The Unofficial Shopify Podcast

Why Shopify's Shipping Just Got Way Better

Episode Summary

Shopify Shipping isn’t what it used to be... Major shipping improvements you probably missed.

Episode Notes

"We want to make sure that merchants who are starting their business who don't know what are all the jobs they need to take care of for shipping to merchants who are thriving and understand the space and have complex workflows, we can solve this problem for everybody."

Vibhor Chhabra, Director of Product at Shopify, breaks down how Shopify Shipping has evolved into something completely different from what you might remember. We covered the new carrier integrations (including FedEx), bulk label printing for up to 250 orders, automatic shipping insurance up to $200, and why Amazon is now a fulfillment partner through SFN. Plus how shipping transforms from a cost center into a competitive advantage.

WORK WITH KURT

Apply for Shopify Help
ethercycle.com/apply

See Our Results
ethercycle.com/work

Free Newsletter
kurtelster.com

The Unofficial Shopify Podcast explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Episode Transcription

Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you instead of your competitors. And 45,000 stores already use it, and it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to get swim. com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com. My friends, if you are in e-commerce, if you have an online store, there is a pain, a problem that unites us all, that we can all agree is a a necessary difficulty in our lives. It's shipping, right? We live and die by shipping. We've got to get the products to customers. We got to do it quickly. But it also becomes this cost center and a a a time suck. So How can we smooth out that process? You know, what can we do to make it easier, better, faster, less expensive? Well, and then potentially, you know, we have more, more profit, more profitable businesses. There is a lot that could be gained if we could just make shipping less painful for ourselves. Well, of course, on the unofficial Shopify Podcast, our solution is going to be Shopify related. And in this case, it comes direct to us from the mothership, Shopify Official. We're gonna walk through the options that Shopify gives us for shipping because they have made improvements. Not only, you know, however you thought uh it worked before, apparently things are improving. So joining us to talk through it, Vibor Chabra, uh director of product at Shopify. He knows it. He's worked on it. And he's going to talk us through it. Bibor, thank you for joining me.

Vibhor Chhabra
I appreciate it. Good. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I'm really excited and looking forward to talking about shipping.

Kurt Elster
The, you know, I am excited about it. I get where people might go, oh shipping's not that exciting. But it is like it's kind of a Yeah, a a lifeblood, right? The order, even when people, you know, buy something, yeah. Customers are like at their most attentive. to our our communications between that moment of I have placed my purchase and I have received my item. It's a thing we gotta get right.

Vibhor Chhabra
Yeah, I think, you know, some of these Jobs that we look at, hey, they're not that exciting. But if you think about the purpose and the end of that outcome is a smile on the customer face. And that suddenly makes it like, hey, we got to get it right because if we get it right, we have a smiling customer, which means the customer is coming back. And I think shipping plays a very important role in ensuring that delight that is very special to your customer and to your brand can be delivered in that way.

Kurt Elster
And it it's also one of those things that compounds, right? It's not something I I solve for once. You know, potentially it's something I'm doing ten times a day, ten times an hour, right? It really starts to add up. So Help me help me agitate the pain, you know, this universal pain. What is what's frustrating about shipping? Like what's the the thing that we gotta solve for with it?

Vibhor Chhabra
Yeah, like, you know, it really depends. The pain is actually very different based on where the merchant is in their journey. um of the store, right? Because if you are if you just started a store on Shopify, all you know right now is, hey, I could go through a retail outlet and ship my package. But you don't know that there is a lot around shipping than just that one thing, right? For example, if you don't have things like address validation. then the package might get delayed because the address that is entered is not recognized by the shipping carrier, right? And now your package is two days late. uh going to be delivered two or three days later and you might actually end up paying the fee for address correction. So we we bring it, we built it into Shopify. So somebody starting their business who doesn't know about this doesn't have to worry about it at all. Right. What about showing delivery estimates, right? We know that there is a significantly higher conversion if you show a delivery estimate for the package, right? But when you're starting your business, do you really know this? Um claims and insurance. We insure every package on Shopify in the US so that if something happened, you are covered as a merchant, right? And so is your customer. But I I'm not sure everybody who started just some examples, right? Where on day one you you're not thinking about this, you don't know about this, right? On day one, you're focusing on surviving on getting to a point where you're thriving, right? And as you go from surviving to thriving and you're scaling your business. You should really be focused on, hey, what is needed to grow this business? And some of the jobs like shipping and payments and taxes, some of these things, like Can Shopify take care of it for me so I don't have to worry about it? I trust the platform. It'll get it done for me. I'm going to focus all of my energy on growing my business. Right. And that's where I come from from a shipping perspective. We want to make sure that merchants who are starting their business who don't know what are all the jobs they need to take care of for shipping. to merchants who are thriving and understand the space and have complex workflows, we can solve this problem for everybody and in between. So that's that's Shopify shipping. That's where we are headed.

