Magento 2 Challenges: How to Manage Shipping Well?

1. What makes a Magento 2 e-store successful?
2. Amasty Shipping Suite: what’s in?
3. Shipping Rules
4. Shipping Restrictions
5. Shipping Table Rates
6. Sum-up

For the last 7 years, eCommerce has been on a steady rise, and according to the latest stats, it’s not going to stop any time soon. And the growing number of digital buyers, that has seen a 1.5 increase since 2014, is a solid proof to it.

However, other statistics source tells us that the rate of e-commerce sales growth is to be dropping, from 26% in 2014 to only 18% in 2021. So is it possible to ensure your sales rate growth doesn’t reduce? We have some ideas we’d like to share.

What makes a Magento 2 e-store successful?

Merchants try very hard to answer this question, and so do we. Most popular quality goods? Sure they matter, but that’s what you know and ensure.

Swift page load? It does matter. After all, around 80% of users don’t give another chance to a store that failed their user experience at least once.

Engaging design with user-friendly themes? They also matter.

But none of the above will secure a customer’s come-back if they had a bad shipping experience. What makes the latter?

Flexible shipping calculation, adjustable shipping methods, clear information about deliveries. Sadly, none is available in native Magento 2.

Luckily, we can help you solve this trouble with a 3-in-one solution - Magento 2 Shipping Suite.

Amasty Shipping Suite: what’s in?

Shipping Suite is a comprehensive solution that offers 3 basic modules able to ensure efficient shipment in your Magento 2 store. Let’s consider the process of setting up a delivery. So what’s the 1st step?

When you run some activity, you strive to make it efficient, i.e. to hit the balance between efforts and the time you spend. You need to set some boundaries: what is worth doing, what is useless, and what is harmful at all. In other words, you need to set up some GROUND RULES. This approach works in any field of activity, shipping included.

Shipping Rules

Merchants often complain about the lack of flexibility when it comes to the rules in Magento 2. Luckily, vendors cover this gap providing a range of extensions to meet the needs of most picky users. Let’s see how it works in our module.

Magento 2 Shipping Rules is a highly flexible tool permitting you to do some magic. The thing is, with this tool you can modify carriers shipping costs and adjust them to your business needs. It’s possible due to a range of pre-set conditions available, and you can even combine them to cover tricky shipping cases.

What’s more, you can offer different shipping methods to different customer groups and store views. But the magic doesn’t stop here: you can even set shipping rules relying on the item attributes, such as brand, and even the color.

One of the extension features gave us a bright idea to make it even more flexible. The extension supports ZIP codes, so you can set shipping rules based on the customer’s address. But what if you have, say 20+ customers living in the same city district? Setting conditions for each delivery separately takes time, but with Shipping Areas feature, it’s just a matter of some clicks. You just need to group customers’ addresses into areas. There’s a range of parameters to choose: you can include/exclude particular zip codes, cities, regions and even countries. Now the rules you create for the area will work for all destinations within it.

So the rules are up and running. What else you need for efficient shipping? Do’s and Don’t, remember? So if the Do’s are in, we need the Do-not’s, or restrictions.

Shipping Restrictions

Flexible shipping rules, however useful, don’t always work. Sometimes, shipping should be restricted due to extremely high costs, the nature of goods and even legal reasons. And here comes a problem: how to explain a customer you can’t ship to their country because it’s too expensive or not safe? Obviously, they won’t be happy. This may result in negative reviews (and not only), which actually influence buying decision in 88% of customers.

With Magento 2 Shipping Restrictions, you’ll be able to limit shipping to/from certain countries and areas with no damage to your store reputation. In its functions, this module is like a mirror reflection of Shipping Rules giving you the possibility to turn any rule available into a restriction.

Here are the possible options:

The last but not the least: just like Shipping Rules, this extension allows you to set up restrictions based on shipping areas, which saves your time and efforts.

Do’s and Do-not’s considered, what we have left? The price of the matter. And the Suite offers a flexible and efficient solution - Magento 2 Shipping Table Rates. We’ll discuss the module below.

Shipping Table Rates

Setting prices to shipping services is a complex task. The price of shipping depends on a range of parameters such as the nature of a good, its size and weight, the material it’s made from, its price and a lot more. The destination also plays an important part in pricing: shipping to some capital is a way easier than sending a good to a remote area. However, the geographic location also matters: sending a good by train is a way cheaper than by plane.

These are just some parameters e-commerce vendors should consider to evaluate shipping cost. When done independently, the process may take much time, Shipping Table Rates for Magento 2 facilitates it considerably.

The module offers highly flexible settings that allow setting different shipping rates to groups of products and even individual products. Besides, it supports volumetric weight calculation, a pricing method widely accepted by international carriers. What’s more, the extension flexibility works well not only for vendors but also for customers. They can order products that fall into various shipping types, and you can provide fair and acceptable pricing using flat and percent rates and their combinations.

Many customers abandon carts because they don’t know how much the shipping will cost. With Shipping Table Rates, you’ll manage to keep your customers in the know about the price of shipping and even the possible delivery date right on the cart page. With these features, you are likely to reduce cart abandonment rate by 44%. And another heartwarming feature - caring about your customers, you will stay in the black yourself. Just set min/max rates to product types and shipping methods.

Sum-up

We’ve discussed all the tree modules that are bound to help you set up an efficient shipping process. So why not purchase only, say Magento 2 Shipping Rules or Table Rates alone? Just have a look at the table:

As you can see, the modules are not equal in the features they provide, and they all are available only in Magento 2 Shipping Suite. Haven’t decided yet? Just have another look.

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