You may have seen recent posts about when refunds are posted to your account, or how to make sure you’re not losing money on international orders. I’ve even written about how to help customers who want to change how often receive a recurring delivery to simplify the process.

As I thought about it, I realized that most of the tips and tricks I’ve come across with 1ShoppingCart with my clients relate to specific problems.

It seems to me that you guys should be asking the questions that you want to see answered here on this blog. I want to help you make your website as profitable as possible, but that only comes with knowing your specific concerns.

So, fire away and let me know what aspects of setting up an account or keeping it running are giving you a headache. Consider me aspirin that comes in several forms:

1. If it’s a quick question, you might see me pop into the comments to address it as soon as I get to reading it. You don’t have to worry about long waits.
2. For more involved processes, you may see the the answer as an upcoming blog post. We’ll be sure to let the asker know and credit them in the post!
3. If you need a full-scale consultation to make sure that your business can go from scratch to fully up-and-running, you want to contact me through this site so I can assess your needs.

Three choices and whichever you choose, you’ll get rapid responses about your 1ShoppingCart needs from a leader in the field.

Let’s get started: What do you want me to write about and answer just for you?

So why are you feeling so down all of a sudden?

It might be because of 1ShoppingCart’s invoice and packing slip system.

When I was first starting out, I used to want to tear my hair out in frustration. When I was only selling a few dozen items a week, it wasn’t that big a deal to go into an order, click on Print Invoice and be on my merry way.

But being successful made me unhappy. It was click on an order, click on print invoice, click on OK. Over and over, again.

Does that sound like it’s fun? No?

One of the things about 1ShoppingCart Experts is that we like to minimize the few hassles that 1SC does offer.

And that’s why I came up with my 1ShoppingCart Automated Invoice Printing System.

No more invoice by invoice. It lets you export orders to an Excel spreadsheet, upload it into the program and then export it as a document where you can print out tens or even hudreds of orders at a time.

You don’t have to be at that level of sales to realize how great this is for someone looking to save time.

In fact, every five minutes you save on the order fulfillment process is time you can use tweaking your e-mail marketing campaign, or running tests on your opt-in campaigns. It’s not time saved, it’s money you’ll be able to earn.

This client had someone else initially set up their shopping cart, and since the beginning was under the impression that he was charging customers for shipping.

When I asked how much, the client didn’t know, so I set out to find the answer. To my, and my clients, surprise, it turned out he wasn’t charging for shipping at all!

Boy was that a shock!

After correcting that mistake which was letting his hard earn money out the window, we set out to set up his shipping for international orders, which is the purpose of this email.

(First things first, for those of you new to 1ShoppingCart, and who have a physical product you send out that you need to charge shipping for, double check that you are charging for shipping!)

This experience reminded me of a little trick I know, that only about half the users of 1ShoppingCart know.

You can set up defaults in shipping so when the United States is the country selected (default setting) users will only see a set number of shipping choices. These include only options within the United States (Overnight, Priority, Express 2 Day, etc.).

To enable different shipping methods, you have to switch to a different default country, which then shows Express, International Air, Slow Boat To China, etc. as shipping options.

Why is this so important?

Simply put, you could be leaving money on the table. As an example one of our clients who had international customers quickly realized that people will, surprise, surprise, choose the cheaper shipping options inside the shopping cart.

Well they were losing on average $5 per sale on international orders. They had roughly 10 of these orders a day, so that’s $50 a day, or put another way, $18,250 A YEAR!

So how do you get these 1ShoppingCart Shipping Options for your 1ShoppingCart account?

Simple, just follow the steps below:

1. Log in to your 1ShoppingCart account
2. Scroll over ‘Setup’ and click ‘Cart Options’
3. Set the 9th line down, ‘Show International Designation Option on Shipping Table:’ to ‘Yes’
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click ‘Save Page’
5. Scroll over ‘Products’ and click ‘Setup Shipping’
6. Click your current shipping option (Weight Based, Quantity Based, Realtime Calculation, etc.)
7. Click ‘Next’ on the next screen.
8. You will see a new checkmark box called ‘International’. For all international shipping options be sure to click this checkmark
9. Be sure to check a ‘default’ international shipping option. So you will have two defaults. One for International shipping and one for U.S. shipping.
10. Click ‘Save’ at the bottom of the page
11. Click ‘Done’ at the bottom of the page

And just like that you are done.

Be sure to go through your checkout process and make sure everything works as expected.

ADDED BONUS:

Everyone always says to me, “Tyler, I don’t know how to setup my shipping. What do you recommend?”

Here’s my response.

Sure you can go with Realtime Shipping. By why? It’s complicated and you can’t add $1 or more for handling.

Also, you want to be sure NOT to give your customers too many options when checking out. So I keep the checkout options to no more than 2 options. (2 options for shipping within the U.S., and 2 options for shipping Internationally)

So what I do is set up the following for all of my clients. (The price may change but the shipping options do not)

I choose Quantity-Based so that way when they order more than one product they will be charged shipping accordingly. And I keep the “Minimum total for Free Shipping” set at the default they provide.

Then I set up the following:

Standard U.S. Delivery (3-5 business days)
Overnight U.S. Delivery (1 business day)
International Delivery (4-10 business days)
Canada Delivery (4-8 business days)

• I put checkmarks in the international section for the bottom two.
• I make Standard U.S. Delivery my default for U.S. deliveries and International Delivery my default for shipping internationally.

Why do I offer Canadians a discount? Because, being based out of the U.S. I know it’s cheaper to ship to them then it is any other country. Plus, I never want to piss off any Canadians eh.