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Shipping Tools and Apps

Lesson 9 from: A Crafter's Guide to Starting a Subscription Business

Mei Pak

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Lesson Info

9. Shipping Tools and Apps

Lesson Info

Shipping Tools and Apps

Let's talk about shipping now I think a lot of us they're probably going to be some of us in the audience who are you? Probably not a subscriber to some of these paid shipping programs on dh let me show you here the few options that are available you might probably have heard of some of these there is indicia their stamps dot com there's ships station on dh these are all really great time savers for doing shipping automatically for you, but I know that some of you guys might still be using shipping by a papal so like, once you get the order from etsy, you're going into paypal and you're printing the shipping label directly in paypal and then some of you are also doing that via at sea where you go into the etc order I think now they have integration with indicia where you can directly print shipping labels from that scene. Well, what's really nice. I think when you're thinking about subscription businesses and subscription products on especially once you get to a certain level, if you g...

et ten, subscribers twenty, subscribers, it really saves you a lot of time from copying and pasting all these individual addresses into your program because that's what I think within dish in stamps, that's what I used to do, I think when I was using it it didn't have integration with etc so every time I got and that's the order or a kn order from my main website and I sell in a bunch of different places, so any time I got in order I would have to manually go in there and copy and paste the entire address, paste it into the shipping software and have to manually select ok, this guy wants first class mail okay it's three ounces ship it takes a lot of time, especially when you're dealing with multiple orders especially when you're thinking about the growth that you might experience with their subscription business. So what I use now is ship station on, by the way indicia I think starts at ten dollars and that integrates with fc stamps starts sixteen dollars when I like about stamps is that it integrates with mohr mark marketplace platforms like if you're in etc or if you're an amazon orphan shopify it integrates with more of those than indicia does and what I mean by that integration is that once an order is placed on your shop it automatically kind of funnels that information into your shipping program so you don't have to copy and paste it in there. I currently use ships station and that starts at twenty five dollars a month and what I love about that is part of that twenty five dollars includes a subscription to indicia or stamps but it also has some really great features to it overall a lot user friendly than andy show when I was using it the support is great andi I think it's really worth it it saves a ton of time a ton of time so for those of you guys who don't have subscriptions to any of these paid programs because they know like I used to have the sixty five dollars subscription to strip the ship station and that's that's a lot of money and that not all of us have that capacity to pay sixty five dollars for shipping program it's nice that they've added new features into the lower models so now I don't have to pay sixty five dollars I can just bump it down down to the forty five dollars plan, but for those of you guys who are not at that level or you don't feel like you need it, I want to show you a really cool service or a feature of papal where you can bulk ship your subscribe your subscription eso it's called paypal multi order shipping and I'm not it's kind of buried in your paypal account, so I'm not sure a lot of us have heard about it, but when I found out about this I was really excited because it's free to use so if you have these paid shipping programs what in order to do bulk shipping you basically need to import comma delineated file a spreadsheet basically and then it will ask you to map out each column to the specific fields that needs like first name, last name order date that sort of information but with paypal multi order shipping the process is almost exactly the same, but it's free to use so I'm going to do a walk through on how to do that primarily because it's free and once you know how to do that generally if you have any of the page shipping programs, you can apply that same concept to any of the page shipping programs as well. So definitely you definitely want to write this down I've already provided in this course a template that you can use, so this is the exact same template that you're going to be uploading into paypal or into indy surest answer ships station on dh you can download this at creative hive co dot com slash bulk shipping so before we get into doing a walk through on how to actually upload spreadsheet to print bulk orders, I there are a few nuances with the spreadsheet that I wanted to mention ahead of time just to save you the stress in the hair pulling because I went through that and you might probably go through that if I don't talk about it, so if there is no company or phone number et cetera, you can just leave the cell blank don't worry about it and when it comes to the state or country of your address, you want to abbreviate it. So for california, just to see a for you, for america, just to us, for australia, a u, you know, so on otherwise, if you don't follow some of these criterias than it will break the upload and then it won't upload, and then they're gonna be errors and then even like what's wrong, and so just keep that in mind. So the only drawback to this bulk upload shipping system with paypal mart multi order shipping is it only works domestically within the u s, and it uses usps as its shipping service. And so the thought behind this is I think, for the most part, for all of us poor living in the u s most of her subscribers are going to come from domestic orders anyway. So I think for me, at seventy, subscribers, I think I have maybe five people who are international, so if I were to use the system it five people would be totally fine for me to just manually copy and paste it in it wouldn't take too much time, but with some of the paid options I talked about shipping internationally is not a problem if you wanted to do bulk shipping. With paypal multi order shipping you want to use on ly firefox, internet explorer or safari eso for those of you guys out there who are chrome users such as myself, you have to it's kind of switch over to firefox or anyone of these other browsers and what's really nice too about papal multi order shipping you consent the shipping, shipping preset ah, head of time or even after the fact that you've uploaded a your spreadsheet a shipping preset is where you just say ok it you want it first class and you give it a specific weight three ounces, for example and what you can do once you upload all of your subscribers on there, you can kind of select all and then just have it bulk apply the shipping preset so everyone gets first