I cannot keep telling our clients enough about watching what they charge for their delivery. If you have to explicitly show delivery charges, then at the very least, please make sure they are shown throughout the customer journey. The number of times I see people that sell a product for £20 and then only when you get to the checkout do you see that there is another £4.95 to add to the cost! Wow, that is 25% of the price of the goods!
I know you have to charge delivery, but you can be more clever about it:
– You could look at making it part of the price of the product.
– Perhaps only charge for certain postcodes.
– Only charge for when the basket is a certain value or weight – this is actually a good technique some online shop owners use in order to get customers to buy more.
– If you have a bricks and mortar shop or perhaps warehouse or office or something, then push the opportunity for click and collect.
If you are not sure about whether delivery charges are affecting your sales, then just look at Google Analytics and see the percentage of people that exit when then get to the checkout. You should be pretty confident that 9 times out 10, if the user has moved from the basket to the checkout that they are going to buy, so if they exit at the checkout, why?
Doing the kinds of suggestions I made earlier is very easy to execute if you are using Magento as your eCommerce platform. You either just need to work through the configuration settings in the Magento Administration panel or perhaps you want some more customised options, then just use the free MatrixRate Magento Extension from WebShopApps. This extension makes setting up shipping rates in Magento so easy.
Don’t be someone that is missing a sale because you missed this simple trick! Oh and don’t miss another trick, if you do not have a Magento online shop, then you better start looking for a Magento Agency now! 😉
