Transcription
Hey everyone, welcome back to another video. Today, we are going to be talking all things Whatnot shipping related. And in particular, we're going to be breaking down the Whatnot shipping profiles.
I get tons of questions on Whatnot shipping: "How do I set everything up? Am I doing ground, priority? What buttons do I press? And what are these shipping profiles that you talk so much about?" And I'm going to today explain all of those to you.
So, we're going to jump into a screen recording here. I'm going to go into our seller profile and we are going to actually set up our shipping settings. You are going to set those once and you should likely never need to really touch them again, unless you are selling in a variety of different categories that are very different weights and types of items that you're selling. For the most part, you shouldn't need to touch these settings once you set them.
And then we're going to jump over to that shipping profile section and I'm going to show you how to set everything up and why it's so important to your Whatnot selling business.
And hi, if you are new here, my name is Amanda. I do videos talking about Whatnot and reselling in my book selling business in general, and I release those every Thursday each week. So please make sure you're subscribed if you're interested in getting notified when I post new videos each week.
All right guys, let's go ahead and jump into it. I'm going to be screen recording and keep in mind, I am going to be on an Android device. Follow along, I'll show you how to get to it and how everything is going to be set up.
All right, we're going to go ahead and open up Whatnot. And this is what it's going to look like when we open up the app. We're going to have our main screen with shows. And down in the bottom right-hand corner, you should see a button that says "Account," and you want to go ahead and click that. That's going to bring up your general seller hub.
So, in your hub here, you have a variety of different items that you can select and play around with. I definitely recommend just clicking on all of these and just seeing what's behind each one of these tabs. But what we're focused on is going to be this shipping tab. You guys can see here, see where it says "Shipping" down here? So let's go ahead and click on that.
And your screen should look just like this, or very similar. So, we're going to start from the top and work our way down to the bottom. Okay, this is what you're going to need to do to set everything up.
First up, if you want to enable free pickup, you can. You can actually toggle over this little option here, and it'll allow you to start putting in information for your free pickup. Or, sorry, for your local pickup. But they don't have to pay shipping, essentially. So, why it's free pickup. So, first off, you have your location. Ensure that your pickup location is safe and easily accessible. You put your address in and possibly any instructions that you would like for people to know as well. As like, specifically, I have in mind like pickup time windows. Like, there's only a few days a week that I'm available. So if those days don't work for you, you may not want to do local pickup, right? And as you can see here, these pickup settings will apply to future and already scheduled shows.
All right, so now let's go ahead and look at the next listing here, domestic shippings. Now, this is the screen I think that confuses most people, but I feel like it is so easy to understand. So, we're going to start from the top and we're going to work our way down.
All right, all orders falling outside of your shipping preferences will default to USPS Ground Advantage. Eligible sellers will default to Media Mail shipping. So, there are only a couple types of shipping you can do on Whatnot. You can do Media Mail, which is what I mostly do. Priority, which is a vast majority of mailing in general. And Ground Advantage, which is a new, really up-and-coming service that's come out in the last year that's been amazing and is highly utilized by so many platforms. And then you, of course, you can see at the top here, have things like the letter system, which is great for, uh, when you're sending out like giveaways, stickers, things like that. I think you can utilize the mail system. I've never really used that. This very first little thing here, USPS First Class Mail Letter for shipments $20 and below. Shipments valued over $20 will be upgraded to USPS, um, Advantage.
So, let's click on the "Learn More" and kind of see what it says. It'll, it's probably going to bring up a help article here. And it looks like it's going to talk about, perfect. So, uh, trading card games, sports stickers, all that kind of stuff, is going to be a great way to use the First Class like Mail Letter shipping system. However, I don't do those, so I don't personally utilize those. Now, I know that what's really cool about these is the rate, like the pricing. If you see right here, I know the pricing is really, really good on these First Class, uh, mail letters. So when you are doing giveaways and you can pay 69 cents for a giveaway as opposed to like $3.57 or maybe even $4.67, which might be the introductory. Now, it is so much cheaper. So if you do fall under these categories where you're going to be shipping out, um, cards and stickers and things like that, go ahead and read this article, check that out, that might be something you want to go ahead and toggle on.
