Shipping Calculator Update
Google "shipping" and this is what you get. Not especially relevant, but pleasantly picturesque.
Hi all, just wanted to provide an update on our progress since our previous blog asking for help on how to improve our shipping calculator.
We have since been in contact with the shipping experts at AuctionInc., who have responded enthusiastically to the opportunity to partner with us to provide a more robust solution for calculated shipping. By the middle of this October, we had completed our integration with their API, such that we could allow sellers to choose whether they wanted to use the "Classic" Bonanza shipping calculator or the shiny new AuctionInc. shipping calculator.
At this point, we have been in a holding pattern for a couple weeks as we await their lawyers completion of the agreement that lets us actually use their calculator in production here. They have estimated that their lawyers should have something to us by early this coming week, so hopefully the calculator is online and ready to go shortly thereafter.
They have been willing to negotiate with us to allow for a pricing scheme that charges per item, rather than per shipping quote (as is their custom). We felt this was a key to getting pricing that would be viable for our sellers, since nobody is going to want to pay $20.00 if a buyer wants to get 100 shipping quotes on an item, for whatever reason.
So, after negotiating, we were able to arrange for use of the new shipping calculator at 20 cents per item listed. We believe this offers the best possible compromise for sellers that want accurate shipping quotes provided by a company that specializes in shipping. Sellers that list using the old shipping calculator (or no calculator at all) will continue to pay no listing fees. FAQ ensues...
I don't use calculated shipping, what does this change for me?
Nothing. Your life continues on as normal, unchanged.
I'm fine with the existing shipping calculator, do I have to pay to list items?
No. If our existing calculator is accurate enough for you, you can continue to use it for your new and existing items at no cost.
Why not just fix the existing calculator and keep it free?
Our existing calculator is based on the most widely available shipping APIs from USPS, UPS, and Fedex. We have spent numerous weeks refining and tweaking it since it originally launched. But without a team dedicated exclusively to the calculator, it's about as good as it is going to get. That's why we decided to call in professional help for sellers that want to use calculated shipping and want a calculator that has a team that is exclusively dedicated to keeping it accurate.
How will I know whether to use the current calculator or the new one?
After the new calculator launches, you will be able to compare what the new and old calculator would quote for various carriers shipping to various areas (on the page where you list your item). You can then choose, based on your personal experience and expertise, which calculator gives rates that are most accurate for you.
Is the AuctionInc. calculator more accurate than the old one?
Gosh, we sure hope so. In many cases, the calculators might give the same rates; but what sets the AuctionInc. shipping calculator apart is the team of shipping experts that stand behind it. When it gives a rate that is inaccurate, we have a group of experts we can go to that can explain why it gave the rate that it did, and improve it if necessary.
What about support for allowing buyers to choose their shipping method? Or improved support for combined shipping discounts?
These are both improvements we are very excited about getting online in the months to come. Our first step will just be to get the new calculator online and running, but after we have that complete, we plan to start plotting how best to approach our next set of shipping improvements.
If I want to use the new calculator, how do I pay?
We are currently planning to automatically include the item cost along with the rest of your monthly bill. If you like, we will allow you to incorporate the shipping calculator cost into the shipping estimate itself (i.e., the calculator adds 20 cents to the buyer's estimate), so the calculator ends up being free to you once your item sells.
This sounds too complicated. Isn't there an easier way?
In general, flat rate or free shipping tend to be more straightforward than calculated shipping, which is probably why so few marketplaces offer calculated shipping in the first place. If you use one of these shipping methods, your experience will be unchanged. If you are a buyer, your experience will be unchanged. But we have heard loud and clear from our sellers that use calculated shipping that they want to have an option that better accounts for the hundreds of factors that weigh into the cost of shipping. For those sellers, having a calculator that is accurate is a key to their business, so we are striving to accomodate them.
When is it launching?
Final date is TBD, depending on when we get back our contract from AuctionInc. If they are able to get it to us by early this week (as they estimate) and it looks good, then we ought to have it online and ready to roll by the following week (the week of the 10th). We'll continue to keep you posted as the situation evolves.
<< Back
Recent Posts
An Important Announcement from Our Team
May 13, 2025
Cleaning House: How We're Cracking Down on Fraud to Protect the Bonanza Community
Mar 26, 2025
The Power of Optimized Listing Titles & Keywords
Mar 20, 2025
Spring Cleaning for Summer Sales
Mar 11, 2025
It's TIME! Bonanza's Annual Holiday Sale is coming up!
Nov 13, 2024
Veteran's Day: Honoring Service and Sacrifice
Nov 11, 2024Most Popular
Share
53 responses to Shipping Calculator Update
I don’t use the Shipping Calculator, but it sounds very promising!
