Category: Shipping

What Are Shipping Adjustments?  Why Do They Happen and How to Prevent Them.

A Shipping Adjustment, often referred to as a Price Adjustment, is what occurs when someone has entered incorrect shipment details while generating a shipping label. The concept of “Shipping Adjustments” is pivotal for anyone involved in the logistics and shipping sector. It is very important to understand that shipping price adjustments, or shipping adjustments, are a standard industry practice. Every shipping carrier adheres to this norm. To avoid these shipping adjustments, it’s essential to ensure that you input the accurate details when purchasing a shipping label, as highlighted below. Any discrepancies in the shipment details or any omission of information can activate a billing adjustment from the courier. It’s a startling fact that, on average, 30% of shipments  undergo shipping adjustments and this usually means additional charges, billed to you after the fact. There are three major reasons for Shipping Adjustments:

1. The package measurements/dimensions
2. The package weight
3. The package type/special handling requirements

After you have shipped your package, the correct shipping label price is always verified by the shipping carrier that you selected.  If you paid an incorrect amount to ship the order, then your carrier debits you the difference.  Are you wondering why and how these Shipping Adjustments  occur and how they can be avoided? Read on for a comprehensive explanation of each factor leading to Shipping Adjustments  and strategies to avoid them.

1. Package Measurements – All carriers employ electronic imaging to capture the packages as they are processed through the shipping hub.  Some of them even utilize laser scanners to measure dimensions down to a fraction of an inch. When your package passes through the imaging process the dimensions are recorded at the largest angle. For instance, if a box measures 8 inches at one end and expands to 8.25 inches in the middle (due to compression) the recorded measurement for shipping adjustments will be 8.25 inches. It’s a known fact that carriers never round down; we advise that you round up whenever possible.
2. Dimensional Weight – Each carrier uses a specific formula which is individually taken into consideration when you enter your package dimensions.  If the package is very large and very light the carriers will use a dimensional weight instead of the actual weight of the package. This formula is derived from multiplying length, width, and height and then dividing by a carrier-specific divisor. The good news is that PaidShipping does the math for you; the bad news is that if you enter the incorrect dimensions a shipping adjustment could be headed your way.  The good news is that PaidShipping does the math for you; the bad news is that if you enter the incorrect dimensions an adjustment could be headed your way. 
3. Special Handling –Our carriers carefully consider how the contents of your shipment are packaged. Is your item a very long, wide or odd shaped box, or perhaps not boxed at all (a practice we discourage)? The intricate network of conveyors in shipping hubs facilitates the movement of your packages.  If the item is bulky it will need to be removed from the conveyor thus requiring special handling. Other considerations that might lead to shipping adjustments include items housed in plastic containers, those with glossy surfaces, or those packaged in tubes. Such items, when reaching an incline or decline on the conveyor are at risk of slipping off and would require special handling. A handy rule of thumb is to ask yourself “can this package be conveyed?” If not, you will need to check the box for special handling. To get ahead of any unexpected adjustments and do your due diligence, here’s a helpful guide for packing unusually shaped products. 

How to prevent adjustments.  To ensure you never encounter unexpected shipping adjustments, follow these simple steps:

1. Measure your package at the largest point on each side
2. Weigh the package
3. Weigh the package again (because who trusts a scale on the first weigh-in?)
4. Indicate any special handling if your package is not a corrugated standard size/shape box.  
5. Take your time in entering your information and double check all your shipment details in the “Finalize & Pay section”.  This quick check can  This diligence can not only ward off potential shipping adjustments but also avert transit issues

To further protect your packages, consider looking into shipping insurance. PaidShipping is known for having one of the best shipping insurance plans in the market. With our shipping insurance, when insurance is requested – we cover the first $100 of the package value for free. If your item is worth $100 or less and arrives damaged, our shipping insurance will reimburse you the value of the item, up to $100.   This is done through our streamlined and simplified online claims processWe dislike adjustments and we know you do too. Our goal is for your experience with PaidShipping and our courier partners to be seamless and hassle-free. Let’s spread the word to end adjustments on PaidShipping shipments.

 

When it comes to shipping gifts for the holidays, several things are essential to remember – particularly when aiming to protect your items and ensuring they reach the recipient on time. As the 2023 holiday season approaches, PaidShipping offers useful pointers to get those gifts delivered without any problems.

When planning to send your friends, family, and loved ones gifts, there are several things you should be aware of to ensure a smooth shipping experience.

