Any kind of online retail business is going to face decisions and potential challenges when it comes to shipping. Selling print on demand products means that your print provider takes care of shipping orders to your customers, but that doesn’t mean you’re exempt from shipping concerns. Selling on Etsy involves some specific shipping considerations, so in this episode we’re going to discuss what you need to be aware of when it comes to selling print on demand in the Etsy marketplace. 

We’re going to break down shipping into a few topics and I could probably make a full episode about each one, but we at least need to talk about all the different shipping-related considerations you need to be aware of as an Etsy seller. We’ll start with shipping strategies, then we’ll cover shipping profiles, international shipping and finally we’ll talk about dealing with shipping issues. Settle into a comfy chair or go for a long drive and let’s talk shipping (unless you’re reading this, in which case please don’t read & drive).

Shipping Strategies

Before we dive into more information about shipping settings and dealing with shipping issues, let’s just quickly mention the shipping strategy for your shop. This has more to do with pricing than shipping details, but it’s worth touching on because it’s part of your shipping profiles. The price you want to charge for shipping is part of your shipping profiles on Etsy. As the business owner, what you charge for shipping is totally up to you. 

To over-simplify this a bit, there are two general approaches for shipping – free or not free. Some sellers apply one of these approaches consistently to their whole shop. But other sellers, myself included, have a combination or hybrid approach. Because I sell a wide variety of products in the same shop (t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, mugs, posters, hats, and more) and they have varied shipping costs, I offer free shipping on some items like t-shirts but charge for shipping on some items where the shipping cost is a higher percentage of the total cost like mugs. 

Even if you charge for shipping, how much you charge is your choice. Just because something costs $5.00 doesn’t mean you have to charge $5.00. You can set your product price to a level where you only need to charge $3.00 for shipping if you think that would be more attractive to customers. In fact, that’s exactly what I do for my mugs. I charge a reasonably competitive price for a mug and I charge $3.50 for shipping, even though my shipping cost is over $4 for 11oz mugs and over $5 for 15oz mugs. I personally believe that charging a high percentage of the item price for shipping on a small, inexpensive item like a mug might prevent some customers from purchasing, while $3.50 seems very reasonable. Remember, the customer often does not see the shipping price until adding something to their cart or starting to check out so it can be a surprise to see a number they perceive as being high. For example, if you added a $15 t-shirt to your shopping cart and then saw a $10 shipping charge at checkout, you probably would think twice about how much you really want that shirt. But if you add a $20 t-shirt to your shopping cart and then see a $5 shipping charge, you would be less likely to change your mind. Keep this in mind when we talk about the default shipping profiles that are uploaded to your Etsy shop by your print on demand platform. 

We’re going to talk about international shipping later after we cover some basics. 

Shipping Profiles

Setting up your shipping profiles properly is a critical part of making sure your shop is compliant with Etsy rules and requirements, and also in the overall sales process because it helps your customers understand shipping expectations and costs. Back in the day (which for me is a mere two years ago when I opened my Etsy shop), there were fewer requirements for shipping profiles and you could leave certain details blank. In 2021 Etsy started requiring more information in shipping profiles in an effort to create more transparency for customers. Ultimately for the customer it is a good thing, but it can present a few challenges for print on demand sellers since we don’t ship the items from our own homes. 

Each listing you create in your Etsy shop needs to have a shipping profile assigned, and each listing can only have one shipping profile. The shipping profile includes several details including the origin postal code, estimated production time, shipping carrier and method, and the shipping price for domestic and international customers. Because of this, it’s common to set up shipping profiles based on the type of product or by the shipping method and cost, so you can have fewer shipping profiles overall and reuse them for similar listings. For example, I have one shipping profile that I use for all my t-shirts. I have another that I use for my sweatshirts and hoodies, and another that I use for mugs. 

