Item specific shipping options

Site URL: https://www.larrygoodeart.com/

Hello, I am trying to set up a store where I sell a variety of paintings and prints that are at vastly different sizes and weights, and I really need item specific shipping. Why can't we do this? At the very least I need to be able to disable the shipping costs on a few very large items and only have the pickup option, but I can't seem to even do this. Item specific shipping should be a  fundamental function if you're going to offer an e-commerce feature. Very frustrating.

Please fix. 

I have spent nearly $600 (on an annual commerce plan) and countless hours of my time to set up my shop on SQSP, just to finally be ready to open my shop and find out that NONE of the shipping integrations and apparently also not SQSP shipping labels offer a letter rate for plain, flat, 1 oz envelopes? I am in tears and SO frustrated right now. I offer free shipping and if someone is buying a postcard from me for $2, I'm not going to pay $3.75 to ship it with a package label.  There has to be a way to do this other than to type in everyone's address from their orders into another site like SendPro to buy a shipping label? Please tell me I'm missing something obvious so I can go to sleep and not feel like this was all just a big waste. 

3 hours ago, Shawsha said:

I have [found] out that NONE of the shipping integrations and apparently also not SQSP shipping labels offer a letter rate for plain, flat, 1 oz envelopes?

I can understand your frustration and I'd love to help but the shipping options and the shipping/labelling integrations are dependant on the country you are in, so it is difficult for us to provide you with advice without knowing where the store is based and the countries to which you intend to ship.

My annual subscription renewal is coming up next month, and the lack of options here is making my decision of whether or not to continue selling with Squarespace pretty clear.

I signed up about two years ago to sell a small batch of one product, and since then have only really been able to use the site to sell a single product at a time.  That has allowed me to set store-wide shipping rates each time I had a product to list.  I have had a few opportunities to expand the products I'm selling simultaneously on my store, but have not been able to find any suitable options for setting their shipping rates.  My actual shipping costs vary more based on the size of the product than the weight, as I'm primarily selling hollow 3D prints.  Weight for each product rarely goes much higher than 2 lbs, but the size of each product can vary wildly so my shipping quotes are driven more by the package size than the package weight.  Adding to this is the fact that most of the products can't easily be boxed together.  As a result, setting shipping rates by total order weight is just completely useless for me.  I could include US shipping in the product price, but I don't want to limit my sales to the US; I could set up the US for "Free" (i.e. included) flat shipping and require other customers to pay an additional shipping fee, but run into the same issues in calculating how much they should be charged for what they're buying and where they're located.

"Carrier calculated" shipping sounds like it would be ideal for my situation, based on how it's described in the Squarespace Help Center.  But it requires the "Advanced Commerce" plan at more than double the price of the "Business" plan I'm currently on.  Selling products online is a side interest for me with very modest sales, and not a single one of the other features missing from the "Business" plan is something I feel I'd benefit enough from that it would justify the increased subscription cost.  And while real-time carrier-calculated shipping rates would be nice, just having reasonable options to manually set my shipping rates is all I actually need.  It'd be nice if I could gradually grow my online sales to a point that does justify the "Advanced Commerce" subscription fee, but I see no path from here to there as expanding the business is stymied by the options available to me.  Using the "carrier calculated" option to avoid losing money on shipping is pretty pointless if I'm instead just losing it to a subscription fee that's too high for my sales to support.

As a website-builder Squarespace has presentation options and ease-of-use that I really appreciate.  But I'm paying for ecommerce features that I can't actually use, despite having items that I would love to be able to list for sale.  I cannot list online the inventory of items that I currently sell at events, much less really consider further expanding my online business with a wide variety of made-to-order items (which was ultimately my longer-term goal) without potentially either losing my shirt on shipping or significantly overcharging customers for it.  The terrible shipping options are a major blocker preventing me from expanding my online offerings, and the sole reason that I cannot justify renewing my Squarespace subscription for another year when it expires next month.  Given that this appears to have been a known issue for years on Squarespace, with no sign of any improvement, it's clearly time for me to take my business elsewhere.

On 11/10/2021 at 2:33 PM, paul2009 said:

Squarespace employees don't monitor this forum for feature requests or issues (see the guidelines - item 6).

To raise this issue with Squarespace open a feature request ticket through Squarespace Customer Care. The more they hear from customers who are affected by missing features, the easier it is for them to prioritise them.

BTW, I'm not seeing any way to actually open a feature request at that link.  I choose request type "Commerce and online stores" and then choose "Shipping rates" and it just says "We think this will help" and gives me a link to their help article about setting up shipping rates.

The link you provided, btw, appears to be the same page that's reached via the "Contact Us" link at the top of both the forum and help center.  That it doesn't actually provide a way to contact anyone is fairly telling...

On 8/7/2022 at 5:55 AM, paul2009 said:

I can understand your frustration and I'd love to help but the shipping options and the shipping/labelling integrations are dependant on the country you are in, so it is difficult for us to provide you with advice without knowing where the store is based and the countries to which you intend to ship.

Thanks for the reply. I'm in the USA and I'm just trying to create a label for shipping within the USA, at a 1 oz letter rate. I have contacted SQSP customer service and they have said it's just not something they offer. I'm pretty frustrated with it and keep thinking there must be a work-around for such a simple thing to be done in a website that can host even the largest e-commerce shops.