1. Understand What You Can Ship: The number of shipping-prohibited items may surprise you. No matter which courier you opt for, always check their list of non-shippable items. Remember, with PaidShipping, you can choose your courier based on price or delivery time, but always verify any shipping gifts restrictions before making your selection. Typically prohibited items are:

1. 1. Liquids (alcohol, perfumes, varnish)
   2. Aerosols (common in toiletries)
   3. Flowers and plants
   4. Electrical items
   5. Anything glass
   6. Currency
   7. Alcoholic beverages
   8. Tobacco products
   9. Cannabis

1. Packaging Gifts for Shipping: Proper packaging is essential when shipping gifts. Along with securing your parcel using robust tape, there are several packaging practices to follow

• 1. Use a NEW box (or a sturdy one)
  2. Be sure to include padding inside (bubble wrap, cardboard, newspaper)
  3. Make sure there’s no movement inside the box

1. Measure and Weigh Correctly: To avoid delays and additional charges, always provide accurate package dimensions. This means measuring and weighing the package after it’s fully prepared. This guarantees:

1. 1. The right courier is sending your gift
   2. You get charged the correct amount the first time

If you haven’t read our blog post on avoiding shipping price adjustments, make sure you do.

1. Consider Shipping Insurance for Your Gifts Picture this: you’ve bought the perfect gift, followed all the shipping guidelines, and yet upon arrival, the gift is found damaged. Here’s where PaidShipping’s shipping insurance comes in.PaidShipping automatically covers the first $100 of your item’s value when you opt for insurance. Should anything go wrong, you can swiftly submit a claim online through our efficient claims process. For gifts valued over $100, insurance starts at just $2.50. It’s a small investment for the immense peace of mind, ensuring your gift reaches its destination intact.

 

How Will Real Time Shipping Rates Influence Shipping Gifts in 2023?

PaidShipping partners with top national couriers, including FedEx, UPS, USPS, and more, to determine shipping rates in real-time. These rates are based on key details like package size, weight, and destination – critical factors when shipping gifts. Sellers can enter their standard package specifications or customize dimensions for individual products in their inventory. This precision in detail allows for sellers to customize each product in the shop with actual package specifications. For buyers, as soon as a product is added to the cart and the checkout process begins, our system immediately evaluates the specifics and promptly presents the most suitable gift shipping options by carrier. The decision making process is handed to the buyer who can decide how fast they want the package and how much they want to spend on shipping, or they can choose their preferred shipper. The integration of real-time rates benefits both the buyer and seller: it eliminates guesswork for the seller and offers clear choices to the buyer, enhancing the entire experience of shipping gifts for the 2023 holiday season.

Avoid These Mistakes When Using a Gift Delivery Service

Just as there’s a right way, there’s also a wrong way to ship gifts. So, when considering your gift delivery options, here are a few pitfalls to be aware of:

1. Waiting until the last minute Don’t wait until the eleventh hour. Provide ample time for your gift to reach its destination, especially during peak shipping seasons.
2. Overdoing external decorations While ribbons and wrapping paper are festive, they’re best kept inside the shipping box. External wrapping can tear, and ribbons might get snagged in transit machinery.
3. Overlooking duty and taxes If you’re shipping gifts internationally, be mindful of potential duty and local taxes, which often range between 10-20% of the gift’s value. Generally, you can send items up to $50 to $100 in value without them attracting duty. Regardless, always check before buying your gift with customs in the recipient country. Otherwise, your recipient might get an unexpected charge along with your thoughtful present.

When evaluating your gift delivery options, make sure you’re partnering with the right shipping service. PaidShipping lets you enter box dimensions and package weight for an accurate rate quote. Next, the top couriers are displayed to you to compare cost, transit time and more – ensuring you have everything you need to make a selection at the best rate. For peace of mind, you can also schedule a pick-up directly through PaidShipping and not worry about leaving your home! On top of that, PaidShipping gives you intelligent alerts all along the way to make sure you can track your package at any time – on your computer, or on your mobile.

Whether you’re a consumer or an online seller, one element stands out in the buying and selling process: real-time shipping rates.

Recent studies have shown that the average shopping cart abandonment rate for online retailers hovers between 60% and 80%, with an average of 67.91% of potential buyers dropping out before completing their purchase. But why?

A huge percentage of these lost sales can be directly linked to unexpected shipping costs. Think about it: how many times have you reconsidered an online purchase upon seeing the shipping cost? In fact, when it comes to eCommerce delivery decisions, consumers believe the cost of shipping is 2.85 times more important than delivery speed.

The sellers on the other side often struggle with this, having to either choose flat rate shipping or make a rough estimate of the cost. Both approaches come with pitfalls. You either end up undercharging, which eats into your profits, or overcharging, which might turn potential customers away.

This is where real-time shipping rates come to the rescue. By integrating these into your online store, you shift the decision-making process to the buyer. This can increase your conversion rate, decrease cart abandonment, and amplify your sales volume. Most importantly, it ensures a transparent and satisfactory shopping experience for your customers, making them more likely to return. In the evolving landscape of eCommerce, understanding and implementing real-time shipping rates is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity.

 

How Do Real-time Shipping Rates Work?

To access real-time shipping rates, sellers can collaborate with leading couriers like FedEx, UPS, USPS, and more. These partnerships facilitate access to shipping rates in real-time based on key information such as package size, weight and destination.

