Shopify App - Features & Benefits
Introduction
The Big Post Shopify integration provides Big Post customers with the following benefits:
- Calculates real-time and accurate shipping quotes directly from the Big Post system to provide to your customers.
- Saves you time and money; your customer's order is booked with Big Post automatically, reducing manual data entry.
- Provides you with an additional revenue stream by allowing you to add a margin to the shipping cost.
- Allows your customer to request a quick shipping quote from each product page, before they even add the product to their cart.
Quoting & Booking
As you may know, Big Post uses live rates from carriers every time you request a quote. Our integration enables your customers to receive a live shipping quote and book the same delivery they were quoted for, directly into the Big Post system.
Once an order is placed and booked in the Big Post system through the integration, you can edit, delete, or despatch the job to the carrier at your convenience.
During an online transaction, your customer will:
- Choose between Home or Business delivery. Home delivery options may include 'Authority to Leave' or a 'Tailgate Home Delivery'.
- Have the option to collect their order from a depot.
- Be provided with the cheapest quote from our portfolio of carriers. You can customize this to restrict certain carriers of your choice from being included in the calculation.
Once the customer has submitted their order:
- The delivery will be booked into the Big Post system. You can find it in your pending jobs. While the job is still 'pending', you will be able to edit it prior to despatch.
- If your customer has purchased multiple small items, such as cartons or satchels, you can choose to manually consolidate or reconfigure the packaging by editing the product dimensions via Pending Jobs –> Edit Job within the Big Post system, potentially saving on your freight cost.
Product Quick Quote
While browsing your store, customers can quickly obtain a shipping quote for a specific product to be delivered to their home, business, or the nearest depot. The shipping quote widget appears below the 'Add to Cart' button by default, but we are working on making it movable to your preferred location.
To obtain the quote, customers only need to enter their postcode and, depending on the settings, select from Home, Business or Depot. If the product requires larger/bulkier delivery to a receiver without unloading facilities, there will be a series of questions to ensure that a tailgate or crane truck can deliver to them if needed.
Checkout Shipping Quote
When a customer enters their shipping address, Big Post calculates the shipping cost for their items based on the dimensions and weights of the product(s) saved on the Custom Integration System (CIS). The system then offers Home, Business, and Depot delivery options for the customer to select from to proceed with payment.
Shopify Order Submitted
After the receiver has submitted and paid for their order, the job will be automatically created and appear on your Big Post system under "Pending Jobs".
As the job has not yet been despatched, you can edit the job details, such as items, addresses, contact details, etc. If you wish, you can manually consolidate the order and potentially save on shipping.
Please note that it will not consolidate items automatically, so the shipping cost will calculate as multiple items under the same consignment.
Pickups
Pickups can be made from a single location only. That is, for each transaction or job, there can only be one pickup location.
Warehouse Locations
If you would like to ship products from multiple locations, Shopify is able to request multiple quotes for each part of the order, but the products would need to be in different shipping profiles in your Shopify shipping settings for them to quote separately.
Whilst it can be made to quote separately and give your customer the sum of the shipping costs of each part of the order, the integration can only create one job per order/transaction. Its important to note that pickups can only be made from one warehouse per Big Post job.
This means the integration may not be the most efficient for retailers who have different types of stock located at multiple warehouses.
For example, the blue item is only stocked in your Sydney warehouse and the red item is only in your Melbourne warehouse and these items are often purchased together in the same transaction. Shopify may calculate the shipping cost for both consignments and charge the customer the sum of both, but the integration will not be able to create a Big Post job picking up from two locations.
Freight Cost Margin
The integration allows you to add a margin or packing fee to the shipping cost. You can choose to add the margin as a dollar value or as a percentage.
Products
Variations
Our integration supports variations of a single item. For example if you are selling garden sheds and your customers can choose between different sizes, then you can set the different package dimensions for each variation's SKU, in the CIS. The integration will then use the SKU for the selected size of the product to find the correct package information to calculate the shipping price.
Importing Products
In order to use this integration, your product's packaging information will be required. It will use the SKUs for each of your products on Shopify to reference the packaging information saved in the CIS.
To make this easier for you, we have two ways for you to add the required product information on the CIS.
'Import Shopify Products'
Shopify only records the name, SKU and weight on your products, as such, this feature will only import those variables into the CIS. You will then need to manually enter the item dimensions and package type for each of your products. However, if you have too many products to manually enter the dimensions for, we have another way!
'Import CSV'
This method allows you to import all your product information at once, and even set some product-specific preferences, including where the product is stocked at and whether you want to offer depot and business jobs as well. This saves you from having to manually edit each product to add the item dimensions and set your preferences, and you can edit as many products as you like in bulk!
'Export CSV'
This method allows you to export all your product information at once, in the same format as required to import products. This allows you to bulk edit your existing products from a spreadsheet editor before importing the updated document to the CIS which will update all the required values.
Note: SKUs should not be edited using this method as this will create new products, rather than update the existing product.
Carrier Restrictions
For each order, the shipping is calculated in the back end the same way it would on the Big Post system. That is, when a quote is requested, the result in the back end is actually the price for each carrier and service which is suitable for the job. The integration then filters the results and offers your customer the cheapest or quickest ETA depending on your settings.
You can adjust your settings to filter out specific carriers or only take some carriers into consideration before offering your customer the cheapest quote.
Not all carriers can complete every job, please consider job and service types, pickup and delivery areas and packaging weight before restricting carriers as there could be orders only they are able to provide a service for.
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