5 hours ago, Shawsha said:

I'm just trying to create a label for shipping within the USA, at a 1 oz letter rate. I have contacted SQSP customer service and they have said it's just not something they offer. I'm pretty frustrated with it and keep thinking there must be a work-around for such a simple thing

Support are correct. The shipping options are buried in a part of Squarespace that users (and third party developers) cannot access, which means we cannot create a solution or workaround. You'll need Squarespace to add this as a feature.

I just had this question from a client and they aren't too happy that this can't be done.

Suggestion..   instead of the product specific shipping to be set up in each individual product, set up the shipping options under eCommerce (as we do now) and then for each individual product, be able to check off the shipping options that you want to show for that product.  This way if that shipping price changes, it only needs to be changed in one place -- under eCommerce / Shipping instead of going into every single individual product. 

 

I am shocked that Squarespace doesn't offer this simple function. Setting up specific shipping costs by each item........

I was trying workaround such as creating diverse Shipping Options, but obviously the inventory setup doesn't offer Choosing "Shipping Options" even though we can create several shipping options by default/weights by zone....

My courier company charge the shipping cost based on weight / Measurement / types of shipping (freight or ocean..) , but Squarespace made this impossible. 

Hope Squarespace supports Commerce customers with this new function of setting up specific shipping costs per item. 

Can someone suggest a platform that solves this issue?

It is 2022 for Pete's sake. 

I'd also like to know an alternative. This makes doing business incredibly difficult.

On 10/5/2022 at 9:27 AM, Donna_Vincent said:

I just had this question from a client and they aren't too happy that this can't be done.

Suggestion..   instead of the product specific shipping to be set up in each individual product, set up the shipping options under eCommerce (as we do now) and then for each individual product, be able to check off the shipping options that you want to show for that product.  This way if that shipping price changes, it only needs to be changed in one place -- under eCommerce / Shipping instead of going into every single individual product. 

 

@Donna_VincentThanks! I setup shipping options under eCommerce setting for my client also. However, I don't see a way to check off the shipping options that you want to show for each product. Can you please explain how to do this.

I really need this feature. Surely it's been implemented by now?? It's 2023

I have just switched back to Shopify after dealing with this and several other extremely basic limitations in Squarespace. Like all of you, I share the frustration but sadly there is no other option then leaving, if you are indeed in need of something as simple as item-dependent shipping costs. Shopify has very nice "return customer" options by the way, you can save the first year with your shop subscription if you return from Squarespace to them, just so you know... : ) 

In 2023, why is Squarespace's shipping set up so archaic?  Why can't it be integrated versus setting up by zip code to zip code.  Every test has been a disaster.  Truly regretting SS as my choice for commerce.  This needs to be SO much more easy, effortless and intuitive for the ui/ux experience---for both us and the customer experience.  

Unfortunately if a customer chooses five product and each has a different price whoa, incredible confusing for both my store and my customer.

A simple shipping $ per product would solve this really messed up shipping multiple items.

Very bad for our business.  

How can I create 8 basic by product shipping rates.

On 3/19/2023 at 12:48 PM, credd said:

In 2023, why is Squarespace's shipping set up so archaic?  Why can't it be integrated versus setting up by zip code to zip code.  Every test has been a disaster.  Truly regretting SS as my choice for commerce.  This needs to be SO much more easy, effortless and intuitive for the ui/ux experience---for both us and the customer experience.  

Tried so many different ways to get through this terrible problem, all these work around come up short by some equation.   Solving the problem is so easy, simple a by product flat rate option.

On 12/3/2020 at 1:16 PM, eoddistillery said:

FIX IT!

It's available. you just have to PAY MORE FOR IT.
 ETSY and EBAY, AMAZON etc have had this available to everyone for years. SQSPC wants to ue pay portals and charge more for it.
 I would like to JUST SEND MY BUYERS TO MY PAYAL FOR CHECKOUT AND SHIP VIA SHIPSTATION THERE

>

Im pretty sure i'll be leaving SQSPC when my year is up. This is a ridiculous feature not to have in 2023. As others have said, pretty much every other ecommerce platform can do this no hassle. Larger products simply have a different cost to ship than smaller ones and the fact SQSPC don't seem to recognise this is baffling. Also the fact you cant automatically put products in alphabetical order and have to actually drag and drop them in order is ludicrous. 

But like many other features not available as standard, you can pay extra to squarespace coder to get it.. wink wink. 

so many basic features are withheld and a pricepoint demanded if you want them.

After introducing a new product to our shop page that isn't fulfilled by our third party company, I was so glad to find out about the introduction of Fulfillment Profiles! Only to find that they still reference global shipping parameters that affect all other orders, and essentially aren't specific to that new item at all.  

This is a major fail.  I pay a good deal for this subscription and I couldn't agree more with everyone else's assessment - this is absolutely absurd that you can not assign specific shipping prices and parameters to specific items.  Even Etsy, the.most.basic. platform offers this.  

I just don't understand. Please please fix this.  

We all like SP design, but this is just, almost, untenable for anyone trying to sell anything, which is, almost, everyone. 

I just upgraded to their premium plan, and I still have to go through and manually fill out shipping information for each order, despite filling out custom package sizes for each service tier, associating dimensions and weights with products and filling out product specific shipping profiles.

It's ridiculous that you all are taking this information, using it to quote, and then cannot apply the service you all quoted with the weights and dimensions.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I REGRET signing up for squarespace. Do not recommend for commerce, and I dissuade everyone I speak to. 

Still no response from SQSP.

please know, your new shipping profiles feature does NOTHING to help.

yes, switching platforms this year is a must.