How to Automate Shipping Costs

Hi there!

We’re currently working on how to set up auotmation with shipping costs based off of customers zip code. Is there an easy way to do this in HubSpot?

Back Story: We’re getting ready to launch a new product for hunters and we’re wanting the customer to receive as much information as possible upon checkout. Tax, Shipping, etc.
What’s the most effective way to do this?

Hi @adobson! I understand the goal is to automatically adjust shipping costs based on the contact zip code.

I want to invite some subject matter experts to see if they have any suggestions.

Hey @Jigar_Thakker, @bendonahower do y’all have any suggestions to automate a dynamic shipping cost?

Best,

Kennedy

The answer to this question is highly dependent upon how you are selling this product.

Is it an expensive enough product for hunters that you’re invoicing people, are you trying to use a payments link, etc.?

If payments link

1. Create Multiple Payment Links for Different Shipping Zones

2. Use a HubSpot Form + Redirect to the Correct Payment Link

This is only sane if you can paint with a broad brush otherwise you’ll be creating new payment links to the end of time.

If you are creating quotes in HubSpot for one you could all take a semi-manual approach and create calculated properties based upon the postcode and your shipping costs which would give you the number to input into the quote.

If you have operations hub you could automatically push that number into the quote. It’s a little complicated, so unless you have in house HubSpot developers, shoot me an email to see if we can help ben@noboundsdigital.com.

Lastly, you could always look to a third-party tool like Shopify and integrate it with HubSpot. With Shopify you of the ability to create rules around things like shipping costs natively.

PS. What’s the product? :bow_and_arrow::deer::evergreen_tree:

Thank you for your input!
To answer your question, it’s complicated :joy:
We are selling a two-story deer blind. The base model is $15,000 so it’s not necessarily cheap.
We had looked into Stripe but they want 2.9% of all charges and I don’t care for that.
We also have an online payment portal set up through Converge that we utilize for online payments. So, my thought process is leaning towards…customer fills out a form with the option they choose…they’re then directed to a “check out” page where we show total cost, shipping, and tax and then they could pay directly through Converge.
However, the shipping and tax rates would need to be calculated via a workflow.
Does that make sense?

Converge is this? Converge Support

I think you have a good sporting chance with your approach.

You’ll need some means to integrate data between HubSpot and converge. If you need help with the development let me know ben@noboundsdigital.com.

If you use HubSpot products, you can create a calculated custom property that adds the shipping cost based on state, but this might be complicated to set up inside a single calculated property for a lot of states or shipping zones (and still requires one product per shipping zone). You can also create products for each shipping zone and then manually map shipping costs accordingly at the product level.

If you’re using quotes with online payments (which can be an option), you can also add a custom line item in the quote with the calculated shipping costs. This would require either Ops Hub Pro for custom-coded workflow actions or some other way to add this automatically to the quote. I’m unsure if this can be done via workflows; I need to test.

You can use HubSpot custom workflows and integrations to set shipping costs by zip code. Connect HubSpot with a shipping tool like ShipStation or use a custom API. This helps show tax and shipping at checkout. It gives your customer full cost details before they buy. This works well for new product launches and improves the buying experience.