Your print on demand platform (Printful, Printify, Gelato, Gooten) has shipping profiles built that you can use for your listings. Some platforms automatically push all of their shipping profiles to your shop when you integrate your account with your shop, including Printful and Gelato. Even if you haven’t published products yet, all the Gelato shipping profiles will be uploaded to your store and you can find them by going to Settings in the left navigation of your seller dashboard and then Shipping Settings. Other platforms like Printify allow you to create a new shipping profile when publishing each listing or select an existing one. If you plan to charge the full shipping cost for your items, then you can use the provided shipping profiles without making changes to them unless you want to adjust international prices or remove any destinations. 

Before we talk about each of the fields in the shipping profile, let’s talk about the intent of the shipping profile for a moment. There are two details in the shipping profile that should be accurate and have more of an impact on the customer and on your orders, while the other fields are used to help Etsy give customers estimates of delivery times but they are less critical. First, the shipping price should be exactly what you intend to charge customers in each country for shipping – that one’s pretty obvious that you need to make sure it’s accurate. But again, international shipping adds some complexity here and we’ll talk about that more later. The second field is the estimated processing time or production time. It’s your responsibility to provide a reasonable estimate of the average production time for the product, and this can fluctuate throughout the year. This has an impact on you because not only does Etsy use this time when estimating delivery times for the customer, but Etsy also uses this to determine the “due date” for shipping your orders and determining whether your orders are “on time” or “late”. For t-shirts, my shipping profile is set to a processing time of 2 to 5 business days. In the fourth quarter, I usually change that to 3 to 7 business days and I’ve had to extend that to 10 days a couple times when production was delayed. This matters because if you leave your processing time at 2 to 5 business days and it takes 7 business days to ship the order, Etsy considers that two days past due and they do use your on-time order percentage when considering the standing of your shop. It’s best to be a tad conservative, and that’s why I keep mine at 2 to 5 business days even if the average is 3 days. By the way, business days do not include weekends or holidays, no matter how many customers seem to not understand this. Customers tend to express everything in calendar days. For example a customer might message you and say “it’s been four days and my order hasn’t shipped” when in fact two of those days were the weekend and it’s only been two business days. Of course you need to be polite, but I do have to remind customers that estimated processing and shipping times are in business days which do not include weekends. 

Let’s talk about country of origin and postal code. These fields come pre-populated from Printful, Printify, and Gelato now because Etsy requires both. I’m not sure if the origin postal code pre-populates for every print provider or just some, but I’ve seen it come through this year on new shipping profiles and I know it did not as recent as last year. This is very helpful because if the origin postal code does not pre-populate, you have to look up where the print provider is located in order to enter a postal code. Etsy uses the postal code to estimate shipping times to the customer’s address. While this is a required field in the shipping profile, it’s not absolutely critical that it be the exact location the order will be fulfilled. Etsy is using it to estimate delivery times, but delivery times for a lot of the continental US are very similar with a few exceptions. Customers also don’t pay a ton of attention to this. Let me give you a practical example and what the result has been for me. I use Monster Digital to fulfill most of my t-shirt orders through Printify, so my T-Shirt shipping profile includes the origin postal code of their fulfillment center in Texas. However sometimes I have t-shirt orders fulfilled by another provider like SwiftPOD if Monster is out of stock. SwiftPOD is located in California, so the order will be coming from a different origin postal code. For a customer in a state like New York, this might add a day to the delivery time. For a customer in the middle of the country it may make no difference at all. Either way, in over 5,500 orders in my shop I’ve never had a customer message me and ask why their order came from one place vs. another. The customer doesn’t generally care about this kind of detail as long as they receive their order in a reasonable amount of time, so don’t stress over the origin postal code. If you have a shipping profile that is missing the origin code, the best way to get it would be to look at a previous order from the print provider that will be fulfilling most of your orders for that type of product. The tracking history should show the postal code at the first step of the shipping, where it is dispatched from the fulfillment center to the carrier. If you don’t have any past orders, then you can look up the business – simply by googling it, and then use their main location until you have an order where you can verify the correct origin postal code. 

