Shipping for new businesses

UPS is expensive!

[lschmidt]

Here is my situation. I am ready to 'go live' now. I send invoices to my distributor, and they fulfill the order from their own warehouse, meaning I don't have to physically stock anything or ship orders myself. Therefore an actual daily pickup account is not going to work. However, if you do $50 of shipping to your UPS account per week for 4 consecutive weeks, you will then qualify for those same rates daily pickup accounts receive. But until then, I'm stuck with the slightly higher rates.

In my niche, all of my competitors offer cheap flat rate shipping via UPS Ground for something like $6 - and obviously can afford this since they receive the daily rates.

Question is, do I charge my customers the lower shipping rate (in an attempt to compete with other sites in my niche) and suffer the difference until I finally qualify for daily rates? Or, do I charge a few more dollars for shipping (and more than my competitors), then lower that shipping charge when I finally qualify for daily rates.

Your opinion?

[Rugles]

I would be apprehensive to charge more than your competition. If you can eat the extra $'s until you can get lower rates that would be my choice.

[ByronM]

Look at it this way, in order to survive you need to ship out more than 200 bucks a month worth of shipping or else you aren't going to make ends meet so figure in your long term shipping costs as your strategy and get over the little hump as quickly as possible.

On a good day i'll have 1,000+ in shipping. LCD/Plasma TV's aren't light :)

[topr8]

ups are not fixed, phone them and hassle them, give them projections ... you might be suprised at the rate they'll offer you.

[Realbrisk]

Only if you ship Air you will get decent discounted rates

otherwise if don't ship Air or 2nd day you will get max a 3% discount

[topr8]

oh, ok, i'm foreign i only ship air with fed-ex (before ups) didn't realise it didn't apply on ground as well.