Thursday, January 23, 2014

Thursday Etsy Tips: Shipping Profiles

Etsy has created Shipping Profiles to save you time when applying shipping costs to your listings. You can create a new Shipping Profile for each price point. Once the profile is complete, it can be added to or removed from a single, or multiple listing from the Shipping Profile page, without having to go into each and every listing to update the shipping costs.

Create a Shipping Profile

You find your Shipping Profiles by going to the Info and Appearance Section.


In the menu on the left hand side of the page you will see a link for Shipping Profiles, located under the Listings heading.




This will bring you to the page where you can see and manage all of your profiles. From here you can click "edit" to make changes to an existing profile or create new profile.



Click the "Create New Profile" button to go to the next screen and fill in the appropriate information.


For Profile Name I like to use a description of the items I attach the particular profile to. For example my regular journals are one price point, shipping wise, so I just use the profile name of "journal" while my "small journals" have a different shipping cost and their own profile. You can name your profiles anything you like, as long as you know what they are, no one else will see the profile name but you.

Processing Time refers to how long it will take you, the seller, to get the item in the mail. It is not the shipping time. You may want to include shipping time estimates in your Policies section.

Ships From refers to the country that you are in, where the package will be coming from.

As a default, you will ship to your own country. Fill in your shipping information with the help of the mail service provider in your country (eg. CanadaPost). You may also ship to other countries if it is your preference. This is highly recommended as you will greatly increase your customer base this way. (You really want to ship the the US if you are a Canadian.)

As an option, you may also join the "Shipping Upgrades and Shipping Profile Improvements" team to get the add shipping upgrades option you see in the bottom left corner in the above image.


The Shipping Upgrades are great for offering faster shipping times, (XpressPost, Expedited) or for us Canadians, shipment tracking upgrades as this does cost more.

Click "Create Shipping Profile" and your ready for the next step!


Link Shipping Profile to Listings

Having shipping profiles are only useful if they are applied to listings. You may apply a shipping profile to as many listings as you need. To do this go to your Listings Manager, found by hovering over Your Shop: in the top right corner of any page.


This will bring up a list of all your listed items.


The heading marked Shipping indicates which shipping profile is applied to the corresponding item. As you can see in the above image, I have three different shipping profiles applied to the journals.

To add or edit which shipping profile is applied, click the "pencil" to the right of the shipping profile name (red arrow in above image). Simply click on whichever profile you would like to add and it is updated automatically, no need to "save".


As you can see this is an excellent time saving tool, especially around this time of year when shipping prices change.

For more Etsy tips see;

Getting Started (Opening a shop)
Setting up Shop (About Page)
Info and Appearance Section
List an Item
Shop Policies 

Andrea Davis resides in Winnipeg. A proud member of WEST for 2 years and the owner of "We Are Bound Together", a shop where 100% of the proceeds go to charities. Check out her shop, or blog.

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