After checking the country of origin and origin postal code, next it’s time to check the shipping price settings for each country or jurisdiction. I already talked about your pricing strategy so I won’t go back into that too much, but we need to talk about setting the shipping for separate countries. If you’ve ever wondered how to make sure your product listing does not show up in certain countries, you control that in your shipping profiles. If you don’t include a country in your shipping profile and you also don’t use the “everywhere else” option, then your listing won’t be visible in that country. For example, if you don’t want to show your listings to customers locate in Germany because you’re not registered with the German LUCID packaging registry (starting July 1, 2022) and you use multiple print on demand providers, then you need to make sure Germany is not included in any of your shipping profiles. This is the only way Etsy allows you to control where your listings display. It’s also important that your shipping prices are appropriate in any country your listing will display in, and I don’t just mean covering the cost of shipping alone. Print on demand platforms will charge you additional taxes in some foreign countries. For example, if you sell in most European countries, platforms will charge you Value-Added-Tax or VAT since they are required to. Unless you are registered as a business in Europe and have a VAT ID number or some complicated nonsense like that (I’m sure it’s not nonsense I just don’t understand all the inner workings of VAT), there is no way to avoid paying VAT on an order being shipped to a country where VAT applies. You can either let that cut into your profit, or adjust your pricing to account for it. You don’t want to increase the price of your product because that would apply to everyone, not just countries charging VAT, which leaves your shipping price. You will need to increase your shipping price to account for the additional tax that you’ll be paying on those orders if you want to keep your profit margins close to the same as domestic orders. This applies even if you use a different print provider located in the customer’s country that has a lower shipping cost, because you will still pay the VAT. For example, let’s say a customer in the UK orders a t-shirt from your shop. Your normal provider is Monster Digital on Printify. Their current shipping charge to the UK is $10.00. You decide to have this order fulfilled by Gelato instead, and their t-shirt price is a little higher (about $1-2 for most sizes/colors) but their UK shipping is only $3.97, so the overall order cost will be less. However you still need to factor VAT into the equation, so we’re not going to charge $3.97 for UK shipping. If you set your shipping price to the UK around $7 or 8, that will keep the shipping charge reasonable and should cover the VAT. Not to mention, your customer will receive the order faster because Gelato has a print provider located in the UK. And that’s a good segue into some more conversation about international orders. 

International Shipping

International orders have more things to consider than just accounting for additional taxes. It’s important to point out that while Etsy may define an international order as one for a customer in a different country than your shop location, you define how much to charge for shipping to each country and where orders originate from within your shipping profiles as we just discussed. The country of origin in your shipping profiles should be the country where you expect most of your orders to be fulfilled. For me, that’s the United States because the majority of my orders come from US customers and those orders are usually fulfilled by a US print provider. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t use other print providers outside your primary country to fulfill orders. Yes, Etsy’s estimated delivery timing is going to show the customer a longer time because the shipping profile is indicating that the order will come from your primary country. But at the end of the day, the customer will receive the order faster so they are very unlikely to complain or ask questions. I’ve used this method since I opened my shop whenever possible, and I’ve never gotten a complaint because a customer received their order faster than they expected. 

So what I do is I set up my shipping profiles just as we discussed a few minutes ago. I set my shipping prices for other countries according to what I expect to pay for shipping plus some extra to cover VAT. However for the shipping method and time, I always select “other” and then enter my own custom estimated shipping time. I usually enter 7 to 15 business days even though I expect it to be less. I do it this way for two reasons. First, I use the “other” option for the method because I honestly don’t know what method it’s going to be. Depending on which provider I use, they might use a variety of different carriers so selecting “other” is the best choice. And I use the 7 to 15 business day range for delivery time because there is still a chance that there may not be a provider located in the customer’s actual country. For example, a customer in France might have their order fulfilled in Spain or Germany because that is the closest provider. While this will still be faster than coming from the US, it definitely could take a week or more to arrive so it’s best to keep the estimated time a bit conservative. 