All righty, that's out of the way. Hopefully that makes sense. Under 3 oz, you can utilize the First Class Mail Letter. Let's look at this second little section here, domestic shippings from 1 to 5 lb. And this is all you need to think about when you are clicking the one of the two buttons when you're shipping items that are only going to be 1 to 5 lbs in weight. Would you like Whatnot to automatically default it to Priority Mail, or would you like them to default it to flat rate boxes? Again, we're going to click on this "Learn More" for flat rate boxes. This is another category that I personally do not deal with because it doesn't fall into the purview of the types of items I sell. Flat rate packaging doesn't work very well with books. The types of books I sell, it can work with books, just not the types of books I sell, not the way I sell with bundling. Okay? If you're selling a lot of individual books, you can utilize it. I know there's a lot of book sellers who do, but it is just personally not something I utilize because thinking about the types of packages and, uh, bundles that I have, they often would not fit conveniently into the flat rate boxes. So, um, basically, what this is going to do, you can obviously, is giving you a little breakdown of everything. So if you want to go back and learn more, you can actually go through this article here. It looks like it does a pretty good job at explaining it, um, but you can get your flat rate boxes for free. They have the small, medium, and large, and you can use flat rate shipping. You can get the the the rate for flat rate and saving the buyer some money by giving them a single flat rate shipping option. That's a great, great way to to package, um, but for me, I'm going to have it on Priority. I actually have it auto defaults to Priority. I'm going to keep it on Priority. It means that anytime that a package is under 5 lbs, I'm super cool with paying Priority with the buyer, even paying Priority Mail, uh, rates. That's, that's totally affordable. That's normal. That is normal shipping Priority Mail.
Right now, we're going to scroll down to the last section. We get three options for this last section, which is going to be domestic shipments over 5 lbs. Okay, so now they're giving us the option for Ground Advantage. And you can even see it says, "Best for shipping heavier items that aren't time-sensitive." Priority Mail arrives in 1 to 3 business days. "Best for time-sensitive shipments." And then again, the option for flat rate. So, what I like about these settings and why I highly recommend these to most sellers is that if you're somebody who's done shipping, you're familiar with packing orders and utilizing the mail service, USPS in particular, then you're going to know the reason why we have a difference now in Ground Advantage and Priority. Priority was kind of the ruling mail system for a long time. Everything got sent pretty much Priority. And then we used to have this amazing service called First Class Mail, which is no longer a thing. If you are new to the shipping world, First Class Mail was packages under a pound, which was great. If you were sending something that was under a pound, you could send it First Class. It was going to be so much cheaper. It's easier for the post office to manage and carry and deliver those small, under one pound packages. But in the last year, they actually got rid of First Class Mail and replaced it with this Ground Advantage, which we all were a little nervous about. I think, I think everyone was like, "Oh, this is just a way for the post office to get more money." But in reality, I think it's been one of the best things the post office has done in a very long time, which is allowing us to ship packages less than 5 lbs, more than 5 lbs, it doesn't matter the weight, really. It allows us to have another alternative of an option. It's ground, it's not going in the air, it's going to just travel on the ground. So it's a little cheaper for them and it will get delivered to you in, um, usually, I think the time frame is closer to like 3 to 5 business days. So Priority, it's pretty much guaranteed to get to you within 2 to 3 days. Like, 3 days for Priority is like a long time. But with Ground Advantage, it might be 2 or 3 days before it even gets near you, and then 3, 4, 5 days until it actually gets delivered to you. And so if you don't mind waiting, or your customers don't mind waiting, or you're shipping things that aren't time-sensitive, you're going to want to utilize the Ground Advantage service.
So, hopefully that kind of makes sense. That is the breakdown of why you would pick those profiles. Anything under 5 lbs, I'm okay with shipping Priority. I would choose to ship it Ground too, it doesn't really matter to me. But once you hit that over 5 pound mark, you really want to consider, is it time-sensitive? Do I want Priority? Do I want the benefits of Priority? Or do I care and I'm okay with it being Ground Advantage? It's going to be cheaper for my buyer, they're going to pay less in shipping overall, and it'll get to them when it gets to them. So that's really the difference in those two, like settings. That's all you're picking.
All right, we're going to jump back in. Let's talk about shipping profiles and I'm going to show you how to set some of those up. So hopefully that was very helpful and you guys are able to pick those selections that work best for you. These are the selections I would pick and I would just click save. And now those selections are going to be saved.
All right, let's click on the "Shipping Cost" option. This, to me, is so self-explanatory. I don't think it takes much explaining to make it make sense, but let's break it down real quick. "Cost calculated based on buyer's location and shipment weight. Only applies to shipments within the contiguous US." So, as shipping per shipping, anything, it's going to be by weight and the buyer's location, most of the time, is going to determine part of their shipping cost. So you have three options: The seller can pay all the shipping. You could pay all the shipping if you want. Do you want to inflate your pricing to cover the cost of shipping? I'm not 100% sure why someone would want to pay for their shipping costs. The only thing I can think that's a benefit for you paying shipping costs is advertising it, saying, "Hey, look, I pay all my shipping costs, right? So you're not going to pay shipping in my shows." That's one way. Buyer pays a set shipping cost. Maybe you know that the items that you're selling are only going to cost a certain amount of money to ship. Like, you know that you can fit four or five of the item that you sell in one box, and there's no way that that box is going to cost more than $10 to ship. So maybe you put in your set price here. Maybe you put in $10 as your set price, right? You can do that. Or, I think what most people do is buyer pays all shipping costs. I do not think that there is anyone that I've ever come across who has told me what they sell and I have said, "I think that you should use one of the other two options." I always default to buyer pays all shipping.
