How To Create Shipping Profiles + Set Up Shipping Upgrades On Etsy
It’s September which means, it’s almost Christmas. And that means things are about to get busy!!
One way to get ahead of the holiday insanity is to have things ready to go or publish way before you think you’ll need them. Shipping is a huge concern during the holidays of course, so making that aspect of business more streamlined is in your best interest as a shop owner.
Etsy allows you to create what they call “shipping profiles” and you should take advantage of them if you aren’t! There is also the option to allow shipping upgrades which is of course something shoppers will want to see at holiday time.
Here’s how to get ahead and set these things up now so they are ready to go when you need them.
First, go to your shop settings page and click “shipping profiles” in the sidebar. This will bring you to a screen where you will see a blue button to “create shipping profile” in the top right corner. Click it!
There are so many possibilities here for profiles but as an example, let’s create a profile for a Free Shipping Black Friday Sale! For this sale, we will offer free shipping vis USPS first class mail to addresses within the USA. We will offer this on all our products - a ready to ship item and a made to order item. These items have different “processing times” (amount of time before the item is ready to be put in the mail.) So we will create two profiles:
1. “black friday free domestic shipping - ready to ship”
2. “black friday free domestic shipping - made to order”
Go ahead and begin creating your first profile for this sale by naming it name it“black friday free domestic shipping - ready to ship” (just FYI, customers won’t see this title.)
Etsy will ask you if you want to use calculated shipping or “create your own”… I’m selecting “create your own” because I think in most cases, sellers are sending similar or standardized packages of similar weight and size. (Calculated shipping is great for vintage sellers who sell all sorts of items of varied weights and sizes.)
Now you’ll fill in the country you ship from and your processing time. Remember, ythis is the processing time that applies only to the ready to ship item in your shop! (You can batch apply the profiles later on to the items.)
Since this is a free shipping sale, just plug in “$0.00” as the shipping price to the United States for the item “by itself” and “with another”:
Now you can input your usual shipping costs for “everywhere else” or the specific countries you send to. Beneath this you’ll see a place to create a “shipping upgrade” (if you are in the USA, it will say “…within the USA”)
This is a feature you can use here and on other existing profiles or future profiles. Input the amount ADDITIONAL it will cost to upgrade the shipping! In my example, I’m offering an upgrade to USPS priority shipping, and since my starting price is $0, i’m inputting $7.00. If you want to offer an upgrade on international shipping you can do that as well.
Now to complete the profiles needed for this sale, you will have to create a second profile for the made to order items in your shop. Once both are made, you can batch edit your listings and apply these profiles to the products in your shop!
Another tip for using shipping profiles to prep for the holidays is to create staged processing time profiles per product. Example: the made to order product might increase in lead or “processing” time after the black friday sale, so you can create a store a profile to apply to those items AFTER the sale which will change the processing time to 2-3 weeks.
Get creative with this and be smart! You can create profiles and publish them months later. I like to keep a free shipping profile on hand for any flash sales I might feel the urge to run at the last minute.
If you are interested in prepping your shop even more for the holidays, now would be an excellent time to take my Etsy Training Course! (LINK: http://members.merriweathercouncil.com)
How else do you use shipping profiles to streamline and simplify the business you do on Etsy?
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ABOUT DANIELLE
Danielle Spurge, founder of The Merriweather Council, is a crafter and craft business consultant to handmade shop owners who want to optimize and leverage their work, and build better brands and businesses. Danielle works and writes to inspire and support makers in business by sharing insights from her five years of experience selling handmade work online. Danielle's Etsy Training Course (bit.ly/etsytrainer) teaches Etsy sellers how to position their shops and listings for increased traffic, more sales and improved customer relationships. More info can be found RIGHT HERE.
