Having a Shopify ecommerce store is no small feat. You’ve prepared your products, perfected your branding and customized your shipping box. There’s now one step left to get your product to your customers—shipping.
It may seem simple, but shipping holds weight when it comes to how your customers view your brand. The second most common reason why people abandon their shopping carts is because of shipping. Customers might not like their shipping options, how much it costs them or the delivery times.
Thankfully, Shopify has plenty of apps to help you with shipping. With so many available, how do you find your best options? We’ve rounded up 10 best Shopify shipping apps for ecommerce.
What to Know Before Choosing a Shopify Shipping App
Before you choose an app or two, there are a few things you have to take into consideration. A shipping app should help you with your shipping process in several ways. It should ultimately make it easy for you to find the best shipping rates, print shipping labels and help you better communicate with your customers about their shipment.
What Are its Core Functions?
Make a list of what you want a Shopify shipping app to help you with. Ask yourself a few questions to help with your list. What features does the shipping app boast? How will it optimize your shipping process? Will it fit with your store?
Different apps have different shipping preparation times. You’ll want to make sure the app you choose facilitates shipping in a timely manner. Research shows that around 18% of customers choose where they shop based on delivery times and 61% of them don’t mind paying more for same-day delivery.
Other important functions to think about include tracking, types of shipping labels and the number of users and mailing accounts the app can support.
What’s the Price You Pay?
As a small business owner, you were most likely thinking of this immediately after you started reading this article. Price is important.
Set aside a budget for your shipping app price. If the app you choose helps you save time by automating tasks and helps you find the best shipping prices for your customers, it will be worth the investment.
There are also free Shopify shipping apps available if your budget is tight. Just make sure to read up about what the app offers and how much manual work you’ll have to put in to make up the difference.
What Are People Saying About the App?
What’s the best way to read up about an app? By checking the reviews. After you’ve done your own research, it’s always best to check out other people’s experiences with the app. You may own a small business, but you’ve also shopped online yourself. You know reviews can help influence a customer’s decision on what they choose.
Shopify makes this easy by including the reviews right on the app description page.
Now that you know what to do when looking for shipping apps, you can start looking for the best Shopify shipping app for you. We’ve kickstarted your search and rounded up 10 best Shopify shipping apps that will help you boost your ecommerce business.
1. AfterShip — Track and Notify
If you don’t currently do it, you most likely remember personally touching base with your customers on their shipping status. Instead of manually entering tracking and shipping details and reaching back out to your customers, automate your process. AfterShip makes it simple for you. It tracks your orders for you and your customers.
You know we love personalization and branding. AfterShip allows you to brand your own tracking page. Your customers will have a seamless transition from email or website to tracking page.
2. Shippo
Shippo is a big time-saver for ecommerce store owners. It helps automate the bulk of the shipping process and allows you to take care of your shipping needs in one place. Find discounted shipping rates, print labels and automatically send tracking info to your customers.
Best of all, Shippo works with big shippers like USPS and DHL. This means big shipping savings on both your end and your customers’ ends.
We like that Shippo allows you to print return labels for free. This enhances your customer experience by making returns simple for them. You’ll only pay if your customer makes the return.
3. Shipping Rates Calculator +
Remember what we said above about how customers really check on the shipping rates before checking out? Shipping Rates Calculator Plus displays shipping costs to your customers right in their shopping cart. It makes your customers feel more confident about the checkout process and increases the usability of your store.
Customers also didn’t just abandon their carts because the shipping cost was too high. Some abandoned their carts because they couldn’t even see their shipping rates to begin with. Be upfront with your customers. They’ll appreciate it.
Shipping rates are displayed on your shopping cart page with a map showing the customer location and the option to select a different location. It also displays estimated delivery dates.
4. ShippingEasy
ShippingEasy is a popular Shopify shipping app for small to medium-sized businesses. Growing quickly? ShippingEasy will still scale with you. We like saving money for our customers and we like that ShippingEasy thinks the same way. It ultimately helps you save money on your shipping processes.
Automate several of your shipping processes like shipping labels, shipping status communication and customer information storage. ShippingEasy also offers inventory management, which sets it apart from many other shipping apps available. This means your stock levels will automatically update in your Shopify store in real-time.
ShippingEasy also offers pre-built email marketing templates to earn reviews and repeat business. We can’t help but love this next feature too. Customize your packing slips with your brand or colors so your customers have a seamless transition from your store to the package they receive.
5. Easyship
Easyship is a free shipping app that allows you to access over 250 shipping carriers, including international. What we like about this app is that it calculates tax and duty rates for you and allows customers to see shipping rates up front from their end as well.
You can also sync your orders and print shipping labels from the app. If you’re wondering how Easyship can offer so much for free, the app states on the Shopify app store description that they get a little commission from shipping couriers they work with.
So even though everything is free for you, shipping prices might be slightly higher for your customers.
6. ShipperHQ
The app allows you to set your shipping rates based on your products, geographic zones, warehouse locations and more.
With ShipperHQ, you can craft custom and real-time shipping rates for defined groups of products, set shipping costs for certain geographic zones, set product weights, price thresholds and cart quantities, add special discounts, surcharges and promotions, enable table rates, flat rate shipping and dimensional weight-based shipping costs.
We use ShipperHQ ourselves here at Brandable Box. We’ve been able to offer LTL shipping, set our shipping zones to the lower 48 states only, and enable dimensional weight-based shipping.
7. Parcelify - Shipping
With Parcelify, you can control the price of shipping and the options your customers see at checkout.
You can also set up your store for local delivery and pick-up, offer free shipping, set up drop shipping, or offer flat-rate shipping. You also have the option of setting up weight-based rates.
8. ShipStation
ShipStation helps make importing, managing, and shipping your orders more efficient.
With ShipStation, you can access USPS, UPS, and FedEx discounts on shipping rates for your store.
You can also compare prices in-app with real-time rate information. ShipStation’s discounts make it easier for smaller businesses to offer free shipping.
9. Advanced Shipping Rules
Have a complicated product with complicated shipping requirements? Advanced Shipping Rules can help.
You can set up shipping for your Shopify store with no coding or programming knowledge. Configure and manage your own shipping rates and rules for your products with major shipping carriers.
What’s Next?
We’ve rounded up the 10 best Shopify shipping apps for ecommerce we could find. Now, it’s up to you to make a list of your biggest shipping needs, read each app’s reviews and figure out which app will both make shipping easy for you and for your customers.
Apps can help you automate your shipping process, but your shipping box will still be your customer’s first physical impression of your store. Why not impress them with a custom shipping box? Browse custom shipping boxes.