Kurt Elster
I like I like the way you view it. I like the approach. I agree with all of this. And so maybe let's start with the workflow. You know, it starts with collecting the address. We gotta know where the heck we're gonna send this. And so I love that uh address validation is built in now. I think it's like settings checkout, it's just a toggle I could turn on, right? And that it I could the person types in their address and then it validates it to like this is a standardized in a like USPS format, for example. Um, but then you know I gotta start well and I have to return then a shipping rate to the customer, you know, a carrier quote, estimated time. Um tell me about that.

Vibhor Chhabra
Yeah, so I was, you know, I was taking this example of this small merchant who's just starting their store, right? When they go to a s retail store uh to uh buy a label for that package, right? That is you're just being treated as a retail customer, whereas when you're buying the same label Um from Shopify, we are giving you heavily discounted labels because we have deals with the top partners in the US and outside in the shipping space where Because of the volume that we are bringing, we get heavily discounted rates. And so you get a significantly cheaper rate. Again, on day one, you may not know that, but we are already working for you on day one to get you the cheapest rate possible. From our partners, right? And um you don't have to do anything. All you need to do is you turn on Shopify Shipping Uh there's a bunch of there's a few things we ask ask of you at that point of time. And based on that, in a couple of minutes, you're ready to start shipping. So the first order comes to Ching and you just go and buy a label. stick it to the box and ship it. That's it. There is not nothing else needs to be done because address validation is there, insurance is there, delivery predictions are there. So we are doing all of that for you. Save that time and go focus on growing the business. And we're doing that in a manner where you know Shopify cares a lot about merchant agency and choice. We are going in a direction where we have a lot of carrier choice or partner choice on our platform. So if merchants have a shipping partner they need, we will have it on our platform. Right. And it's very important for us to build these partner relationships right as well. So that it's a win-win situation for the partners, for the merchants, and for Shopify. So um we added FedEx recently. We've added partners globally across the world and we'll continue to add more partners in the time to come. So it's just To me, it's just a new beginning where we are heavily investing in shipping and it's very different from what it used to be. even a year or two years ago and it's going to be extremely different a year from now because of the heavy investment will come to be too big.

Kurt Elster
I could print my labels within Shopify and I could get purchase the labels getting essentially a a huge volume discount, like a negotiated discount that I would not normally get if, you know, as a small merchant, I tried to negotiate this rate myself. Or, you know, if you know, heaven forbid I went to like a local shop and had them ship my package for me, I'm gonna get the the cheapest rate without having to actually go and like set up my own carrier account.

Vibhor Chhabra
Exactly. So it just works. Shopify has the account and every we do everything behind the scenes, so you don't have to do any of that. However, as merchants grow and become larger, it's absolutely possible that they will go work with a shipping partner and get a negotiated rate for themselves And we encourage that as well. If you want to get your own rates and use your own rates with partners, that's great. We will let you use your account so you don't have to buy labels from Shopify negotiated rates. You can buy label directly from the partner, but you can do that within Shopify as well. So you have the choice. You want to use bring your own rates or you can use our negotiated rates.

Kurt Elster
So of our our carrier integrations, what's available to me?

Vibhor Chhabra
So if you're a US merchant shipping domestically You have um UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL.

Kurt Elster
Which is I don't think I had access to all of those before. Those some of those sound new to me.

