BROKERS - How do you handle Shipping Costs on your website?

[Sealevel]

HI All. New to the forum today.

We want to up our game with our website and allow our customers to get pricing, create designs and order printing online. Of course we all know of the Web2Print companies out there with subscription based websites, and many seem nice, but a bit pricey at this stage in our game, and some just dont instill much confidence in either their Product Selection is not very large, or their quality might not be as it should.

We have been using 4over for our printing over the last few years with very little problems or print issues, and would not mind continuing to use them as well as Partner Printing, etc... They offer a wide range of products and options, and are located in the US for easy communication. The problem that we all have with the Print to Trade companies is that they dont offer anything that we can use to help us sell their products on our own websites, or any website for that matter. None seem to offer a simple datafeed, which would sure solve all of our problems.

At this point, we can create a dynamic website with all of the products our Vendors offer, add pricing and our markup, code our own W2P Designer and the works, but we have no way of determining Weights so UPS Can provide realtime shipping costs, and the vendors aren't giving it up either. Basically, this seems to be the last hurdle in order to have our own printing website without the recurring costs involved.

I guess my question is, How does everyone else get around this shipping issue? Maybe I am missing something, so I thought I would post it here.

I look forward to your comments and suggestions.

[Coolio]

Our storefront solution has a spot to enter weight per xx pieces. Then, depending on qty ordered, it calculates the total weight and brings in UPS costs for the end user.

HTH

[Sealevel]

Yes, but the problem is, our vendors 4over / Partner Printing wont provide the weights, so we have nothing to enter into the system. We are trying to figure out how other Print Brokers are getting around this problem.

[Coolio]

Well, if you know the paper you are printing on you can do some calculations from the basis weight to determine the final weight. Not an ideal situation but it would get you close.