Tiered Shipping Groups

What are Tiered Shipping Groups?

Tiered Shipping Groups are a new concept we have created in Better Shipping to allow you to have complete control over which products are included in your tiered shipping calculations.

What is Tiered Shipping?

Lets quickly go over what we mean by tiered shipping.

Tiered shipping give you the ability to discount the shipping cost if customers buy multiple items. For example, if you are selling t-shirts, and you know that it will cost $10 to ship the first t-shirt, but then it will only cost $1 to ship every t-shirt after that. You can set this up using tiered shipping.

This allows you to use shipping incentives to get your customers to buy more! As well as setting a fair price for the shipping.

What are Tiered Shipping Groups

Tiered Shipping Groups allow you to choose the 'scope' of the products that you want to be included in the tiered shipping calculation. Using our t-shirt example, if a customer buys 3 t-shirts, their shipping will cost $12. However, if we are also selling kitchen appliances in our store, then we don't want to ship those for $1! So we can use the tiered shipping groups to separate our tiered shipping calculations.

How to use the Tiered Shipping Groups

Tiered shipping groups are setup on your product rates page (Step 2 when creating/editing a shipping rate). It will only be available if you have selected to use Tiered Shipping in your shipping rate setup.

You can get to your shipping rate products page by clicking the "Edit product rates" link from the Shipping Rates page, or by going through the process of creating a new shipping rate from the same page.

There are 3 options for the tiered shipping groups:

• Multiples of the same product
• Multiples of the same variant
• Multiples of the same group

Each of these choices will have very different shipping calculations, so we will go through each of them in turn, using the same example.

To setup our example, imagine you have a t-shirt shop selling t-shirts. Lets focus on two of the t-shirt products, a dog picture t-shirt product and a cat picture t-shirt product. Each t-shirt costs $15 for a customer to buy. Each t-shirt also has 3 variants of size, small, medium and large.

We have setup our two t-shirts in our Better Shipping shipping rate. The cat t-shirt ships for $10 for the first t-shirt, and $1 for every extra t-shirt. The dog t-shirt ships for $5 for the first t-shirt and $2 for every extra t-shirt.

Multiples of the same product

Currently in the tiered group column, we have both products selected as Multiples of the same product. This option means that each product will be treated separately, but the variants within the products (small, medium and large), will all be in the 'scope' of the tiered shipping price we have setup.

For example, if a customer buys:

• 2 x small cat t-shirts
• 1 x medium cat t-shirt
• 1 x small dog t-shirt
• 1 x medium dog t-shirt
• 3 x large dog t-shirt

As both cat and dog t-shirts are selected as "multiples of the same product", we can just group the products and ignore the variants. We can say that the customer has bought 3 x cat t-shirts and 5 x dog t-shirts. This makes the calculation

• 3 x Cat t-shirts ($10 for the first item, $1 for every item after that)
• $10 + $1 + $1 = $12
• 5 x Dog t-shirts ($5 for the first item, $2 for every item after that)
• $5 + $2 + $2 + $2 + $2 = $13
• Total Shipping Cost
• $12 (cat) + $13 (dog) = $25

So we can see that every product is uses it's own calculation that we setup on the products page, but it doesn't matter which variants the customer orders, they are still treated as 1 product.

Multiples of the same variant

Now lets choose Multiples of the same variant for both our cat and dog t-shirts on the products page.

Multiples of the same variant means that each variant will be treated as its own tiered shipping calculation, not combined with the other variants in the product. So for the cat -shirt, the small variant will begin at $10, the medium variant will begin at $10 and the large variant will begin at $10 shipping.

Let's use the same example to illustrate this. If a customer buys:

• 2 x small cat t-shirts
• 1 x medium cat t-shirt
• 1 x small dog t-shirt
• 1 x medium dog t-shirt
• 3 x large dog t-shirt

As both the cat and the dog t-shirts are set to the "Multiples of the same variant" we have to treat each of these variants like it was it's own product. So the calculation for this order will be:

• 2 x Small cat t-shirts
• $10 + $1 = $11
• 1 x Medium cat t-shirt
• $10 = $10
• 1 x Small dog t-shirt
• $5 = $5
• 1 x Medium dog t-shirt
• $5 = $5
• 3 x Large dog t-shirt
• $5 + $2 + $2 = $9
• Total Shipping Cost
• $11 (small cat) + $10 (medium cat) + $5 (small dog) + $5 (medium dog) + $9 (large dog) = $40

Now we can see that every variant starts from the start of the tiered shipping calculation. It also shows what a big difference the "Tiered Group" setting makes on your shipping calculation.

