Anyone using dropshipping from China? How do you set up your price ranges?

[sounds]

I'm working on a store that will have some products drop-shipped from China.

I have set up one carrier for DHL, and the default zones are set, shipping by weight.

Not sure how to set up the price ranges, maybe someone else could give me some pointers.

 

I set up a few ranges, 0 to 1000 and 1000 to 5000, don't think that's complete by any means.

I asked my drop-shipper for their pricing ranges but they wouldn't provide that info.

Is this information available from DHL for example?

 

I had another idea that might work if we were only using drop shipping services.

What if we didn't give any ranges, could we add shipping fees just for each product.

We'd have to go through checkout on our wholesaler's website to get dhl shipping costs per product,

then add that shipping cost on each product in our store, would that work as an alternative to price ranges?

 

Maybe forget I asked that last bit, didn't work as I imagined it might..

Edited August 7, 2014 by sounds (see edit history)

[sounds]

Thanks,

wish I could afford all these addons, would make the setup a lot smoother.

Edited August 12, 2014 by sounds (see edit history)

[bellini13]

you typically do not need both weight ranges and price ranges, you configure one of them for a given carrier. 

 

You need to work with your dropshipper and the carrier (DHL in this case), to understand pricing.  Does your dropshipper charge you for shipping to your customer?  If so, then you should be able to get those costs from them if they intend to charge you.

 

Do you intend to ship worldwide or only to a select country?  Pricing is most likely going to vary based on the weight of the package and its destination.

[sounds]

Yes I want to offer services world wide, I asked one of the drop shippers about their setup.
They said they go by weight, but didn't give the full product weights to their customers.

I don't really understand how to set all this up, be great if we just had a module that did it auto,

But anything I saw is like 100$ and up for an addon, I just don't have it right now, so I'm kind of stuck.

Other than that I got paypal and the rest set up and ready.

 

Basically I'm confused about zones and currencies and ranges, I'd do it all manually if I knew more about it.

[bellini13]

Auto setup what exactly?  Your supplier doesn't provide exact weights, but you want a module that would auto setup based on guessing? 

 

You need to decide for yourself how much it would cost to ship your products.  Put down on paper what your weight ranges would be, grouping them by the same cost

 

For example, if it costs the same money to ship 1 ounces as it does 13 ounces, then create a range from 0 to 13, and assign a cost to that range.

[sounds]

No I guess i was thinking there would be a module for like DHL based on the different weights per country or something.

The supplier offers DHL so we would probably do the same, keeping the shipping costs similar to their's

 

I'll have to read up on it more.

[bellini13]

but you don't know the exact weights of the products, so even (and thats a big assumption) if you can match the DHL rates, and assuming your supplier doesn't add handling charges to those rates, your weights might not even match.

 

Further more, the packages are being shipped from your supplier, not from your location, so make sure you consider that

[sounds]

Yea I'm starting to see this is not easy to set up,

Considering the products are coming from our supplier in china,

I have to work out the weight ranges first, then do the pricing per range,

Then I have to think about if they charge their customers on every order, as I see it, if yo had 1 watch 20g weight 

It might cost more if you added 2 or more to your checkout, this whole thing is getting confusing.

And then it's gonna be different costs for every country,

I hope our suppliers new api take the hassle out of setting these prices/weights/countries.

Looks like it will take me forever to set all these up right for every  country we want to ship to.

 

What I did so far is pick one carrier, 

DHL. same as our suppliers.

According to total weight

 

Range 1

>= 0.000000 g

<   1000.000000 g

 

Range 2

>= 1000.000000 g

<   3000.000000 g

 

Then I selected 1 zone, Europe

 

19.950000 € for Range 1

34.950000 € for Range 2

 

There's no way that will cover all.

 

I'm going back and forth to my suppliers website constantly adding products to the cart,

Trying to work out how they're charging with DHL, it's fairly confusing.

 

Example:

 

A watch costs 23 € on their site, weight 40g.

DHL shipping costs come to 15 €

 

If I add two watches to the cart the shipping costs come to 19 €

 

Now on my own checkout the cost would be 19.95 for 1 watch,

The shipping costs don't change if I add two watches to the cart. 

 

I have to go through this for every single country or zone?

Edited August 14, 2014 by sounds (see edit history)

[bellini13]

You stated a single watch weight is 40g, so 2 watches would be 80g.

 

Since your range is 0 to 1000, you can add 25 to the cart and the shipping price would remain the same

 

And yes, you need to do this for each zone.  Group countries into zones to make it easier, so long as the cost to each country are the same.  Otherwise you need more zones and split your countries into better groupings.

Dealing with shipping is complex even without the supplier factor (let's say you were shipping the items directly). 

 

Now add the supplier and trying to copy the rules without them telling you what those rules are, near impossible,   good luck.

Edited August 14, 2014 by bellini13 (see edit history)