It’s a Monday morning and you’re getting orders ready to ship. You come across an order and realize you might lose money shipping it. This is how you know it may be time to reevaluate your shipping costs.

Setting your shipping rates is important to ensure you do not lose money on orders. You need to consider your cost to ship, which includes supplies, labor, and shipping sizes. The shipping cost is applied once per order, based on the largest item in the order. If you have opted into International Orders, you’ll want to set a shipping cost for each country.  

Many sellers like to provide their customers with free shipping on orders –– this is a great way to make your items look more appealing on the marketplace, but there are a couple of things to note about it. When you are applying your shipping settings, there are three different areas to adjust for domestic orders: Free Shipping, Standard, and Expedited. The free shipping setting is for your Pro website only. You will be able to set a price at which orders made through your Pro site will ship for free. The Standard setting applies to your marketplace orders, and Pro website orders below your free shipping threshold. All marketplace orders of each size will have a set shipping cost. The Expedited setting lets you set your cost for expedited shipping, should you offer it. 

You may notice while looking at the marketplace that some sellers appear to have variable shipping. You may see a listing say “free shipping on orders over $35” or “free shipping on orders over $5.” The first, free shipping on orders over $35, is a Direct seller –– the Direct program offers this feature, and $1.99 shipping on orders under $35. The latter, free shipping on order over $5, is a seller who has set their Standard shipping to free, but the card is under $5, and thus will have a $.78 shipping fee attached to it.

Now that you know how to set your shipping rates and what qualifies for free shipping, you need to identify the correct shipping rate for you. Depending on the programs you are in, Direct and/or Pro, you have additional things to consider. With Direct, TCGplayer is shipping a lot of your orders, which reduces your shipping costs. Pro gives you the option for free shipping from your Pro Site. Taking these into consideration, you may want to include the cost of shipping into your listing prices. This allows you to have a lower displayed rate, which is more appealing to buyers. In addition, this will help prevent you from shipping large orders at a loss.

If you need help identifying the appropriate shipping rates for you, please schedule a meeting with a Customer Success Manager by selecting a time from this calendar.