Ecommerce Experts Explain Why Adding Product Fees to Shopify with an App is the Easiest Way to Help Your Store Save Money and Stay Compliant
If you run a Shopify store and are trying to figure out the best way to charge product fees, look no further: the answer is to use a Shopify app.
Senior ecommerce experts on our team at Magical apps have compiled the top five reasons why they feel charging product fees with a Shopify app is the best way to help your business make more money and stay compliant with local laws.
About the Magical Apps Team
The Magical Apps team builds Shopify apps that solve real problems and help businesses of all sizes thrive online. To date, we have developed over 130 Shopify stores and developed apps such as the 5-star rated Magical Mandatory Product Fees.
1. Charge mandatory product fees to cover the cost of any fees or expenses your business requires to operate
Anyone who runs a business knows that to make money, you need to spend money. Throughout the course of operating any business, various fees and expenses must be paid in order to keep it running.
For example, this includes fees or expenses such as storage or packaging costs or credit card processing fees. Learn more about the types of mandatory product fees you can charge in What is a Product Fee? A Beginners Guide.
Using a Shopify app to charge mandatory product fees that cover costs like these ultimately helps your business save money by reducing or eliminating the amount of profit that would otherwise be eaten by subtracting them from the base price you charge. Instead, the costs are passed along to your customers.
Using a Shopify app to charge mandatory product fees that cover costs like these ultimately helps your business save money
2. Charge visible product fees to stay in compliance with local laws
Depending on where your business is located, you may be required to charge visible product fees on some of your products or services.
One of the most common examples of this are environmental handling fees or eco fees required for the sale of products such as electronics, automotive parts, or paints. These fees typically go towards funding the collection, transportation, recycling and disposal of these types of goods.
Using a Shopify app to charge visible product fees required by local laws is the easiest way to ensure your business stays in compliance with the law and that you have the funds required to pay the fees stipulated by them without dipping into your own profits.
3. Improve communication and transparency with your customers
The last thing a potential customer ever wants is to be blindsided by additional hidden product fees just as they are about to checkout on your Shopify store. In fact, it is one of the top reasons for shopping cart abandonment according to Shopify.
Using a Shopify app is one of the best ways to inform customers earlier in the shopping process–before they even add a product to their cart–of any additional fees. This type of improved communication and transparency will combat shopping cart abandonment and ultimately help your store keep more customers and make more money.
4. Shopify does not natively support charging product fees
As we discussed in Discover How to Add Product Fees on Your Shopify Store (Native vs. Apps):
“while the ability to charge taxes and duties as well as shipping and delivery fees is built natively into the Shopify platform, they do not have a true solution for adding product fees”.
Scott Williamson, Product Lead at Magical Apps
Workarounds for the lack of native support do exist, such as marking up or discounting calculated shipping rates, adding the fee into the cost of the product, or adding a fee into product variants. But each one is riddled with issues that make them insufficient or too cumbersome for most merchants.
On the other hand, Shopify apps enable the separation of any product fees from the products themselves or shipping rates. Shopify apps like Magical Mandatory Product Fees or Canteen ‑ Deposits and Fees allow merchants to create and manage automatic product fees store-wide using rules-based conditions and avoid the frustration of trying to employ the sub-optimal methods possible within the native Shopify environment.
5. Charging product fees is easy with Shopify apps
Shopify product fees apps make it easy to display, manage, and communicate the reasoning for fees charged on your products and services.
Not only do Shopify product fee apps like Magical Mandatory Product Fees or Canteen ‑ Deposits and Fees enable merchants to manage the creation and application of product fees from one central location.
But perhaps more importantly, they make it easy to show applicable fees and the reasoning for their existence directly on product pages and the checkout screen.
One of the keys to the success of any business is their ability to refine processes and do less, better. And often, on the list of things a business has to do to survive are monotonous tasks such as figuring out how to most efficiently and effectively charge the fees you require on your products or services.
The ease with which you can automatically charge product fees using a Shopify apps translates inevitably to saved time and money, both of which can be invested back into your business to make you more successful in the long run.
Magical Product Fees
The Magical Product Fees app is a fast and easy way to build, customize, and attach fees to products or entire orders.