woo-cost-of-shipping

My company (crankports.com) has been doing e-commerce for 17 years, shipping our products direct to consumers. The first 16 years we operated on an in-house developed platform that managed every aspect of our business, but for a variety of reasons we decided to migrate to WooCommerce and went live in February 2018. One of my biggest complaints with WooCommerce was the complete lack of ability to tack and analyze true profitability. While you can track cost of goods with 3rd party plugins, it’s not complete if you’re unable to capture the cost of shipping data as well. In our case, the cost of shipping a package ranges from $7 to $50, but we only charge our customers a small portion (starting at $2.95 flat rate). We have to do this because people would never pay the actual cost of shipping. That results in us incurring very large shipping expenses that come directly out of profit. While I can see our total monthly shipping expenses in our accounting system, I have no way of knowing how profitable a particular order is, or particular type of order (weight, shipping zone, etc.). When we got this plugin it was truly a game charger as far as being able to manage our business. It works flawlessly and imports the actual cost of shipping for each order from ShipStation as soon as the order ships. We also use their “Woocommerce Net Profit” companion plugin that gives us all of the tools to roll this data up into reports that allows us to analyze the information and make educated changes to our business. We looked long and hard and there was no other plugin that did what this plugin along with the Net Profit plugin were able to do. If you ship products form a WooCommerce site, you honestly should consider this plugin as mandatory.