Pirate Ship is not a shopping cart plugin. We're simply the cheapest way to buy a shipping label after you have a completed order. We don’t display shipping costs on your website to your potential customers; we’re more of a backend app 😉
If you’d like to display shipping rates to your customers, here are some options you may find useful:
Option 1: Purchase a Weight-Based Shipping Calculator Plugin
Every eCommerce platform has an app store where you can purchase a weight-based shipping calculator (except for marketplaces like Ebay and Etsy). Your customers will then see these rates and pay for them when they check out. These plugins typically display higher shipping rates than you’ll see on Pirate Ship, since we offer the deepest discounts on the seven seas! You can pocket the difference, or use the extra booty to cover operational costs like packaging 😎
Option 2: Offer "Free" Shipping
As small business owners ourselves, we saw higher conversion rates if we offered "free" shipping. You can offer free shipping by calculating the average cost for shipping an item and adding a fixed shipping cost based on that average. You can learn how to calculate your average cost of shipping here.
Option 3: Manually Set Up a Rates and Zone-Based Shipping Calculator
The third option to display your exact shipping costs to your users is to set up a rate and zone-based shipping calculator. We don’t recommend this option, because of the time it takes to set up and maintain. USPS and UPS change their prices every year, and you would need to implement these changes to continue displaying accurate rates every time they change. That said, if you’re up to the task, setting up a rate and zone-based calculator is the best way to have the most control over your customer’s shipping costs 👍
You can find the most up-to-date USPS Commercial Pricing rates here. If you decide to go this route, we’ve got some resources that might point you in the right direction for the following integrations:
Note: You can easily export orders from your e-commerce site and drag and drop a spreadsheet into Pirate Ship, or use one of our awesome integrations when you're ready to ship!
Waters feeling a bit murky? Be sure to chat with us if you have any more questions 😃