As an online seller, you have the ability to key in your standard package size/weight or to customize each product in your shop with actual package specifications.

From a buyer’s perspective, the magic unfolds during checkout. Once they add a product to their cart, the system, powered by real-time shipping rates, recognizes the product’s parameters. It then immediately displays the best shipping options by carrier, sortable by cost or speed. This transparency empowers the buyer, allowing them to decide on the delivery speed, the amount they wish to spend on shipping, or even their preferred courier.

This is a huge benefit to both buyers and sellers as it takes out all of the guesswork on the sellers end and gives the decision making to the buyer.

 

How Does PaidShipping Make Real-time Shipping Rates Easy to Activate?

PaidShipping’s advanced eCommerce solution seamlessly integrates with leading eCommerce platforms and shopping carts, including Shopify, Opencart, WooCommerce, and Magento. By utilizing the PaidShipping application, you can swiftly activate real-time shipping rates within your store, and the best part? It’s absolutely free.

For each eCommerce platform, there’s a concise instructional video to guide you. This ensures your real-time shipping is up and running within minutes.

What’s more, partnering with PaidShipping offers an added advantage by giving access to exclusive discounted shipping rates!

 

How Effortless Is Shipping With PaidShipping?

Whether you’re leveraging eCommerce platforms or navigating directly through the PaidShipping app, shipping with us is done in 4 quick and easy steps.

1. Detail Your Shipment – Provide the specifics of what you’re shipping. Check some of the things to remember when planning your shipping.
2. Compare and Select Your Rates – Browse through the available options and select the rate that’s right for you. Here are some tips to ensure you never have to see a shipping adjustment.
3. Pick Up or Drop Off? – Decide the most convenient method to dispatch your package.
4. Print and Attach Your Label – With just a click, get your label ready, print it out, and attach it to your package.

  Eager to delve deeper? Discover more about PaidShipping, our Real-Time Rates, and how partnering with us translates to time and monetary savings.

Many shipping companies, understanding the value of shipping insurance, make a point to tell their shippers and package handlers to treat every package like they are handling Grandma’s cookies. Handle the packages with care, place & stack gently, and always assume that whatever is inside is breakable. However, despite these precautions, 21% of oversized online purchases arrive damaged. We all hope that the shippers will handle packages with care, but sometimes accidents happen. This unpredictability, combined with the alarming rate of damage (especially for oversized items), underscores why insured shipping is so crucial. Shipping insurance protects your package contents and covers your goods for loss or damage. Without adequate insurance for shipping, all packages are handled, stored, and carried at the shippers, owner’s, and consignee’s risk.

 

How Is Shipping Insurance Calculated?

PaidShipping is known for having one of the best shipping insurance plans in the market. With our shipping insurance, when insurance is requested – we cover the first $100 of the package value for free. If your item is worth $100 or less and arrives damaged, our shipping insurance will reimburse you the value of the item, up to $100. This is done through our streamlined and simplified online claims process; more on this below.

For any shipments valued over $100, insurance for shipping starts at a small fee of $2.50. From there, we use a calculation to determine fees on a sliding scale. To simplify, you’re looking at about $1.50 insurance per $100 of package value with our shipping insurance plan.If you shipped and filed a claim directly with the shipping company, you would be paying substantially more for your shipping insurance, and the claims process would be much longer.

 

What Happens if My Shipment is Damaged?

Not only does PaidShipping offer one of the best shipping insurance plans in the industry, but we also boast one of the fastest, easiest, and most streamlined claims processes. If your package, covered by our shipping insurance, arrives damaged, the entire claims process is done online, from claim submission to payment.

What makes the PaidShipping claims process so simple? For starters, it’s a very straightforward online form.

 

How Do I Make an Insurance Claim?

Our shipping insurance claims process could probably not be any easier!

In your shipping dashboard, you will see a “Make a Claim” button. From there, you answer a few questions, and your shipping insurance claim is submitted.

You’ll notice that all of your information has already been filled out, meaning less work for you! Simply scan the information to ensure it’s correct, fill in any missing details or provide required information about your shipping insurance claim, and submit.

If our claims team has any questions, they’ll reach out to you. Otherwise, the process will commence immediately, and you’ll be updated on the progress.

Some things to consider when evaluating shipping insurance and choosing your shipping provider:

1. Carriers’ Shipping Insurance Costs
   • Carriers will always charge far more for shipping insurance.
   • Most shipping carriers’ insurance claims process is done by mail.
   • The process can take months to resolve.
2. PaidShipping’s Shipping Insurance Claims Process
   • PaidShipping’s shipping insurance claims are all done online.
   • Our claims, on average, take about 3 weeks to resolve.
   • Your payments can be made via PayPal, e-transfer, or check: your choice.

PaidShipping has gone to great lengths to ensure a better than industry standard shipping insurance and claims system.  Put your trust in our insurance so that you can rest easy knowing that no matter what happens, you, your package and the recipient will be taken care of!