Lets quickly do one more example except this time, make the cat t-shirt "Multiples of the same product" and the dog t-shirt "Multiples of the same variant"

Using the same example. If a customer buys:

• 2 x small cat t-shirts
• 1 x medium cat t-shirt
• 1 x small dog t-shirt
• 1 x medium dog t-shirt
• 3 x large dog t-shirt

As before, the cat product is a set as "Multiples of the same product" so we can group all the variants together making it 3 x cat t-shirts:

• 3 x Cat t-shirt
• $10 + $1 + $1 = $12
• 1 x Small dog t-shirt
• $5 = $5
• 1 x Medium dog t-shirt
• $5 = $5
• 3 x Large dog t-shirt
• $5 + $2 + $2 = $9
• Total Shipping Cost
• $12 (cat) + $5 (small dog) + $5 (medium dog) + $9 (large dog) = $31

You can have any combination of the tiered groups, allowing a lot of flexibility to suit your shipping strategy. There is one more type of tiered group which we will cover next.

Multiples of the same group

Multiples of the same group allows you to use the tiered shipping across multiple products. This means you can group all of your products, or just a selection of your products and set a single shipping rate for all of them.

In our example, we have cat t-shirts and dog t-shirts. In reality, they are both very similar products, so why not just set a single tiered shipping price for both of them. That way, it doesn't matter if a customer orders 3 x cat t-shirts and 5 x dog t-shirts, in whichever variants they want, we can charge them $10 for the first item and $1 for every other item, combining their t-shirt order into a single shipping rate.

This is where you can use the "Multiples of the same group" setting for your tiered groups.

When using "Multiples of the same group" You will see you can't actually select that option, however, you can select the "New Group 1" option. Selecting "New Group 1" will set the tiered shipping group to "Group 1" (don't worry about the name, we can rename it later). So by setting both our cat and dog t-shirts to "Group 1" we are effective linking their shipping rates.

Now instead of seeing a shipping price we can set, it has the message "Group rates are set in the next step". What this means is we actually set the price and options for the tiered group rates on the tiered group page. So once you have selected "Group 1" and hit the "Update and Save" button, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the "Next" button to head over to the Tiered Shipping Group page.

On the Tiered Group page, we can see our "Group 1" tiered group appearing just like one of the products on the previous page.

The columns on tiered groups are very similar to the products page with a couple of differences.

The Tiered Group Name column allows you to change the name of your tiered groups to something more meaningful.

There is also a "No. of Products" column. This simply shows you how many products are currently included in the group. For us, it is the cat t-shirt and the dog t-shirt, so 2 products.

The "Shipping Rate" column is the same as on the products page. You can use the "+" and "-" buttons to add and remove tiers.

The "Skip Shipping Rules" toggle again is the same as on the products page. The difference here is that it means that every product that is in the tiered shipping group will skip any shipping rules you have created on the shipping rules page.

Finally, the "Delete" column has the delete buttons ("X"). Clicking this will delete the tiered group rate completely. Any products that were in that tiered group when it was deleted will be set to the final settings of tiered shipping group before it was deleted.

Example

Continuing with our example, our current group is called "Group 1", lets change that to "T-Shirts" by clicking on the text and typing in the new name. Then lets add a new tier using the "+" button in the Shipping Rates column. For the first tier set the price to $10, and for 2 or more, set the price to $1. Then hit the update and save button to save our changes.

Now, using the same customer order as before, lets do the calculation. If a customer buys:

• 2 x small cat t-shirts
• 1 x medium cat t-shirt
• 1 x small dog t-shirt
• 1 x medium dog t-shirt
• 3 x large dog t-shirt

Because we have the cat and the dog t-shirts in the same tiered group of "T-shirts", we can group all of the items together.

• 8 x T-shirts ($10 for the first item, $1 for every item after that)
• $10 + $1 + $1 + $1 + $1 + $1 + $1 + $1 = $17
• Total Shipping Cost
• $17

All of the items were grouped together, and treated as a single calculation.

Let's add one more product to drive this example home. In our shop we also have a gold necklace product. This is a separate product and is set to ship for $5 per product. Leaving everything the same in our example, except adding a necklace to the customer order, lets do the calculation again. If a customer buys:

• 2 x small cat t-shirts
• 1 x medium cat t-shirt
• 1 x small dog t-shirt
• 1 x medium dog t-shirt
• 3 x large dog t-shirt
• 2 x gold necklaces

The calculation is now:

• 8 x T-shirts ($10 for the first item, $1 for every item after that)
• $10 + $1 + $1 + $1 + $1 + $1 + $1 + $1 = $17
• 2 x Gold necklaces
• $5 + $5 = $10
• Total Shipping Cost
• $17 (t-shirts) + $10 (necklaces) = $27

From this we can see that the tiered group still works as normal, even when combined with other products that use different settings.