Vibhor Chhabra
So uh UPS and USPS have been there for a long time. We added various uh we added DHL as well sometime back. FedEx is the most recent one that we have a close partnership with. And so we have the big uh players in the US market on the platform. And we are now adding some of these partnerships we are scaling uh beyond. Also as this As the world at AMDAS changes and policies change with trade and regulations and tariffs, we're also adding options for our US and worldwide merchants so that they can ship. And don't have to deal with tariffs on their own. So as an example, when you're dealing with tariffs, there are two kinds of labels you can purchase. One is what we called deliberate duties hate. So there, as a buyer, I can see the final uh price I will pay for this shipment at the time of checkout as uh itself. So I'll see the taxes and duties for that order. Right. So that's DDP or delivered duties paid. So we have those options on our platform. We also have DDU, delivered duties unpaid. Where the buyer won't see what the duty is, but they get the final bill when the package is delivered. So we have both options we've recently added on our platform for merchants so that as policy changes happen, they don't have to figure out how do we deal with policy changes. What might be the duties I have to collect today versus tomorrow? We do that automatically for that. So both domestic, cross-border, and then global international partners, all three actually.

Kurt Elster
That's really they're really sli the slick. You know, getting you know years ago trying to get DDP labels to work at Shop Epify. Um it was possible but more difficult. And this new system sounds considerably easier, right? I really I I I think I would just have to make sure I have country of origin and um harmonized system, HS code set on a product. I think that's it. Or like uh what are the requirements what I need to get it to work?

Vibhor Chhabra
We also help with HS codes. So you know, yeah, you are ultimately responsible for the HS code, but we do help with that. It's really activating the right carrier. So going to shipping, activating Shopify shipping, selecting which carriers you want to use, and boom, it's done.

Kurt Elster
How does it help with HS codes? This is a problem I actually have to solve for for a client store. Now I'm just picking your brain for my own advantage.

Vibhor Chhabra
Yeah, so we'll we'll give you recommendations for HS codes. Uh ultimately as a merchant you're responsible for the for what code you select, but we'll give you recommendations for HS codes.

Kurt Elster
See yeah. And I will I uh having set this up on a another store recently, you know, I asked them, oh yeah, provide can you get me the HS codes? They said sure. And they just asked ChatGPT. And then when I went and verified them, I'm like, hey, maybe double check these. So just a little word of warning, you know, validate them, make sure they're right.

Vibhor Chhabra
The key thing is that Ultimately the merchant is, you know, we we can give a recommendation, but you know your product best. So those are recommendations that you can choose to accept.

Kurt Elster
Right. Ever had a customer cancel an order because they were shopping? Well high, or because they broke up with their significant other. Those are real reasons customers could cancel, and they're a real headache for both you and your customers. Why should they have to email support to change, cancel, or update an order? Enter Cleverific. With Cleverific, your customers can edit their orders themselves through a self-service portal. That means fewer support tickets, faster shipping, and fewer returns. Everybody wins. Peter Manning New York cut their order support by 99% with Cleverific. Now it's your turn. Listeners of the unofficial Shopify Podcast get 50% off the pro plan. Just $49 a month. Go to Cleverific. com/slash unofficial and use promo code Kurt50 at checkout. It's less hassle, happier customers with Cleverific. All right, I've got more freedom of choice. I easier than ever to get these the carrier calculated rates in. The other thing I love about carrier calculated rates, doesn't it it it should automatically display estimated delivery date at the checkout.

Vibhor Chhabra
Yes, so it does, but I think the estimated delivery date is actually an interesting thing because At checkout show an estimated delivery date. It's actually two different things, right? Like what is the time in transit that the carrier will take in order to deliver the package? So that's coming from our partner. However, what's the fulfillment time that this merchant might take for this particular quarter? And that we know based on merchant behavior. So like there's a bunch of factors like without going into very deep what how the algorithm works, but we are looking at a bunch of factors to say, hey, there's pro fulfillment time, there is time in transit from the partner. So we look at a few of these things and add uh you know come up with a prediction for based on where this order is coming from going to uh the partner using etc, what is the right estimated delivery time because we want it to be accurate so that your buyer is happy And you have a happy customer, conversion is higher. And then if you have a happy buyer, they're going to come back and become a loyal repeat customer to you. So that's our end goal with this

Kurt Elster
You mentioned uh that it handles shipping insurance as well. We know the value, I'm guessing here, we know the value of the order. And so we're we're able to then purchase insurance accurately or make that an option? How does it work? Yeah, so if we cap shipping insurance at two hundred dollars.