Is it worth searching for the best provider every time I get an international order? I think it is. But I also don’t have a high volume of international orders. I sell some items in Canada each month, and maybe a couple items in the UK, and then spread throughout the year I make a handful of sales in other countries. So for me, manually handling these orders is not a big deal. If it is for you, you might consider a provider like Gelato because they automatically route each order to the optimal print provider to get the order to the customer as quickly as possible, without you having to search around for the best one. The only downside to that is you don’t know who the provider is or what their track record is for on-time shipping and quality, but it’s a lot less work for you. I also think it’s worth it because of how much of a headache customs delays can be. I’ve had a couple orders in the past where the only available print provider for the item was in the US, and the package was delayed at customs for over two weeks for one of them. The customer messaged me several times while waiting for the delivery, and there’s nothing you can do as the seller but tell them to keep waiting. Speaking of shipping issues, that’s the last topic for today. 

Handling Shipping Issues

This wouldn’t be a conversation about shipping if we didn’t talk about some issues. Dealing with shipping problems can be very frustrating for both the customer and the seller, because the situation is literally out of our hands. When it comes to an item arriving on time and in the right place, we’re all at the mercy of shipping carriers. I get a message about a shipping issue about once per month on average, but when it’s busy in the fourth quarter and shipping carriers are overwhelmed and working overtime, expect to get some extra questions and frustration about shipping delays. These situations range from very minor with questions that are easy to answer, all the way to a full blown hot mess where the customer is demanding a refund or replacement and your print provider is saying it hasn’t been long enough to consider it lost in transit, leaving you stuck in the middle. Let’s talk through three scenarios that I’ve encountered and how I handle them. 

The first and easiest one is when a customer asks for an update because something is taking longer than they expected, but there is no actual problem. In my opinion, we get these messages because consumers are used to ordering things online from certain massive online stores that deliver in two days for free. Even if your estimated delivery time was a week after the order date, some people will just stop being patient after four or five days and want to know when it will arrive. Many of them don’t even check the tracking that is provided in their order record. This can be annoying, but a short and simple message back letting them know the estimated time remaining and a link to the tracking usually takes care of it – as long as you’re polite of course. 

The second scenario I’ve faced is a package that is lost in transit. This one seems to happen more in the fourth quarter when shipping carriers can get overwhelmed with package volumes, increasing the chances for mistakes. I’ve had customers message me and say that the tracking information hasn’t updated in several days or weeks – it just depends on how patient the customer is. Some will message you if the tracking doesn’t update for four days, others will wait much longer before sending you a message. This situation can be frustrating because there is not much we can do, and you may get varied responses from your print on demand platform. Even within the same platform, I’ve had a couple different experiences. For example, on one occasion last fall I had a deliver that never moved past the first sorting facility. It was scanned by USPS at the facility where the package was accepted, but the it was never scanned again. After waiting two weeks, the customer messaged me asking for an update. As a side note – most customers seem to think we have some magic portal that lets us see exactly what is going on with a package. At the very least, they assume that we have more information than they do. But if you’ve been selling online for any amount of time, you know that’s not true. We have the same tracking information they do, with no further access to see any status or location information. I do remind my customers that I have no control over the package once the carrier has possession of it and I don’t have any more information than what’s the in tracking. However, I always follow that by saying that I will look into it for them. This conveys that I do want to help but reminds them I have very limited control. In this particular case I first sent a message to Printify support asking if the package would be considered lost in transit at this point, since it had been two weeks since the last update from USPS and the order was placed over three weeks ago. I always do this as the first step to see what they are going to ask for. However I was surprised in this case, because they responded that they would consider the package lost at this point and have a reprint sent. It was a mug if you are curious. So this one was resolved quickly and the customer was happy. But as I mentioned, the response you get from your platform can vary. 

I’ve experienced two other types of responses in this situation between Printify and Printful. The most common one is that they will ask you or the customer to contact the post office or shipping carrier to request they trace the package or at least verify they cannot locate it. This is annoying, but if you want a refund or reprint for the customer, it’s something you must do. Of course you could just ask the customer to do this and report back to you, but that can make them more frustrated. It’s up to you, but I personally don’t ask the customer to do this. Instead, I open a support case with USPS or whichever carrier it is. I think maybe one time out of the ten or so times I’ve done this, they responded indicating the package was located and the tracking started updating again. Normally you’ll get a response in about 24 hours that says there’s nothing they can do to locate the package. When I get that response, I write back to the support team and say that the carrier has indicated they cannot locate the package. After that, I think every time the platform has agreed to consider it lost in transit and provide a reprint or refund. While this is extra work for sure, the alternative is to not bother reaching out to support and just absorb the cost to send a replacement. So for the little bit of extra work, I will take the cost savings.