Thank you Bill! I don’t use Calculated, but this will be helpful for those who do.
LOL “your life continues on as normal, unchanged”.
Sounds encouraging. I use a flat rate shipping now, but may try the new calculator once it is functional. Thanks for your perseverance.
I would like to use calculated shipping, but I’m not willing to pay for it and don’t trust the Bonz one. Oh well, my fixed price and free shipping method seems to be working fine. At least I know the total amount charged to a customer will be the same no matter where they live in the Lower 48 and what my minimum profit amount is. I was just really hoping I could switch to calculated because it would be less work for me since I wouldn’t have to figure it all up.
@purple: Sorry to hear that. On the bright side, ecommerce studies tend to show that buyers convert at 20% or more higher if you can make free shipping work for your items. Of course, for sellers that are shipping fragile or heavy stuff, it is pretty hard to make free shipping viable.
Also, for the record, the calculator can become “free” once your items sell (by using the option to add the 20 cents to the shipping cost).
I haven’t sold anything here with a calculated shipping yet, so I don’t know if I’ll use the new calculator or the old one. So far all of my sales have been on items that have a flat rate.
Is that 20 cents per listing a one time fee? Or does it multiply by the months the listing is on? Or does it get recharged when you put an item in reserve and then make it active again?
Just for the sake of perception, wouldn’t it had been better to charge a mandatory monthly site fee and charge nothing for the shipping calculator?
FYI – I have no issues with the old shipping calculator.
Just curious???
Your Friend,
LouieTheSeller
What about the many users like me who have no need for a shipping calculator except occasionally? A mandatory fee would not be fair to us.
I think adding the $0.20 to the calculated shipping would work well. The vast majority of customers would not notice an additional $0.20 added to the postage amount, unless the seller is someone who already overcharges significantly for postage.
My understanding from the blog is that the $0.20 only gets charged when the item sells. It does not matter how long it takes for the item to sell.
so is it all or none. i would like my heavy items to have calc. shipping and the others to continue to be free shipping. Is that possible; to pick and choose?
I use the shipping calculator with no problems, seems pretty accurate to me! Need to take care inputting accurate weight though.
@Indizona: It’s a one-time, per item fee.
@louie: The reason we didn’t want to go with a flat monthly fee was because we didn’t want to charge sellers who didn’t make use of the feature. And for those that do, we are getting charged on a per-item basis, so that is the most accurate way for us to keep our costs in line with the sellers’ costs.
@thebgs: The fee isn’t mandatory, it would only apply if you choose to use the new calculator rather than the old one. If you want to continue to use the existing calculator, you can continue to do so at the current (=free) price. If a seller chose to use the new calculator, the 20 cents would be charged when the item is listed. If they wanted to pass that 20 cents on to the buyer (which would be our recommendation) then we would just add 20 cents to the shipping estimate when the buyer checked out.
@barntiques: You can choose, on a per-item basis, if you want to use the old (free) calculator or the new (non-free) one. We’ll be providing a tool built into the new listing so you can get an idea on what rates the two calculators would estimate, which will allow you to make an informed decision on which one you want to use.
Thanks for the great questions, all.
does the 20 cents get charged to us us immediately upon listing OR are we charged when the item sells? Please let it be the latter
at least till things pick up
@sofy: That would obviously be our preference, too. But understandably, AuctionInc. is not able to allow us to use their calculator for free when it is costing them resources every time an estimate is made against their calculator. Our hope is that the fee will be small in comparison to the money a seller might lose (either through bad estimates or lost sales) if they use an inaccurate calculator.
got 20 bucks I can borrow?
@sofy: Sure, stop by later tonight and I’ll pick $20 for you off of the money tree in my back yard.
Hmmm, I guess many of these questions and concerns will get worked out as we use this, both the old and the new calculator. As one who uses the calculated shipping we already have pretty successfully, my only issue has been with combining orders. I am curious to see how combined shipments will be effected, and if there will be a need to switch certain categories over to the new calculator so that they combine easier. I know all that remains to be seen, but I applaud you for taking the necessary steps to provide a tool that was obviously a major necessity for anyone who sells online and needs to ship their products. It’s hard to have one without the other, so I am glad to see this evolving.
I am wondering if we will have to edit our listings to include the new system, and if so, is that when we are charged for using the service. I am pretty happy with the old one, but we’ll see…Sounds promising!
Sooooo….
1. will the calculator handle the shipping of multiple items under a single order?
2. will there be (or can there be) a seller option to use the calculator, but to limit the amount charged to for example, no more than $10 for a domestic shipment?
3. Is there a way to pay for it with cheeseburgers?
next ? Say I want to re-list an item to push it up higher in the search here will that be charged an extra 20cents?
I don’t use it and doubt that I will start after 2 years.