Vibhor Chhabra
Um, which is uh, you know, we looked at what makes most sense for most of the merchants and most of the orders, and that that made a lot of sense for us, for our merchants So we cap shipping insurance at $200, but you don't have to pay for it. It just is automatically taken care of for you. So we cover the cost there. The merchant doesn't have to worry. In fact, the merchant mean some of our merchants are not even aware that we're doing that. And the first time they learn about it is when they run into a problem and hey the package was lost. The buyer didn't receive the package. And then they're Now I have to eat the cost and uh they'll reach out to us and no, like there is shipping insurance and you know the moment of delight for the merchant is so satisfying to see, like, oh, I didn't even know Well, I didn't even think about this, but I'm glad you covered it. That's great.

Kurt Elster
Yeah. And then turns out there's an unexpected solution that's already handled it for you. That must be quite the relief.

Vibhor Chhabra
Yeah, exactly. That's truly delight, right? Like it's the pleasant surprise that turns these experiences into a delight both for the merchant and the merchant's customer. Uh, because now n nobody is looking at like, oh, who's going to pay for this? Who's going to eat the cost? Well, it's taken care of because because we covered it for you. And I think that's where there is a, you know, if you if you contrast A small business, that's where they don't know a lot of these things until they run into a certain experience, right? So our job as Shopify is we are here to help you. Like I said, go from we're just starting to we're thriving, right? So we want you to be thriving. So what are the things that that become a pain point or become take time away from you investing more time in growing your business. We want to solve all of those problems for you so that you don't have to worry about it. And that's That's trust building for our merchants and us too, because when they when they needed something and we had their back, that builds trust both between Shopify and the merchant, the merchant and the customer.

Kurt Elster
Absolutely. So with the if I'm lucky enough to have this problem of shipping so much stuff that it's very time consuming, is there any, you know, automation, batching, anything I Shopify does to make the process smoother, faster?

Vibhor Chhabra
Yes. So uh it's one of my favorite topics here. So we're we're actually doing two, you know, we're doing many things, but I'll say largely we're doing two things. So a few years ago, Shopify shipping was great if you had a few packages you were shipping every day, right We are going in the direction of how do we make Shopify shipping amazing for merchants who are shipping hundreds of packages every day So we introduced a capability called bulk label purchasing about a year and a half ago. And what that does is I if you are a merchant who says shipping 250 labels, sorry, boxes every day, up to 250 orders every day, instead of going one by one and printing a label, you can actually print all up to 250 labels in one go. So you select all of your orders. So you go to merchants, go to admin, go to orders index, and they'll look at all of their unfulfilled orders. Right. So up to 250, you can just go there and create shipping labels for all of those orders. We also have pick lists. Because often merchants will print pick lists with their orders to say, okay, cool, like where am I going to pick this order from? So like um, so we're It we've introduced these capabilities, some of them recently, some of them a little back. But the key thing is we're continuing to work on a lot more in this phase that I can't talk about, but this is an area of focus. Merchants who have complex workflows. who want to do a lot more, we we have our eye on that um problem as well.

Kurt Elster
So you're we're we're teasing some new features. There's stuff potentially in the future.

Vibhor Chhabra
But yeah, I can't say more. But uh this is a this is an area that we are very serious about and we want to make sure that we are solving uh the right problems for merchants there.

Kurt Elster
Yeah, on the topic of just you know bulk printing labels, I what it it comes to that I'm a layman. Can I use a a like a can I purchase and use a dedicated label printer with Shopify? You can use a dedicated label printer with with Shopify, yes.

Vibhor Chhabra
So um we sell a label printer on the Shopify store itself. So you can buy that. You can buy a different labor printer. You don't have to buy from Shopify. But yes, we do allow or we do enable, sorry, allow seems to autocratic, but we do enable merchants to uh use uh label printers especially as you're going into volumes a label printer is a significantly better way to print labels as opposed to a a standard print

Kurt Elster
Uh yeah, just thinking about like, you know, trying to ship a hundred orders and printing it off on a laser printer. Exactly. You're gonna lose interest in that pretty quickly. I want the I you know, I like my toys. I want my fancy label printer.