class, everyone gets to be ounces so it's a really quick and easy way to choose which shipping option you want for every person so let's actually do a walks around this right now so I can kind of show you guys how to download this some spreadsheet. Okay, so once you hit that lane creative hive co dot com slash bulk shipping you're going to get to this google drive spreadsheet and this is the columns that we have set up here they're pretty much fixed and here's an example of two subscribers that I've put in here so what you're going to do then is go to file and download as csc, okay? And then we're going to go to paypal multi order shipping and once you hit this link it's actually under tools and if you go to all tools, you're going to find it in there. I haven't actually showing up here because I favorited multi polar order shipping so I can kind of is one of the quick access um links in my paypal navigation but it's under tools and then you go to all tools and find multi order shipping in there what is going to do once you reach this page it it's going to create a pop up like this? So make sure pop ups are enabled and you're going to click on import and then you can select from a file and rows to the download and then click on import. So this next step it's going to ask you to do and this is pretty much the similar process with all of the other paid aps if you're using ships station, I believe invasion stamps you can probably do the same thing, but this next step it's going to ask you to map basically the columns to the field that it is requiring you to to use to do shipping so all you gotta do is just drag first name over to first name last name and so on there's quite a few here, so please bear with me but once you do this, you can actually save this mapping and give it its own special name if you want to. So the next month when you're doing another subscription shipping day, you can just you don't have to go through this process again putting phone number, order I d title and the title I have if you actually checked out, does the spreadsheet the title is really just the product or the subscription name, so for my case, I would have necklace off the month club put in there and in thes spreadsheet if you actually see some of the blank some of the cells I've left blank, so those air not required fields that you need to have on there, so once you're done with this mapping, you can select, done and then it's going to say the two orders that you have have been imported and then it's going to show up so it's a little bit tiny, but you can kind of see when I selected this first order here you can see my jane doe isn't here by scroll down mr john doe is in here, but at this point what you can do is apply a preset and if you don't have a preset created, you can create one now and at this point you can name your preset for example, if you want to do priority mail for everyone, just type that in and then you conflict what service you want to you so priority mail let's say I want to use a small flat rate box and the way it doesn't matter because it's a flat rate box and then there are some extra settings here that you can select if you want to but I am not going to simon I just hit save and then you have your shipping preset created so what I can do now is then select both of my subscribers and then I can apply the priority mail preset on them and they would both have gotten the priority mail service on their orders and then I can just click print and you're off and if it's connected to a thermal printer, if you have one it's just going to start printing out all the labels and that's really nice and easy to do I believe I'm not sure this is right, but I believe stacy at one point didn't have a spread sheet like this so she was literally manually copying and pasting every person over onto a shipping program so this is really cool so let's go back to the slides and I want to show you how you can do papal buttons and how you can actually collect money from people so this is what we're doing right? We're actually creating papal subscribed buttons with paypal on as I mentioned it's a really easy way to just get started and the thing for you to keep in mind is if you're shipping your subscription to different parts of the world or if for whatever reason you have different subscription plans you want to create separate shipping separate papal buttons for each of these different case scenarios so for my own business I only have three different cases where one of them is shipping domestically the other one is shipping everywhere else in the world and the third one is shipping to canada and mexico on what you're going to do actually shipping and the price of your subscription is going to be clumped together into one thing so the drawback you know a stacy said you can't change that once you figure it out once you actually go into paypal and create that button so going back to our first segment make sure that you get your pricing figured out because once all these subscribers have signed up using this papal button you're not if you decide you're pricing isn't right if you do if you at the end of let's say two subscriptions you find out that man you're not making a profit from this there's no way for you to change the price in this unless you cancel everyone subscription and asked them to re sign up again which obviously if you have ten, subscribers not all ten of them are going to re sign up you know, a few people are going to drop out from that process so if it all possible make sure that you have everything set up your pricing is correct before we get to this stage and here's a u r l for you to go to so that we can get that set up so let me show you what we're going to go back to our laptop ah here um and it's really easy to do but I just want to show you just in case you're not so sure so once you hit that link its paypal dot com slash buttons slash select slash saved or you can go to tools and it's going to be in all tools on dh for me I just haven't really easy here in papal buttons but once you land to this page you're going to go to create new button and then choose a button type that is the's subscription one so for item named, you know, name at your club whatever that may be. This is what people actually see when they go to paypal it's going to be the item product that they're going to be checking out with so don't name this something crazy because they're going to see it so you can say necklace of the month club us only, for example I'm only showing you the things that are required of you or that I would recommend for you to change out everything else is optional you don't have to fill in a subscription idea if you don't want to you can even if you wanted teo, I don't like displaying the credit card logos so you can remove that or if you want to you can even upload your own button an inch billing amount each cycle so this is where you were putting your price and as I said before again remember to include your shipping into this price so if my subscription is twenty five dollars shipping domestically is for I want to put in twenty nine dollars in here and then your billing cycle this is your frequency