Order Shipping Cost

Shipping cost is the amount you pay to ship an order. It's a key financial metric in your sales reports.

Shipping cost is your expense, and is not to be confused with shipping charge, which is the amount billed to your customers.

Applying Shipping Cost

When you create small parcel shipments in Goflow, the shipping cost is automatically retrieved from the carrier and recorded on the shipment.

Orders shipped using third party billing or through a store-owned carrier account do not record shipping cost, since the shipper does not bear the freight charges.

When you mark an order as shipped, you may add the total shipping cost for the entire shipment. The shipping cost will get evenly distributed among all boxes. To specify the exact shipping cost for each shipment box, use the external shipment bulk upload.

Understanding Shipping Cost Distribution

The total shipping cost is displayed on the order as a single value per shipment. Nevertheless, shipping cost is recorded per shipment box. For multi-box shipments, Goflow distributes the total cost evenly across all boxes. In the sales report, shipping cost is further divided evenly among the product units the box contains, allowing for product-level cost analysis.

To view shipping cost per box, use the order shipments export. Box-level shipping cost is also available through the Goflow API.

You may add the Shipping Cost field to a custom order export. Like all order-level fields, Shipping Cost is also available in the order item export, but is repeated for each line item. This value represents the total shipping cost for the order and does not reflect the cost per item. Item-level shipping cost is only available in the sales report.

Understanding Shipping Cost Currency

Shipping cost may be a currency different than the order charges currency. For example, an order placed in CAD but shipped from the U.S. will get shipping cost in USD. Goflow records the shipping cost in the currency returned by the carrier, or based on the shipment origin country.

If the shipping cost currency differs from your account home currency, Goflow records both values. The foreign amount is converted to your home currency using the market exchange rate on the day the shipment is created. You can view the converted value by hovering over the shipping cost in the order.

Sales reports always reflect shipping cost in your home currency, allowing for profit calculations in a single currency.

Updating Shipping Cost

You can update the shipping cost for shipped orders, either because the cost wasn’t known at the time of shipping or an itemized carrier bill adds additional surcharges.

To update shipping cost for shipped orders using a file upload, follow these steps:

1. From the left sidebar, go to Settings › Shipping.
2. In the upper-right corner, click the upload icon and select Import Shipping Cost.
3. Click the Columns tab to review the required and optional file headers.
4. Under the Upload tab, click Choose File to upload your CSV file.

Your CSV file can include the following three headers:

• Tracking Number - The tracking number identifies the shipment.

  Small-parcel tracking numbers are unique per box, so you specify the exact shipping cost for each box. With LTL shipments, all boxes share the same tracking number, so the total cost is evenly distributed across all boxes.

  If multiple orders share the same tracking number, the upload will skip all affected orders to avoid ambiguity.

  To avoid Excel corruption of long numeric tracking numbers, import data as text.

• Cost - The updated shipping cost.

  The uploaded value overwrites any existing shipping cost.

  For tracking numbers repeated on multiple lines in the upload file, the total of those lines is applied. You may include both positive and negative adjustments, but the final total must be positive.

• Currency - The currency field is optional.

  If left empty, the currency will remain unchanged from the original shipping cost. If no cost has been recorded yet, it defaults to the currency of shipment origin country.

  Foreign currency is converted to your home currency using the market exchange rate on the day the adjustment is made.

  All boxes within the same order must use the same currency.