Vibhor Chhabra
Um hey the second thing I was going with, how do we help merchants who have super complex needs, right? Is there is a point of time where Shopify shipping may not be the right product for your needs because instead of managing shipping on your own, you actually want to go work with the 3PL and source your logistics to them. And you might have heard of SFN or Shopify Fulfillment Network. So we also are adding many partners in Shopify Fulfillment Network to give our merchants choice. So Flexboard remains our preferred partner. We've added seven more partners in Shopify Fulfillment Network so that as you are looking to As we're considering 3PLs, we give you enough choice of select partners. So the process of going from I have never looked at a 3PL, I don't understand. How do I price a 3PL? How do I compare different 3PLs? We want to make that transition very easy for you if you're interested in making that transition. Right, so Chopify Fulfillment Network has now eight partners and that will also grow We will add more partners to cover various geographies, global uh merchants who have global needs, different product categories. So, you know, we were talking about, hey, merchants who get complex shipping needs. Yes, we'll have the workflows. We have some workflows today. We'll have more workflows in the future. But there are merchants who are going to grow beyond and say, I don't want to manage logistics on my own. So we'll help them with that transition as well.

Kurt Elster
The so these new partners for Shopify Fulfillment Network for SFN, I this includes uh Amazon, doesn't it? It does include Amazon, yes. I I can't picture it. So I I contact SFN and then they help with my integration, or I already have my stuff mailed to Amazon and then SFN sets up the integration.

Vibhor Chhabra
Um it could be both ways. It could be that you're you're using Amazon multi-channel fulfillment already and you're on Shopify already and you're using them. So you can Just connect via Shopify Fulfillment Network and your experience will be better because now instead of doing many clicks on two different places, your data, some of your data will start appearing in Shopify. So for example, if you're looking at a single order, say a customer emailed you and said, hey, my order has not been delivered, what's going on? So you go to Shopify, you get the order number, you see it was shipped through Amazon Multi-Cannel Fulfillment MCF. Uh but then you don't know what the status of the order is. So now you open the NCF, Amazon NCF portal, and get that information there. Versus here For any of our partners, you just go to the orders page and at the bottom of the page we'll show you the status of the order. When was it delivered? Is it delayed, etc. ? So fewer clicks. Again, we don't want to build What Amazon or other partners have built into Shopify, that's not the goal, but we want the merchant workflows to be simpler and easier. Right? The information is available right where you need it as opposed to I have to now open five different things to get one answer.

Kurt Elster
And with this Uh does this sync inventory as well?

Vibhor Chhabra
Um so it it does. Um There are things we are working on today where, yes, there is inventory sync happening. Um the again, I won't want merchants to have all of that information available at their fingertips. So yes.

Kurt Elster
So yeah, yeah, the really the the huge convenience here is I to get all this info, I don't have to leave the Shopify admin. Which really does I mean that does greatly simplify things when I could find it all in one place. That also means, you know, that information potentially gets surfaced. better in my Shopify dashboards, analytics, reports, even Sidekick. Like Sidekick, every time I ask that a question, it seems to get smarter every time. Um Yeah, so being able to have it do my analytics queries really quite convenient.

Vibhor Chhabra
You know, a question comes up like, hey, you know, isn't Amazon a competitor? Like how is Shopify and Amazon, like how are how are you partnering? And if you think about it, we really focused on what's best for merchants there. And keep going back to how do we give more choice to merchants? Our job is to give merchants the choice and then it's on merchants to decide like how do they want to work, right? And so anything that adds more choice for merchants is a great thing and we will go do that.

Kurt Elster
I do I appreciate the the focus on making the all of these choices really more democratic, right? Like give me the freedom of choice, you know, give because There there's nuances to all of these, you know, to the carriers, to the fulfillment, um, where, you know, one may work slightly better than another for a particular business or situation. And so it's great to just have those options available.

