Surcharge Shipping Rates Based on Cart Price

Overview

If you’d like to apply a surcharge for shipping rates based on a specific cart price, ShipperHQ’s shipping rules feature provides an easy way to set this up.

For example, you may wish to apply a surcharge for small orders to ensure you’re covering your costs.

In this example, we’ll apply a surcharge to USPS shipping of $5.00 for orders up to $100.

Prerequisites

Ensure the carrier(s) you’d like to surcharge have been set up in ShipperHQ.

Setup

To create a surcharge rule based on cart price, you’ll need both a shipping filter and a shipping rule.

The shipping filter will determine the price point at which the rule will be applied.

Creating a Shipping Filter

  1. Click on “Filters” on from the left-hand navigation in ShipperHQ and then click the +New option.

Location of Filters option under Shipping Rules menu in dashboard.

Click on New to start a new filter creation.

2. In the filter setup page, enter the Name for your filter.

We’ll use “<$100” in this example.

  1. Select Filter Applies to Origin.
  2. It is also recommended that a brief description for the filter’s purpose be added to the text box titled “Internal Description.” This is helpful context for SHQ support and your team members in understanding the purpose of the filter.

Example showing the fields to be filled in Overview section of the filter.

3. Set a Price Range of 0-100

Example showing how to configure price based filter.

4. Save your new filter.

Once this is complete, you’ll be able to select this option when building your new shipping rule.

Creating a Shipping Rule

1. To create the new shipping rule, navigate to the “Shipping Rules” option in the left-hand navigation menu.

Location of 'All Shipping Rules' option to view all the shipping rules created.

2. Click “Add New” to create a new shipping rule.

Click on New to create a new Shipping Rule.

3. Select “Surcharge Rates” for the action you would like the rule to perform.

Location to choose 'Surcharge Rates' action to create a shipping surcharge rule.

4. Select the flat rate or percentage you would like to surcharge.

In this case, we’ll simply set a flat rate of $5.00.

Select how the surcharge rule should be applied once live.
Example showing how to configure a flat rate surcharge on each shipment in the cart.

5. Be sure to specify how the surcharge should be applied.

Location to select how the surcharge rule should apply.

6. Choose the shipping methods to be used in this surcharge rule from a list of all available shipping methods

Select the shipping methods for the shipping rule.

7. Click the option to use “Price” for the rule condition to apply this surcharge to the selected methods then click “Continue” to proceed to the next step.

Location to select conditions for the shipping rule to apply. For example, in this case condition is Price.

8. Next, you will be presented with a prompt to enter the monetary value to use for your rule.

If you have not yet created the price filter, you can do so here.

Example showing how to configure the condition for shipping rule.

If you have already created a price filter from the initial steps above, you can also simply opt to Apply an Existing Filter.

Location to select existing filters to be applied to the rule.

Select the existing price filter from the drop-down menu that appears on the next screen.

Select an existing price filter to be used in the rule.

9. After selecting the price filter and proceeding, a summary of the shipping rule will be displayed.

Be sure to add a title for the new rule so that it can be easily identified in the shipping rules list and when testing.

Example showing summary of a shipping rule before finishing the setup.

10. Click “Finish” to save the new rule. This will apply the rule immediately.

11. Once the rule has been created, we recommend using the “Test your Rates” feature to confirm the new rule is working as intended.

Conclusion

With this rule in place USPS rates will be surcharged by $5 when the cart price is < $100. You can add other filter/rule combinations if you want to charge different surcharges for different price ranges.

Test Your Rates

Verify that your carriers and rules are working and see how they will display in your checkout right from the ShipperHQ dashboard.

Learn More

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