Sounds good. Not sure if we will need to use it. Just hate to see more costs. That’s why we came here, because the other place got too expensive.
To clarify, I knew the fee was not mandatory. I was responding to Louie who seems to think we should all be paying for the shipping calculator.
Although not much use to myself – I hope it works for those who can make use of it. At the moment, I will just have to keep using the older model and doing things the long way.
Charges to give customers calculated shipping?? No thanks. Flat rate is fine for me. Sounds like running two shipping calculators on the same site checkout is only asking for trouble and more glitches. JMO
Pray tell me … am I the only one who remembers the tagline "Relentless Simplicity’ ??
I hope it works well for those that can afford to use it.
At this point, I am in the I can’t afford it club.
Old calculator works good for me. I am confused, do we pay the .20 cents on each item we list? Or do we pay the .20 cents when we ship an item. Will we select the new calculator when we do a listing and be charged at that point? If you have a lot of items in your booth it could add up to a lot of money.
Will it let us choose the way we want to send item such as Parcel Post, Priority, Media mail????
So, you’re saying the Bonanza calculator is not so good (and you know it), but if we want more accurate information we can pay .20 each item for it, and you recommended a work around for that which is to inflate the ship price so the customer actually pays for it, but why not just offer free shipping…
Thanks Bill!
I went to http://www.auctioninc.com/ and found this article about Bonanza and AuctionInc.
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y10/m10/i15/s01
Sounds like a BIG deal to me! This could be a good thing!
Kim
@moms: Yes, when the new calculator is online, if you decided you’d want to use it, then you would edit your item to specify that. It is at that time that you’d be incur the fee.
@jsgeare: Yes, the new calculator will handle the shipping of multiple items in a single order the same way as the current one does (either by taking the sum of individually calculated shipping costs, or by adding weights and then calculating cost, depending on how the seller has setup combined shipping). There isn’t currently a way to limit the amount charged for shipping. Nor is there a way to pay for it in cheeseburgers at this time.
@sofy: If it is a new item ID, then it is considered a new item. So yes, given that relisting is considered a new item, it would cost 20 cents if it used the new calculator.
@renagade: This does not change things at all for the vast majority of our sellers who don’t use calculated shipping. For those that do, we see it is as a worthwhile change to make for the sake of improving something we’ve been repeatedly told is important by our sellers.
@collectableme: Per the FAQ, you’d pay 20 cents if you list an item that uses the new calculator. You would get 20 cents back when you sell that item.
@journey: We know that some of our sellers tell us that the current calculator is inaccurate for some orders, and we know that calculated shipping is complicated enough that we would probably have to start a shipping business to get it to work correctly 100% of the time. We figure that partnering with a business that specializes in shipping is the next best thing.
I don’t need the shipping calculator but I guess it is a good idea to have a working one for those that need one.
Will it give you a choice of parcel post or Priority mail or Media Mail???
The one we use now only give Priority Mail
Also will it give the buyer the choice how they want it sent?
Depending on distance Priority Mail can be a lot more than Parcel Post.
@collectableme: Great minds think alike. Allowing that choice is next on our shipping “todo” list.
will that cost extra too?
@collectible: That’s HUGE. I would definitely want my buyers to see their choices at to the shipping methods I would use. Show priority, show Parcel Posy, show first class -and let the buyer decide. Excellent suggestion!
@sofy: Of course not, why would it? The only reason that there is a cost for the calculator at all is because we are being charged for it. But adding extra functionality to it doesn’t change the cost structure at all.
pffft lol Bill..“adding extra functionality to it doesn’t change the cost structure at all.”…like I would know that! Someone has to ask all the dumb questions
And when might we see that functionality incorporated???
I guess it is hopeless to have a calculator for international sellers.
@sofy: OK, I guess that might not be obvious if you weren’t a programmer. But if you were a programmer, it would be totally obvious.
As far as timeline for rolling out buyer/seller picking their shipping options… I always hesitate to guess since I hate being wrong. But I can say that I think it is relatively important compared to our other tasks, and I would be very sad if we didn’t have it available by the year’s end. Ideally, sooner.
@jinx: International calculated shipping already exists, have you checked the batch editor lately? I’d imagine the new calculator will do intl as well or better than the existing one.
The overwhelming majority of my items can ship first class. With that in mind, I use flat shipping on most items. I know others have expressed concern about the accuracy of the current calculator, but I haven’t had that problem. Having said all this, I’d probably stick with the current calculator when I need it. The thing that would make me take a second look at this new calculator is the option of allowing buyer to choose their shipping method and make payment accordingly.
Hi Bill. Thank you so much for doing this.