Vibhor Chhabra
And a lot of times the the thing is there's no right or wrong. It's not like, hey, there is only one right way to solve this problem. So our job then is to not say here's the one right way for every merchant, but here's a few options for every merchant, and the merchant can then Kick what is the right way for them and go with that. So like that's where that democratization or the choice comes in. Hey, you have all the options you need. Pick and, you know, it's it's an ala car. Um, you decide how you want to make this work for yourself.

Kurt Elster
I don't I want to pick your brain on order tracking. Because I think, you know, one of the most common questions you'll get what if you have a business that is is doing shipping volume is hey Where's my order? Right? You you hear that a lot in your your customer support tickets. Are there solutions uh for simplifying that. I want to get fewer. Where's my order tickets?

Vibhor Chhabra
I am glad you asked. So it's actually a very cool experience that we have for tracking. So if you are buying a label from Shopify shipping, We provide tracking on every label that's purchased from Shopify Ship. And the experience is pretty neat. Have you used the Shop app? I hope you have. Yes. So so the whole experience is the merchant buys a label from Shopify. And in the admin, in the merchant admin, we start displaying the tracking information. So the merchant can keep in the admin where they're looking at order status, etc. They have the latest tracking. But and for the buyer, if they have the shop app installed on their phone, they will get notifications. about the order. So they don't they don't have to worry about tracking. We will provide that information to them via Shop app. So the merchant doesn't have to worry about it. The buyer doesn't have to worry about it. It just works out of the box.

Kurt Elster
Time for a quick break from our friends at Zippify who help make this show possible. Because if tariffs are eating your margins, guess what? You are not alone. Smart merchants. aren't raising prices though. They're offsetting costs by boosting average order value. And the easiest way to do that, Zipify's one-click upsell. It uses AI to recommend the best upsells and cross-sells in real time based on what your customers are buying and what's worked in your store. There's no manual setups. No split testing, just automatic personalized offers that convert. OCU can increase your average order value by up to 30%. from day one and it works everywhere product page cart checkout post purchase even in the shop app over 50 000 shopify stores use it Nearly a billion in extra revenue has been generated. So start your 30-day free trial at zipify. com/slash curd. that zip ify. com slash k u r t because in this economy the best defense it's a higher ao v I love that shop app. I think that is is one of uh one of the the most slept on features that if you're not you haven't explored shop. You have not set up the your your shop page, uh gotten everything looking right, you know, integr synced your reviews. Like there's just so much opportunity that it provides. Right. Like I in our client stores, we always set up shop and we always make sure that on the thank you page it offers like, hey, you know, you could track your order with shop because it' You know, not only does it give it like a clean, easy place to live, but now it push notify it has push notifications. It's like, hey, your order's out for delivery.

Vibhor Chhabra
So if you exactly if you really care about like, hey, if this is one of those orders where like I'm actually counting minutes when this order is coming, it is there, right? And we're continu continuously making that capability better as well. So there's more to come there. Uh, but I think it's a very good experience so that you don't have to look through, where's my where's that email where it had the tracking number? Now I'm going to find the email, you know, and we all know how hard it is to find the right email in that moment. So all that doesn't need to be done. It's there right in the shop app with a beautiful picture of your product that you ordered And there and a real-time tracking information. So very easily in a second you can figure out where is your order? When is it coming?

Kurt Elster
Recently I noticed something neat. I had two orders from two different Shopify stores, you know, both car parts. I was very excited to get them for the weekend. And I bought them I had purchased both with Apple Pay. And I noticed in my wallet, my Apple wallet, it showed the orders, like with photos. I couldn't believe it. But I've only ever seen this I've only ever seen it do that with a Shopify store. And so I was just kind of curious if you knew how the heck that works.

Vibhor Chhabra
Like there isn't a I uh there's a partnership here where if you have an iPhone in the wallet, Shopify orders get displayed. So you again, it's in addition to Shop Pay, there's one more way for uh buyers to get that notification

Kurt Elster
More surfaces, more better. I thought it was I've just never seen anything else do it. I thought it was really cool.

Vibhor Chhabra
Yeah, it's about it's it comes back to their choice, right? Like where is maybe for the buyer, for a certain buyer, that is the best workflow. So what how do you give everybody more choice and then they'll adopt the workflows or the ways that are most convenient for them? And if you're an Apple Pay merchant, sorry, if you're an Apple Pay buyer, kind of gives us some idea about maybe that's your preference. So maybe this is your preferred route. Although with the popularity of Shop Pay, in the shop app, that's become a preferred destination for most of our buyers.

