The pandemic has led to a boost in e-commerce, and changed the way consumers shop. However, as an e-commerce merchant it can be difficult to maintain profit margins with the rising costs of shipping. Many carriers add shipping surcharges for both domestic and international orders.
What is a “shipping surcharge”?
A surcharge is often defined as a “service fee” or “shipping and handling fee.”
A surcharge is typically an extra charge added on to the stated price of goods or services, added to an existing tax or added as a stand-alone charge. Sometimes, surcharges are added on as temporary measures to defray the costs of increased commodity pricing (e.g., fuel surcharge), or they are used as regular and permanent fees.
You can improve your profit margins by understanding the different types of shipping surcharges and setting your own pricing accordingly. A tool such as Connex can help you to add shipping surcharges to your shipping fees so you can stay profitable.
When you as the merchant receive an invoice with a shipping surcharge, it can appear as a “service fee”, “handling”, or a variety of other labels.
A shipping surcharge is an extra fee that is added to the base cost of shipping good.
In order to stay profitable, you must keep track of the shipping surcharges imposed by the different carriers.
In addition, you also need to mark up your products accordingly and reconcile your QuickBooks account.
Keeping track of different shipping surcharges between various carriers, can quickly add up to many hours of manual data entry as well as human errors.
How Can You Mark Up Shipping and Stay Profitable?
If you are being invoiced for shipping surcharges, you need to mark up the cost of your own shipping in order to stay profitable.
Connex for QuickBooks is a 3rd party integration tool that copies orders from your selling channels to QuickBooks Online or Desktop. However, Connex does much more than just copy orders. You can use Connex to
- Automatically get your orders into QuickBooks Online or Desktop,
- Adjust your inventory levels in QuickBooks and selling channels,
- Sync summary sales and the Amazon settlement report to QuickBooks,
- Match deposits from your sales,
- Integrate ShipStation and other shipping platforms with QuickBooks Online or Desktop, and
- Mark up shipping and stay profitable!
In fact, you can instruct Connex to mark up shipping by an amount. You can compare the shipping method field or another field of your choosing.
How Can Your Business Make $10,000 By Marking Up Shipping?
(Click here for our most up-to-date step-by-step manual)
With the powerful Connex Rules Engine, you can instruct Connex to mark up shipping by a specific amount, sometimes referred to as a surcharge.
Consider this use case for a specific dollar amount:
- Create an invoice in QuickBooks.
- Sync this invoice from QuickBooks to your shipping solution.
- Ship the order.
- Update the QuickBooks sale with the shipping cost.
- Connex will mark up the cost, which you will invoice to your customer.
In summary, using the Connex Rules Engine, you can add shipping surcharge as:
- Specific dollar amont
- Percent
- Additional handling fee
While shipping surcharges can eat into your margins, the Connex Rules Engine can help your company to become more profitable by passing these additional fees onto the customers. A small shipping fee such as $1.50 per order can increase your annual revenue by thousands of dollars and relieve your company of the burden of paying for shipping.
Most customers will pay a small shipping surcharge to ensure that their orders arrive safely and on time.
In addition, you have the flexibility to add shipping surcharge as a percentage of the price, so you can charge higher shipping surcharges for bigger orders. Finally, if you have fragile or other “special-care” items, Connex can add an additional handling fee to your order.
Choosing the right tools for your accounting is essential for the growth of your business. By implementing automation into your workflow, you can have the peace of mind that you are delighting your customers while staying profitable and growing your business.
Is Connex the Right Tool For You to Integrate with Your Shipping Solution?
Most of our customers sell on multiple e-commerce channels. For example, Woocommerce, Shopify, Magento, and ShipStation, just to name a few.
They want to grow their business, and they also value the peace of mind from knowing their books are always up to date and they can serve their customers.
Why Our Customers Choose Sync with Connex
- Developed specifically e-commerce business owners
- You can scale your business by automatically syncing sales & inventory from multiple e-commerce platforms to QuickBooks Desktop or Online.
- You don’t have to spend your resources manually entering sales, inventory, and customers into your website and QuickBooks accounts.
Recommended by Intuit itself, Connex for QuickBooks will give you peace of mind that your inventory will be updated. You will be free of the frustration of oversells and missed items.
- When your inventory is up-to-date, you can achieve higher customer satisfaction, leading to more positive reviews, and increased sales.
- For phone orders, we can sync sales from QuickBooks to your shipping solution.
- If you sell on multiple channels, you can simplify by using our solution instead of multiple tools.
- Connex integrates QuickBooks with all major e-commerce platforms, such as Woocommerce, Shopify, Magento, Amazon, and e-commerce shipping solutions such as Shipworks, Ordoro, and Shipping Easy.
–Click here for a full list of our ecommerce, shipping, and payment integrations
How can you decide whether Connex is right for your business?
The easiest way to tell whether Connex is right for your business is to try it out.
- Connex is easy to set up on your own.
- If you would like us to set it up for you, your purchase includes a complimentary onboarding by our team.
- Get started with a month-month plan, and upgrade to annual to save 20%.
- Your purchase includes access to a US-based technical support team via tickets and screen-sharing.
- In case Connex does not work for you, we offer a 30-day 100% money-back guarantee.