All right, let's go ahead and jump into the shipping profile. So when you pull up the shipping profiles button, you shouldn't see anything here. It should say there's nothing here at the moment. Let's go ahead and, uh, get some shipping profiles. And it even says here what the point of shipping profiles is, which I love. This is all new, uh, verbiage, I feel like, on the site that I've never seen before. "Save time and streamline shipping costs by creating a shipping profile." Super, super cool. There's even to "Learn More." So if you want to read the article on shipping profiles and like what the point of them is, go ahead and flip through here. Okay, there is a lot that I'm not going to cover in this video. I'm giving you the basics just to get you started.
All righty, so let's go ahead and create our first profile. So let's click "Create Profile." And right off the bat, we have our "Create Shipping Profile." So what I want to do is, let me show you real quick why it's important to have a shipping profile. So let's go back and click our little plus button. We're going to create a product. We want to sell something. Okay, we're going to just scroll down and pretend like we have created this entire product to sell, but I want to show you the shipping part and why shipping profiles are important. So you have the shipping, click the little down button, and these are going to be the automated shipping profiles that Whatnot gives you. Everyone should have access to these shipping profiles: 0 to 1 ounces, 1 to 3, 4 to 7, so on. And then it goes 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 6, 7 to 9, 10 to 14. Right? As somebody who sells books, I know that Media Mail is calculated per pound. So every single pound that my package weight increases, the buyer is going to pay more in shipping. So when I started looking at those profiles when I first got started and I was doing my bundling, where sometimes my piles of books that people would bundle together were, you know, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 lbs, I started realizing, "Hmm, I don't like the idea of charging somebody 4 to 6 lbs because it's going to charge them the 6 lb rate, even if their package is only 4 and a half lbs." So why don't I have an option for 5 lbs? So I looked around and I noticed the shipping profile section, and that's when I went ahead and started adding in all of the missing profiles to the specific weight that I wanted. So I have a 5 lb profile because that is something I want people to pay more accurate shipping on, instead of paying for six pounds of shipping, I want them to pay for 5 pounds of shipping. So Media Mail in particular became really important for me to set up these shipping profiles. So if you are selling things that are, you know, rarely even over 5 lbs, you really don't need to worry about this because you have all the ounces broken up from 1 ounce all the way up to 12 ounces, and then you have the poundage broken up from 1 to 2 pound, 2 to 3 lb. So depending on what you're selling is going to depend on how you need to set your profiles up. But let's go ahead and jump back in. I want to finish showing you how you're going to actually set this profile up and what it looks like once you do it.
So these are the profiles that you're going to have access to, um, naturally, and then it's going to be up to you to determine where you want to fill in the gaps. So let's go ahead and fill in our first gap with that 5 lb profile I was talking about. So going back down here to shipping, shipping profiles, we're going to create a profile. And this is what I like to name my profiles. I want to name it exactly what it is. So I use the term "bundle" because that's why I would be making a shipping profile, but I'm just going to name this one "5 lbs" because that's just straight up exactly what it is. So then let's pop in the weight. So what is the weight? It is 5 lb. Now, it looks like it does give you an option to do the ounces, which I had never seen. So like 5.5 oz, I guess, is now an or pounds. It's now an option. So you can do half weights. I've never seen it like that before. Um, I'm just going to put in five because that's what I named this profile. And then I'm going to make sure I switch it over to pounds because it does default to ounces, I believe. So pounds.