Kurt Elster
Oh absolutely. I mean when we run the reports and check payment method, like ShopPay has become number one. It's quite incredible. Yeah.

Vibhor Chhabra
Shop pay is an amazing story. And I think it's also a good way, you know, a good like, hey, when you build the right product, it just clicks because it's solving a pain point for every stakeholder, whether it's the merchant or their customer. Uh it's easy, it's quick, it just works.

Kurt Elster
And I love anything that leverages the the network effects of Shopify, right? And Shopi does that. Um all right, back to shipping. I want to know, from where you are, what's the what do you think the the biggest missed opportunity is in terms of of shipping? uh for merchants. Like what's the the feature, the the workflow, the step where you're like, man, I wish more people would would use this, would discover it.

Vibhor Chhabra
Yeah, I think the biggest missed opportunity is actually on us. Is us not going and talking to our merchants about how Shopify shipping has evolved. And um if you were a Shopify merchant for a long time, maybe you tried Shopify shipping in its early days. And maybe it wasn't the right product for you at that point of time, but it's a very different product. I get these messages or even on X sometimes, yeah, it'll be a merchant that'll go, hey, I should try Shopify shipping after a year. And this is a completely different product. And I'm gonna now move to Shopify shipping. And I think that's sort of the most exciting moment because that's the moment of truth, right? Like there are merchants who haven't tried our product for a while. And when they do try it for whatever reason, they find it's not the product they remembered or they used earlier because we've made giant strides. And I think I can say confidently that it, you know, this is going to be the case. every year as we move forward because of the massive leech that we are making here. So I'd say that's the biggest missed opportunity. How do we get the word out? How do we make merchants aware? Ultimately, you know After we make them aware, I'm confident a lot of merchants will actually choose to use our product. And if they don't, that's fine. We'll keep making it better, but it's the awareness gap that we need to work on.

Kurt Elster
Well, hopefully you know we're able to help with that here today. Um you know, I want to know uh What what's our action step? What's our next step? For someone listening because, hey, you know, I he's right. I should check this out. I should know more. I should get a handle on my shipping workflow. What should they do? Go to shopify.

Vibhor Chhabra
com, log into the admin, go to shipping, and see if, you know, it's pretty simple. If you're not a Shopify shipping merchant today, All you need to do is go to settings, activate shipping, select the carriers that you use. So if you're a US-based merchant, you might have some carriers. If you're in a different part of the world, You have different carriers, but you can select the carriers that you want to activate, and that's it. Like not not much more needs to be done. We'll start giving you labels. To make this process better, you can even select your, you know, update your product late in the packaging dimensions because we can give you more accurate recommendations. on what kind of label you should buy, right, for this bait for this uh package. Um and that's it. Like try it out. I'm confident you'll love it. And if you have feedback for us, reach out to us. You know, my email address is vibor. shopper at shopify. com. So like this is an open offer, like if you have feedback, if something is missing, if it's not working like you expect it to, just drop a note because Uh ultimately we're building for merchants. So if there's feedback, we're all ears uh to hear how we can improve this further.

Kurt Elster
That well, that's incredible and uh very generous of you to to share that and make that offer of feedback.

Vibhor Chhabra
We actually spent a lot of time with customers, so like myself and my team like over the last couple of years we spent a lot of time learn like going to merchants warehouses looking at what how what their workflows are, how are they shipping stuff. Getting that end-to-end picture on how real merchants are doing this as opposed to sitting in our offices and imagining, right? So like always welcome your customer feedback. Um it'll help us be better.

Kurt Elster
You know, and I think ultimately the the mindset shift here is you know stop viewing shipping as this cost center and start viewing it as a potential competitive advantage, right? that whole experience can be improved, you know, using a lot of these native features. Right? That's what I'm taking away from this. Like you could really compete with the big boys by implementing this stuff.