I have a question. With the new shipping calculator by Auction Inc, will we be able to set it up to where we can provide one type shipping service for international buyers and one type shipping service for the USA as calculated shipping on a listing? For example, I have an item that could ship by priority mail to the USA and first class mail to international. The bonz calculator does not allow us to offer calculated shipping using two different shipping services in this way.
My other question is this…will we be able to use the bonz calculator on some items and also use the Auction Inc calculator on other items if we so choose? This would also give me the chance to slowly change all of my listings to the Auction Inc calculator to avoid a temporary money shock in my pocket.
I am so hoping your answer is yes to both of these questions
As you quoted, Bill…“Also, for the record, the calculator can become “free†once your items sell (by using the option to add the 20 cents to the shipping cost).”
Thank you for giving us this option!!
I would also be looking forward to a better way on combining purchases so that the cost of combined shipping can be factored in and also in giving a customer a choice in what type of shipping service they would prefer since this can make a difference at times in a sale.
Thanks, Bill, for doing this. I’ve read in the forums so many times where sellers have expressed the demand for upgraded, calculated shipping.
You have listened, and done research and negotiating with AuctionInc. It looks good. I hope it works out well for the site and for sellers who need it—of whom I may be one. So far, I’ve found good results with the UPS calculated shipping combined with the discount I get when using PayPal.
One thing I noticed on a sample on AuctionInc’s site: Shipping for a pen. http://www.auctioninc.com/info/page/shopcart_demo View cart, the shipping options started at parcel post for $10.70. I hope they will also include the other USPS choices for very small, light-weight items, i.e., the small flat-rate box and flat fate envelope for $4.95 and $4.90, respectively, and also the medium and large flat rate boxes for $10.70 and $14.50—where “If it fits, it ships.”
Also, I hope that as a seller, for each listing, we could choose to LIMIT the choices for a buyer for a particular listing—i.e., UPS or FEDEX, but NOT parcel or priority?
IT does get so complicated, doesn’t it.
What would be very helpful for my situation, would be the combined shipping, where they could factor in not only the weight of each item, but also the measurements; so, at a certain point, a shipping box would have to be a “large” box price; or, two boxes for the total combined items.
Best wishes for how it all turns out. I’m pretty adaptable, but the combined shipping part is scary, as a fixed rate could be too much or too little, depending upon distance, and a calculated combined might not charge for an oversized or two boxes. Whew. Thanks, Bill. At some point, things will work out as best as possible, and the most sccurate shipping calculator available is the best we can hope for and adjust to any variables necessary.
I have always been a big fan of calculated shipping and I’m very happy to hear about this wonderful news. I personally have never had an item (or items) not be correct on the calculations provided here….but if it will improve for the greater percentage of sellers, I’m all for it. Love the continuous flow of positive exciting changes here. Way to go you all.
Thanks a million
I don’t think I’ll use it but I think it’s admirable that you’re offering an option for folks who requested it.
Would it be possible to negotiate or have shipping insurance as part of the package, less than USPS charges??
I like the idea of having Priority, Media, First Class and Parcel shipping, please make it availablbe.
@goldfire and @calico: The ability to specify the specific type of shipping for a shipper is under the umbrella of what I had been discussing earlier in the comments — improvements that we hope to have as part of our next round of shipping upgrades. For this initial pass, we’re going to start by solely adding the second calculator that has all of the same options and setup as our current calculator. But in the next few months we definitely want to move in the directions of allowing sellers to say which services they do and don’t want (and also let buyers choose from those services, for example, when they want an item to have expedited shipping).
@GoldFire: Yes, you can choose which calculator you want to use on a per-item basis.
Hi all great to know we have a new choice to use for shipping, currently I use flat rate shipping but nice to know if I have an item that needs calculated its avaliable.
I think it is wonderful that we have the option to choose the new or stay with the old. Not everywhere would give us an option. Thanks!!
This definitely sounds promising! Once the choices of different shipping methods are available, I think I will be switching my larger, heavier items to calculated. Thank you for listening and for your efforts guys!
Thank you Bill!
This sounds wonderful. Thank you so much for all you do.
I like choices. Likely I won’t use the new calculator as I do pretty well with the system I have in place now. I don’t have massive amounts of items to ship like some do, and so I have time to entertain emails from potential buyers about alternative shipping options, combined shipping et al. For those who do (or want to) ship 100 items a day however 20 cents per item is reasonable. Upon first reading the announcemebnt I was worried we’d incur a 20 cents fee each time a potential buyer even inquired about shipping before making a decision to purchase (YIKES!), but that was clarified and as long as it is a one time only fee per item that uses that calculator, not so worried
I just dont make the money I need to on this site to pay for all the fun extras
Awesome!!! Love the idea of being able to add 20 cents onto the buyer’s shipping cost!!! No sweat off my back. L-O-V-E it! (er, uh, at least, I hope I do).
Login to see more comments