International Shipping Rate Calculation, A Foolproof 7 Step Plan

Author Chinavasion Marketing 16.10.2009. | 15:28

shipping cost
At Chinavasion, a frequent question we get from eBay sellers is: how do I work out the shipping cost for different countries?

With Chinavasion’s online shipping cost calculator, this is easy to do.

Here is a seven step guide on how to quickly and safely check the shipping cost of the item you are interested in for different countries without paying for the item:

Step 1

 

First of all, we need to add entries of different countries to the address book.

Log in your Chinavasion account, and then click on the ‘Address Book’ button in the left hand menu of the page.

Chinavasion address book

Step 2

 

Fill in the necessary information and choose a country.

shipping address

Step 3

 

In international shipping, only the country will affect the rate.

So you can come up with fake addresses of different countries without changing any of other information.

Remember that the Chinavasion account can hold a maximum of 1500 entries so you could conceivably have an address for every country in the world and still have room for all your regular customer email addresses.

multiple shipping prices
If you don’t want these fake addresses to mix up with real ones, you can register another account only for working out the shipping costs, using a different email address.

However, there is no need to go to this level of separation and just by using your own name for the shipping address.

Step 4

 

By now, we complete the first step of adding different entries to the address book.

Now we are ready to use these different entries to work out correspondent shipping freight cost.

First, let’s place an order and choose any address. As you can see the website will automatically work out the correspondent shipping freight.

Step 5

 

Let’s change it to another address by selecting it from your address book.

As you can see, the shipping freight shown on the website is now magically changed to the rate for United Kingdom.

And you are able to repeat the process, to work out the costs for different countries.

Step 7

 

In fact, shipping freight for countries within a certain area normally remains the same.
For example, by choosing different countries within Western Europe, you will see the shipping rate remains unchanged. Here I placed an order for 1 piece of Odyssey – WiFi Quadband Dual-SIM Cellphone w/ 3 Inch Touchscreen. I change the address from France to Germany, then to Netherlands. You might be surprised to find out that the shipping rate remains unchanged.

Though this is normally the case, sometimes, with some shipping companies, there are exceptions.

For example, in the Mediterranean area, shipping to certain countries can be much more expensive compared to adjacent country, due to inefficiency in local logistics hubs.

However, these differences generally are very small. We suggest you take a look at all countries within a certain area. You then can work out a fixed rate for a certain area and use that as a guide.

At Chinavasion, we are constantly working to maintain the shipping prices constant and as low as possible to help you in your business.

However, most shipping companies adjust their rates monthly according to the international oil price, labor costs, etc.

Generally speaking, these adjustments are very small, however, to keep your shipping freights accurate and up-to-date, we recommend you recheck shipping rates via our website every month.

By doing that you’ll be maximizing your profits and increasing sales, and that’s got to be a good thing.

best shipping method for dropshipping
 

 

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Author Chinavasion Marketing 16.10.2009. | 15:28
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35 Comments

  1. Sylvester October 26, 22:38

    hi, do you ship to ghana? can you give more information on that.

  2. Patrik May 3, 17:30

    How is the cost of delivery that customers will pay?, how can my customers know how much is it?, exist some kind of script that i can put in my site that customers can know directly the cost of that?, please help me and answer that question

  3. Kenny May 13, 01:11

    Instead of troubling your dropshippers to “manually” work this out themselves (for every product and then every country), do you plan to make it easier for your dropshippers to integrate with the way you calculate shipping cost? The thing is, it is not logically realistic for dropshippers (especially those with own website) to find out the shipping cost for each product (because you do not even publish product weight? or do you?) this way, it is too tedious. Neither is it logical for your dropshipper to find out shipping cost only after they close the sale, isn’t it? Please correct me if I get this wrong or you have a smarter way for your dropshipper to automate how your derive shipping fee for every item (I am referring to the formula that is). Thank you.

  4. Michael May 25, 20:55

    It would be easier to have some formula that you could use, this is a ‘must’.

  5. josh July 9, 02:52

    i agree with Micheal and everyone here we need a script or a shipping calculator for our website, This will grow the sales of company because it will help our lives more easier and we would be more then willing to do business with you.

  6. Jennifer September 15, 17:54

    I agree with everyone else. What good is it to know the shipping amount AFTER the customer has already ordered?

  7. Adrian September 16, 09:20

    Hi Jennifer,
    The point of this blog is to demonstrate that you can actually get shipping costs in advance by using dummy accounts for whichever country to ‘test’ orders that you are receiving from real customers.
    Since couriers are always changing their prices we cannot offer a table of shipping costs, as it would immediately be out of date.
    However, we can and do update the computer system as soon as there are any changes to shipping costs. Therefore, the costs that you get from researching shipping costs in this way should be current.
    I hope this helps!

  8. Jennifer September 21, 02:02

    And you have to do this for each product for every country one by one? That is insane and ridiculous. Surely you have a better system than this!

  9. Jennifer September 21, 02:04

    If you could provide the weight of all of your products on a list for resellers, then the resellers could calculate their own shipping costs. You NEED this information. It is critical.

  10. fabio November 6, 23:49

    How much dollar “Aspire – Quad Band Dual-SIM Cellphone with QWERTY Keyboard” up in Albania?

  11. Alfredo Castro January 4, 03:59

    Hi I need some information I am from Mexico and is always used shiping FEDEX, but at this moment you do not offer this service and buy some orders by UPS, but and has a lot of problems and I prefer FEDEX there any way I can send my orders FedEx?

  12. Adrian January 4, 14:34

    Hi Alfredo,
    As I know FedEx is currently an available option for Mexican customers, so I’m unsure of your issue here. It is best to send an email to: support[@] chinavasion [.com]
    Thanks!