of how often you on your subscription to go out so for mine I have it going out once every two months, so my billing cycle is two months this one don't touch it. When I started my subscription club, I don't think this was a default. This didn't default to never I think it either defaulted to six or something, but it defaulted to six for me and by the time six cycles went through I had to ask my subscribers to re sign up with megan, which was kind of a nerve ng so just don't touch it just they never but what this means is you can you can have set a an end date for when your subscription ends eso actually one of the interviewees that we're going to talk with later wendy grants she's run a ton of subscriptions a ton of different clubs and she is very interesting because her cubs some of them have an end date to them. So very specific start and indeed s o this is an option for you if you do want to end after six cycles for example then that is an option but I recommend you just do never and then go down to customize additional customize advanced features over here I would recommend for you to put a specific you are all here that you create on your website this will be your thank you page kind of the confirmation page so when someone checks out with your subscription this is the page you're going to land back on your website so on this page is really important for you to say thank you to tell them when they can expect their shipment to be shipped out give them kind of like a calendar so they know when to expect um their shipment and also, you know, give your email address just in case if any questions tell them give them all that information like if they want to cancel here's what they can do so this is a good page that you need tio create and then once you have that page, just copy and paste that in here and then just click create a button, and then you're pretty much set. But let me show you based on some of the other buttons that I've already created, how you can then copy and paste this code on to your website it's really easy, but once your button is created, you can just click on action here and click on view cold and what's. Really nice is if you don't. If you don't want to bother with all this html coding, and if you just want tohave, it just looked like this this big yellow subscribe button all you need to do is just copy this code and here where it says website and then go to your website and then pasted in, and it will be a totally a working button. Someone clicks on that they go to paypal, it says for you to subscribe once every two months and you go through a checkout process what's really nice here. I like that they also have this email link that if you want to, you can. If you want, you can create your own customized buttons, but you can also just copy and paste his email into social media, and it works out well or in your email. In your email list or if you're personally emailing someone, this works that well, so let me just show you really quickly if I copy this and paste in here. This is the direct link to checking out for your subscription, um, and its azizi is that so? Let's, I think we're done with this segment. So let me show you some of the ways that you can find me in social media s o on instagram, you can connect with me a creative hive coal on twitter may underscore pock facebook at facebook dot com slash creative hive coal and if you have any additional questions that we don't get to cover here in the course today or if you want additional support in any aspect of running your business marketing, pricing, branding, photography any of that kind of good stuff, I definitely feel free to join my private mastermind facebook group at bit dot ly slash maker mastermind on dh yeah, do you guys have any questions about all that technical stuff so far? I have a question may yeah, could you reiterate or elaborate what you mean by go to your website and pay set in? Where do you pasted exactly? Oh, sure, s o, if you so for a lot of people who have their own web sites. Most likely what you have set up it's a wordpress website and you have like a shopping cart like woo commerce figured in there or even if you don't if you have your own web site you know your product listing is on there you create a new page you put up picture of the product that you have or you know as we talked with stacy give several pictures of of possible products that that you that might be included in your subscription you write all the text descriptions and things like that copyright um the copy for your product and they're going to go into that page and in the final or the subscribe button the code goes on that page in my instance when I was before I was on shopify I was using a different shopping cart called pressed a shop and what I did was it's a full fledge shopping cart where every product listing had its own by now button but what I would do is for that specific subscription I would turn off the buy now button for that subscription product and I would insert these by now subscribe buttons from paypal onto that product listing and the reason I did that was because since I was just getting started with my subscription I didn't want to spend a lot of money on buying or subscribing to a paid ah service with press to shop that could manage my subscriptions for me so I think they're definitely work arounds depending on your your own scenario, depending on the web site that you're having. But I think even was shopify. If you wanted to, you could potentially create a page that is your subscription product and then turned that into a product page where people can actually buy from. If you don't want to pay for some of the aps that I talked about earlier, do you have a button for your three month a button for your six months, but for your twelve month right? Yeah. So if you were doing lump sum payments, then you would have a separate buttons for all of those. And if you found that you made a grave mistake in the in the price, it would go out to those whoever subscribed and then could you go back and just kind of replace that pull button with a different price without anybody really knowing with the next group that are going to subscribe, right? So you can definitely go back on dh on back to your web site. You can create a new button. Go back to your website and replace the cold with the new one. But for everyone, who's already signed up. There's. No way for you to change the pricing on them unless you ask them to re sign up. But for the new group of people who are coming in, then they're going to be using the new button with the correct pricing on it.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Email Pitch Template and Checklist.docx
Email Pitch Template and Checklist.pdf
Subscription Management and Shipping Tools.docx
Subscription Management and Shipping Tools.pdf
Your System For Selling Subscriptions.docx
Your System For Selling Subscriptions.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Great course, especially the interview with Stacey (part 6).

Nuvea
 

Mei gives lots of practical information and resources in this course.

Student Work

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