s shipping profile configurations.
When there are items from multiple brands, a single, combined shipping rate will be displayed to the customer. But some retailers might have split cart activated, which will display a total shipping cost per shipment from each supplier.