  13. constance January 13, 12:55

    I feel that you need to have the weight of all of your products so we can put on my website. Also I need the shipping chart.

  14. Adrian January 14, 11:39

    Hi Constance, I will pass on your feedback to management. It’s useful.

    In the meantime perhaps this blog can help? http://blog.chinavasion.com/index.php/2815/international-shipping-rate-calculation-a-foolproof-7-step-plan/

    Thanks for letting us know.

  15. Angela August 11, 03:47

    Is it possible to give the most expensive country and the cheapest? This could help me to determine a flat shipping rate and I have not to try out 150 countries first.

  16. xlxmarketing August 16, 17:23

    Hi Angela,
    Actually, shipping rates mainly depend on the weight and size of products. there is no way to say which country is the most expensive or the cheapest destination to ship a product.

  17. rose October 2, 22:44

    Hi perhaps at least you can put a link of courier companies you deal with in china that has calculation in their website. For example FEDEX from Shenzen China website that has built in shipping calculator base on weightage (base on size) and destination. So we can toggle the calculator ourselves.This way, they will update their own price everytime, so no hassle at your part to keep update .

    At your part, you can put on all the product weightage in product description. So at least when we go to shipping company website calculator by ourselves and fill in the weight and destination, Voila!..we got our shipping cost. So we left out your burden as well .. In both ways, win win situation.

  18. xlxmarketing October 17, 13:15

    Hi Daniel,
    Thank you for your comment, our customer support staff will contact you in 24 hours!

  19. Marianne October 26, 03:08

    Hi,

    How much would be the range of shipping cost within the US?

  20. xlxmarketing October 27, 17:16

    Hi Marianne,
    Thank you for your comment.
    The shipping cost entirely depends on the size/weight of orders, you will see the fee in our check-out system! Enjoy shopping 🙂

  21. John January 27, 15:49

    Hi Alice,
    Had a good chat. You answered all my question. Good online support.

  22. abraham perez g July 4, 00:44

    good tanks

  23. arkadi December 3, 01:54

    I offer two simple ways-first Specify your size weight: gross and net and give us each company’s shipping calculator (delivery) of working with you. any change to the cost of transportation (delivery) will occur automatically with the carrier’s website.
    Option 2 Give a working link to a site that works with you (Dropshipping) partner.
    All products have a code and if you order and delivery is selected automatically from your site the shipping cost of a company that is added to the sum of the order on the site partner (Dropshipping)

  24. sAM May 30, 05:20

    FOR EXAMPLE, MY SITE HAS DEFAULT COUNTRY A, AND IF SOMEONE WANTS A PRODUCT DELIVERY TO COUNTRY B, HOW CAN I CHARGE HIM CORRECTLY FOR DELIVERY FROM COUNTRY C (CHINA) TO COUNTRY B (HIS COUNTRY)????

  25. www.googl.com October 29, 09:00

    Thanks for the auspicious writeup. It actually used to be a leisure account it. Look complex to far brought agreeable from you! However, how could we communicate?

  26. Kristians November 18, 17:53

    Yes, i have the same problem. I want to do partnership in drop-shipping business, but i need to name delivery price already when i list my items on different sites, but i can know shipping cost only when buyer orders item and i get to know his country.

    So without shipping cost i cant sell items, but without naming country, size (i can get this), weight i can’t know shipping cost.

    What to do?

  27. mikea December 17, 16:33

    hello everyone,
    we all have the same problem because we can not define the same price for all customers, due to the change in transport costs. And as Daniel said above, sometimes the shipping costs are more expensive than the price of the product

  28. Abbas January 20, 00:23

    I think chinavasion.com need to partner with a bigger company like yahoo and google to find out the solution to this problem.
    Thanks

  29. norton November 27, 06:16

    The problem of transport costs by providing the dropshipper is a serious problem.
    The CSV with including shipping costs for a country that’s fine, but sel’acquisto is directed to another country as you calcona shipping charges.
    I saw that recently there is also the connection API, this method can not show my customer the actual cost of shipping?

  30. Egdar January 15, 02:32

    Sounds like all of us have the same complicated issue about shipping cost. It woud be great to do business with if this issue cou;d be resolved.
    sincerely
    Edgar

  31. SamLin March 23, 11:32

    Hi Norton, shipping prices should be available in our datafeed. It shows the lowest express shipping cost as well as the airmail shipping cost. You might try download our XML instead of CSV for some extra detailed information.

    Our API solution is definitely more advanced, and can show all the actual shipping methods and prices! It would be worthwhile to setup. Email us anytime if you have questions or need support.

  32. DCAB April 22, 14:09

    What about this: Can Chinavasion give us the actual source of the product? Is this possible? This way, we can always find ourselves a shopping cart where shipping can be integrated but we always have to put the place of origin of the product to get a fairly accurate shipping estimate. Is this possible?

  33. Joe Yee July 22, 22:10

    It seems I am not alone having the same challenges on the shipping fees. I have everything ready but I cannot launch my site due to this obstacle. I was cracking my head for more than 2 weeks now. If Chinavasion can adopt to a Flat rate it would be nice but I don’t think that possible too. Now I try to figure out the categorization of the product based on weight and size and work on different shipping classes to different categories of product. I know this will still not be perfect but at the end of the day I need to make sure that I am profiting from it. I am following this thread so any suggestion is appreciated.

  34. Nestor Alfaro August 3, 01:27

    in my case I’ll put items on ebay, I’ll have to put the highest rate shipping costs not to have lost I see no other solution because the products have to place them as free shipping, honestly it is complicated this system because there is no stable shipping fee.

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