Vibhor Chhabra
Yeah, I I do think like look, we have unbeatable rates when you buy a label from us. So I'm not concerned about that. But I think Instead of just looking at what is the cost of the label that I'm paying, you look at this as what is the cost of making your customer happy? Right? So that they come back to you. And that's not just the label costs. You know, we talk about tracking. We talked about Um delivery predictions, we talked about address validation. There's so many things about insurance, right? There's so many things that add up, which There's no subscription cost for Shopify shipping. There is no cost for any of these capabilities that I talked about, right? They're just available when you buy a label. So I think the lens is in order to make your customer delighted and have them keep coming back, there is a lot more than just the label. And You don't have to cobble together all of that yourself. They have done that. It just works out of the box.

Kurt Elster
And the there's also um there's more info, uh, shopify. com slash shipping. And of course I'll link to that. in the show notes. Uh any takeaways, anything we want to close on?

Vibhor Chhabra
Uh yeah, I look I'll I'll just repeat. I think we are a very different product today and we'll we'll continue to evolve and change. So I think if you if somebody tried Shopify shipping a couple of years ago, worth trying it again, um, I think there's a lot more choices in terms of Carrier partners that we have today. There's a lot more capabilities in addition to purchasing a label that are available right out of the box. Um and you can now buy up to 250 labels in bulk with, you know, pick lists. Setura, so we are looking we are going in the direction of some of these complex workflows as well. So I think the products change dramatically. Give it a shot and uh feel free to drop feedback at bibor.

Kurt Elster
shopright shopify.

Vibhor Chhabra
com.

Kurt Elster
Vibor, I'm so thrilled that there is someone at Shopify that gets this excited about shipping. Truly, right? Because it's just, you know, it a thing we all have to solve for and the amount of like just in what you've described to us, the amount of headache, frustration, um and time that this could save really quite incredible when you imagine it like Adding up over time across all these stores and orders. That's great. Yeah.

Vibhor Chhabra
is involved in the work that needs to be done to ship the package and so on and so forth, right? But you're not there with the customer when they get the package and open the box and have that giant smile on their face. And I think that's sort of the missing component. Like if you See the delight on a customer space, you will find, hey, this is a very highly valuable process that has outsized returns.

Kurt Elster
And I think that's the missing piece. You're right. Yeah, they don't get yeah, you they're doing the work and it like it's real work. It's work physical work. You're doing it with your hands, but then you never get the payoff. Which is, you know, the person getting the package and you know, that that Christmas moment when you're excited about something.

Vibhor Chhabra
And by the way, like there is a very heavy payoff. And the payoff is if their customer has a smile on their face, they're coming back. And again, and again. So I think the payoff is there. You just don't necessarily connect the dots.

Kurt Elster
Yeah, well it's like word of mouth, right? Return customer rate. Uh the customer satisfaction. Really uh quite powerful here. No, this is great. I'm thrilled. I didn't think we'd get excited about shipping, but you did it. Congratulations.

Vibhor Chhabra
That's our job to be excited about things so that merchants don't have to worry about it, right? If you're not excited, then we're it's all the stress is on the merchants. That's our job.

Kurt Elster
Vib Orchabra, Director of Product at Shopify, thank you so much for joining us and everybody else. Check out your Shopify shipping settings or check out shopify. com slash shipping.

Vibhor Chhabra
I uh thank you, Kurt, for having me on your podcast and thank you to your audience as well.

Kurt Elster
Oh, my pleasure. Oh, I like that teaching. Crowdfunding campaigns are great. You can add social proof and urgency to your product pre-orders while reducing risk of failure. But with traditional crowdfunding platforms, you're paying high fees and giving away control all while your campaign is lost in a sea of similar offers. It can be frustrating. That's why we built Crowdfunder. The Shopify app that turns your Shopify product pages into your own independent crowdfunding campaigns. We originally created Crowdfunder for our private clients. and it was so successful we turned it into an app that anyone can use. Today, merchants using Crowdfunder have raised millions collectively. With Crowdfund You'll enjoy real-time tracking, full campaign control, and direct customer engagement. And it's part of the Built for Shopify program, so you know it's easy to use. So say goodbye to high fees and hello to successful store-based crowdfunding. Start your free trial and transform your Shopify store into a pre-order powerhouse today. Search Crowdfunder in the Shopify App Store to get started.