I recently received an email from an artist asking about calculating shipping costs on his website. This is a challenging issue for any artist who sells online, but especially for artists who work in 3-D.
Email from Artist
Hello Jason,
I make sculpture vases out of wood.
I have a question about your web site’s shipping instructions. I have a web presence. Unfortunately, it’s a ‘backyard’ special—I made it. When possible, I will devote the money required to have one professionally produced.
In the mean time, I would like to add a shopping cart like you describe your gallery has, to encourage additional sales.
Here’s my question: How do you deal with shipping costs for web generated sales? You must have many variables to consider when costing out a shipping price: crating, physical size, and weight for shipping the piece.
The packaging and shipping costs for my vases range from $12 to $80 for my small and medium sized vases. My larger vases are 24” tall and weigh 28 pounds Shipping on those are about $130 to $180. I do have FedEx do the double-box packing so they can’t come back to me if damage occurs during delivery and say I packed it wrong. I even have a 34” tall vase weighing in at about 70 lbs. I shudder to think about its cost. I suppose whoever buys that one will not be dissuaded from the shipping, however.
So that’s my problem: too much variability in packaging and shipping.
Do you have any suggestions on how to handle the variableness (to invent a word) of total costs for shipping for your web sales?
I fear if I have too high a shipping cost added to an already expensive vase, the potential client will shy away from the sale, or ask that I pay for it. I suppose I could include an averaged figure and add it to my cost of doing business to the web price of each item. My thinking is that with so many different regions in the country that require different rates, the potential for over pricing could negate a sale.
Thanks for any help, Jason,
Mike F.
My Response
Mike – this is a great question and not an easy one to answer. On our site we do exactly what you suggested – that is, we’ve taken an average of our shipping costs based on price of the artwork and tried to create a correlation between price of artwork and shipping cost. We’ve done this based on media (bronze sculptures and glass are more expensive to ship than paintings). Because we have a high volume (relatively) of sales we have enough data over time to create a fairly accurate average over our total sales. On any given shipment we may actually lose or make money on the shipping, but on average we break even. The reason we do it this way is that I believe there is a perception among buyers of what an “acceptable” shipping cost is relative to the the cost of the piece of art. In our case I believe that number is between 3-7% of the retail price (again, depending on medium).
What are the retail prices of your pieces? This is obviously a critical factor. If the vases are selling for $500, $130 for shipping is going to really impact your ability to sell.
As your volume of sales increases you can move your shipping in-house which is going to help you decrease the cost of shipping dramatically. There’s no reason you can’t double box the pieces yourself to FedEx standards and decrease the packaging and shipping cost to around $30-$50. Paying a retail FedEx or UPS location to package and ship the artwork is going to absolutely kill you.
As far as damage, I have filed claims on broken glass and never had a problem getting the carrier to pay if they were indeed at fault. Offering a much lower shipping cost will make a huge difference in your ability to sell online, and the more you ship the less damage you will have as you become more an expert in packing the pieces for safety.
For the website you could then take your variables and price the shipping based on worst-case scenario.
Remember, if your clients are accustomed to buying art, they are also accustomed to paying for the shipping as long as the price is fair.
What do You Think?
How have you dealt with shipping costs for your website? How do you calculate shipping for your medium? Do you generally come out even on your shipping costs? Share your responses to these questions or any other thoughts you have on shipping below in the comments.
About Jason Horejs
Jason Horejs is the Owner of Xanadu Gallery, author of best selling books "Starving" to Successful & How to Sell Art , publisher of reddotblog.com, and founder of ARTsala. Jason has helped thousands of artists prepare themselves to more effectively market their work, build relationships with galleries and collectors, and turn their artistic passion into a viable business.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
It costs me about 10%-15% to ship a painting. I usually negotiate the shipping and taxes with price of the painting. The shipping of large paintings (over 36×48) is exorbitant and I just absorbe some of the costs. When I ship more that 2-3 paintings I like Craters and Freighters to build a crate. It is truly the safest way, they wrap the paintings like babies, in heavy moving blankets, when transported to where the crates are made. Galleries don’t like them because they take long to unpack, take to much room and they are heavy duty. I had paintings damaged with Fed Ex. Not a pleasant experience when they don’t pay. Lately I have used UPS. I prefer for UPS to do the packing because they use heavy duty boxes and would be less likely to deny a claim since they have to pack according to their standards. I have also packaged and shipped paintings as large 72×48 and I have sweated bullets! I end up spending lots of time on this task… looking for reasonable priced boxes and re-building boxes to fix the large paintings. I don’t use moving boxes because they a frail and you can even poke a finger thru them. No peace of mind.
Hi Jason… This is a great discussion for all of us. I have been shipping my high-end ceramic work for over 15 years. I have a ‘click n buy’ option on my website and add shipping fees per piece. I agree when you ship yourself, you keep the costs remarkably lower. The client does not realize how inexpensive it is, so this builds in a buffer for the variation of costs, allowing me to break even and still get paid for all my packing time (when in a pinch and I have UPS pack for me, I am always very surprised at the cost). I usually charge between 7 – 10% shipping fee, depending on the price of the artwork. I have never had clients hesitate about this – it is close to the cost of sales tax if you are selling direct in any state.
I also offer a once a year ‘free shipping’ option around the holidays – as a thank you for clients support. This allows people to appreciate the ‘deal’ they are getting while paying close to full price for the artwork. This free shipping option once annually has been a huge boon to my sales – and worth the absorbed cost. As I see it, it is less than I pay to go to a juried art show and there is virtually no risk of weather, low sales, etc. I have been doing this for about 5 years. From my experience, art sales on the internet have dramatically changed in the last 5 years as the comfort level of collectors is high and the convenience factor is excellent. Thanks for all your great articles!
I have a pretty good handle on what it costs to ship my textile artwork to anywhere in the US since I ship at least monthly to galleries and museums for juried exhibitions. I use these actual cost histories to determine a general shipping charge for each size range of art pieces that I have on my website as well as other gallery sites where I would ship either directly from my studio or to the gallery itself. I use ULine for high quality boxes and tape supplies and do my own packing with bubblewrap and airbags. I hate to jinx myself, but I have never had an issue with damage in the past 10 years.
I usually either break even on my shipping charges or come out about $15-$20 ahead which covers my time in wrapping and boxing the artwork and computer time to schedule pickup by UPS and print labels. As sales continue to grow, I will change my UPS account to a daily pickup instead of just scheduling when needed as I see that I am almost at the breakeven point for the Pickup fee vs a weekly fee for being “on the route”. I am about 50 miles from any UPS retail store so I don’t use them, just my own commercial account.
I do not use FED-EX because everytime I have used them, the outside of the boxes have become covered in black grime from the trucks and clients and galleries were very unhappy so I only ship via UPS now. I can’t control how suppliers ship to me usually but those supply orders via FED-EX still arrive extremely dirty so I end up unpacking either outside or in the garage to avoid bringing all of the grime into my studio space.
Thanks to Mike for bringing up this topic. It will be interesting to see what others have to add to the conversation.
Ugh, shipping costs! It’s such a pain trying to guess the cost. I’m always off. Sometimes way too low, sometimes way too high.
I just don’t ship often enough to have a good feel for it. In fact, I’m sending a refund check today to a collector for overcharging on shipping. How embarrassing. Lucky for me, my collectors are very nice people and very understanding.
Doggedly, I keep trying to improve my estimates. Hoping to get it right someday! Just this week I changed the numbers on my website… again. It’s an ongoing process.