The second type of response that I’ve received maybe two times in these scenarios is that we need to wait a minimum amount of time before considering the package lost in transit. I believe both times it was stated that we need to wait 30 days from the ship date to make sure it doesn’t show up. In those two cases, thankfully we were already pretty close to 30 days from the ship date so I just told the customer I needed a couple days to see what I could find out and then went back to support at the 30 days mark. But as you can see, when a package seems to be lost in transit, you may get a few different responses from your print on demand platform. The key is just to stay on top of it and message the customer periodically to keep them in the loop. 

The third scenario I’ve come across is similar to a lost package – it’s when the tracking indicates the package was delivered but the customer says it was not. These can be very frustrating because you never truly know if the customer is saying they didn’t receive it to try and get their money back in a deceitful way, or being honest that they didn’t receive it. I hate to even think that, but it’s certainly something that some people will do unfortunately. However I personally have had this happen on several occasions. Sometimes it’s Amazon, sometimes it’s USPS, but for the last few years I’ve noticed an increase in this situation. And as the customer you feel powerless because the carrier will just say it was delivered and yet you’ve received nothing, so I certainly get why a customer is upset when this happens. Having been on the receiving end of this, I also know that sometimes the package shows up within a day or two. It could be because it was scanned as “delivered” in error, or it could simply have been delivered to a neighbor and they are nice enough to put it in front of my door. I’ve had this occur maybe a half dozen times with my Etsy orders over the last two years. If the customer messages me on the same day that it was scanned as delivered, I always tell them it could have been scanned in error so we should wait a day or two to see if it turns up. A couple times the package did show up the next day, so that was a relief. But the other times, it never showed up. And in this case, my experience is very similar to what we talked about with packages that are lost in transit. Between Printify and Printful, both have told me we need to reach out to the local post office and ask them to verify the package is not there or still en route. The only difference in the way I handle it is that I do usually ask the customer if they can contact their local post office if the carrier was USPS. I do this because they are more familiar with the local post office than I am, and they’ll know which one is the right location to call. If they say they already did that, then I just reply to the support team that we did that and they did not locate the package. If the carrier is not USPS, then I usually go the route of opening a support case or filing a claim in order to get the response that they cannot locate it. I do that because customers are usually less familiar with their local UPS or FedEx distribution center vs. the post office, unless the customer says they’ve already tried to do that. But in any case, once you complete that step you shouldn’t have a problem getting a reprint or refund. 

In all these scenarios, the customer will be happy with the service you provide as long as you make it clear that you want to help and you want them to receive their order. It’s perfectly fair and appropriate to remind them that you don’t have control over the package once a carrier has it, but you should still be helping where you can to make sure they either receive their order or get a refund. Nobody wants to pay for something and never receive it, so even though customers can be a little rude sometimes in these situations, it’s important to remember how you feel when you experience these issues yourself and stay focused on one of the central goals of your business: to have happy customers. 

Conclusion

Well that’s all the basics of shipping for your Etsy print on demand store, from shipping strategies, to shipping profiles and handling shipping issues. I’m going to break this topic up into a few separate videos on the YouTube channel so check those out if you want to review any of this information again. I also have a video on YouTube just about the Etsy Free Shipping Guarantee, because that deserves a separate conversation. I hope this has helped to lay the foundation for your understanding of shipping decisions and concerns for your business. 

Don’t forget to subscribe to the POD Insights podcast on your favorite platform and visit me online at podinsights.net for some great POD resources and transcripts of every episode with links. As always, thank you to all subscribers of both the podcast and the YouTube channel, I appreciate your support. 

Thanks for reading.