So now we've got 5 lb is the name of the profile, of the bundle, or this shipping profile, five in weight, and pounds. And then there is some bundling options. Again, I do not talk about stuff like this too much because I do not know about it yet. Maybe I'll take some time to learn about it and make a video in the future, but I'm not super familiar with this bundling options thing. So we're going to skip that and we're going to go down here. So, "Do you want to set the maximum number of items to put into one package?" Recommended for items that are unusually fragile, unusually sized, fragile, or you prefer to ship individually. So you can click on that and then give it all of its information. Like, "Look, I only want to ever put three of the items I sell in one box. There's no way I can ship more than three of the items in whatever box I want to use." So you can use the flat rate boxes. Often are going to be what's going to be, um, recommended to you. But I don't use this. Again, I don't have a set amount because I'm not shipping fragile or unusual to ship items. I'm shipping books, it's pretty standard. And then next, "Set a fixed weight for additional items in the same package." Now, again, wanted before I skip, jump over that, if this is you, check this out, you know what I mean? Play around with this, see how that works for you. If you have any specific questions on it, let me know. I can definitely do some research and help you out. But for the most part, um, I think that's going to be for a very select group of people. And then, all right, "Setting a fixed weight for additional items in the same package." So again, this is going to be items that are eligible for the bundling, as you can see up above. Not something that I do. Even though I do bundling, I do not use bundling within Whatnot. Okay? So we're not going to toggle that over. We are going to leave everything untoggled. I'm not touching anything else. All I needed to do was to put in the name, the weight, and if it's going to be pounds or ounces. Okay? So now we can just click save. And look at that, 5 lb bundle shipping profile.
Let's put in another one just to give you another example. Now, you're going to need to click the plus sign in the top right-hand corner. So click that little plus sign and let's name this one "8 lb bundle." Like I said, it was, um, I know that's the other increment there. So eight do 8 oz. Back to pounds. We don't need to do anything else down here. Save. And then sometimes this will pop up. I don't know why it does, but sometimes it pops up. "Your max bundle size is currently blank pounds since your bundle has multiple items." I, I don't understand this. I never have understood why this pops up. It just is so irrelevant to me. I don't know why it matters. So I always just click save anyways. It just pops up once you start creating bundles over 8 lbs.
All right, another one. I know that they don't have is like a 20 lb bundle, which is so random, right? But maybe you sell a big heavy thing and it weighs 20 pounds, or with shipping, it's going to weigh 20 pounds. So let's pop that in there. Same deal, we're just going to click save anyway.
All right, so now let's show why we needed to create those. So these are here in our shipping profiles that we can add. We can delete them if we needed to. We can modify them. But now let's go back to that sell, sell page. We're going to create a product again. We're going to scroll down and see what options we have in our shipping profile. So now look at right at the top. Those are those three shipping profiles we just created. You have the five, the eight lb, the 20 lb. But you also still have all your other shipping profiles. But all your custom profiles usually appear right at the top for easy access. Okay? So now when I'm going to sell an item and it's, you know, let's say it's 7.2 lb on the scale, well, I could click "7 to 9 lb," but that seems a little like I'm making the buyer pay way more in shipping than they need to. So I now I'm going to click "8 lbs." That's going to be a much more accurate shipping cost for them. So that's the point. That's why you want to create shipping profiles. That's why you want to take a little bit of time, think about the items that you sell, look at the profiles that are already pre-loaded into your store as an option, and think, "Are there any places that can fill in gaps or holes that better suit the types of items that I'm going to be selling?"
And again, like I said, you're going to be setting up that first, um, tabs before you get to the shipping profile, and you're going to forget them once you set them. You shouldn't need to change them. Uh, you'll notice when you go into creating products, at the bottom, you'll see some more options for like information and shipping stuff. It's another little section that oftentimes when you're listing, you're just going to skip. A lot of the things that you preset, if you don't change them, they will auto-populate to all your listings, all your stuff, everything you do. It kind of just auto-populates. So just keep it in mind. It's often not nearly as daunting as you think it is, and it's honestly really tackle-able if you just read everything on the screen. Utilize those blue "Learn More" options if you want to get directed to a help desk article. Those are really, really helpful. Don't get so overwhelmed. Just take some time, do some research.
I also want to highly recommend this to you guys. When you go into your Whatnot like seller hub, if you click at the top, this "Home" button, it's going to pull up your main home, which is just going to show you like what you have going on, things you need to ship, right? But what it's going to show you down here is a ton of video tutorials, scheduling shows, adding listings, sharing your shows, things that you can do during your show that you need to keep in mind, how you can promote, how you can ship better. It has an entire video here on shipping profiles. So if my video didn't cut it, go watch this one, see what that's all about. There's options for shipping, bundling shipments. I need to watch this. I need to learn about this one. I think I know what it means, but I'm not quite sure. So if you're not sure, go take some time and look at some of these things. This again is just in your seller, seller hub. It's just your homepage in your seller hub.
Okay, so I really hope that that was helpful. I know it was kind of a very simple video, or just breaking down one topic specifically in the seller dashboard, but this is something I get almost more questions than anything else is questions about shipping and not being able to get started because they're just not sure how it works. So hopefully that answered a lot of your questions. And if it was helpful, definitely make sure you're hitting that thumbs up button to let me and the algorithm know that you enjoyed it. Make sure you're subscribed if you haven't already, and comment below if you have any other questions or comments. I'll catch you guys next week on another video. Have a great week until then. Bye.