Website shipping issues
The sawmill has been very busy this week with another trim order. This order is by far our largest molding order. It is heading to a new construction project. I thank the customer for choosing to shop local and giving us an opportunity to supply them with our product.
However the topic of this blog is to talk about the issue I am having trying to find a shipping option for the website. Fist off I would like to start by saying that this is my second crack at developing a website. The first time I used WordPress this time I used squarespace. I have to say for a person like me that doesn’t know much about web development the squarespace option was much nicer experience. The development with squarespae was easy starting with the great templets they offer and the very intuitive way of editing your pages. I found it a very enjoyable to set up my new webpage and ecommerce site with squarespace. That is until I got to the shipping options squarespace offers.
Squarespace only seams to offer three shipping options Flat rate shipping, shipping by including a fee to certain weight or calculated shipping. Flat rate shipping and shipping by weight might be ok if you are shipping in a defined area with very standard packages however in our shop we offer a broad range of products that very with size and weight as well as a large geographic area, hoping to sell to the United States and Canada. Another issue is that you are not able to exclude products from the shipping option. This causes an issue if you are not offering shipping for a specific product. So the calculated shipping seamed to be the only option. The issues was that it almost doubled the price it cost to have the website for the year and for a small shop like mine this was a descent amount of money for this service, however it was the only option. So I upgraded my service to premium ecommerce account and signed up for calculated shipping. To my major dismay I come to find out that the calculated shipping only applies to United State’s so I was not even able to put a Canadian address in for the point of origin so needless to say this did not work for me or my customers.
I know this is allot of inside baseball and many of you could not careless about this blog. But I though I would share some of my issues with dealing with this problem and give some explanation to those customers that would like to have us ship them products.
I will reach out to Squarespace to see if they have any other possible options that might work in Canada for a site like this. I will keep you posted.