Black Friday is the most significant event for commerce all year. But are you ready?
While it’s essential to plan out your discounts and promotions, many tools make your life easier to prepare for the peak season. Here’s our top list of Shopify tools you can use to take your Black Friday sales to the next level:
Countdown Sales Timer by Pixel Union
Privy
Referral Candy
Rise
Klaviyo
Back in Stock & Restock Alerts
Carthook
Sales Pop Master
Let’s dive in.
1. Countdown Sales Timer by Pixel Union
Urgency is your best friend when it comes to driving sales during Black Friday. You need to highlight the limited-time nature of your offer so that customers have no choice but to make a purchase right away.
That’s where the countdown sales timer by Pixel Union comes in. The app makes it simple to add an action bar on your website that lets visitors know how much time is left to benefit from your offer. No coding knowledge is necessary to set up the timer on your store.
Pricing:
Basic plan: Free for one timer at a time
Premium plan: $5.99 per month for unlimited timers
2. Privy
Privy is a tool you can use to create email pop-ups that get the visitor’s attention and invite them to sign up for your list.
Privy will come in handy when customers on Black Friday are about to abandon their carts. You can set up a pop-up offering a discount on the product if they don’t finish their purchase so they can follow through.
It has countless templates to style your pop-up, whatever you’d like. Privy also has A/B testing to experiment with what works best for your pop-up — sometimes, a simple change in color or copy is all it takes to transform your results.
Pricing:
Free plan: Free to install for stores with an average of 5000 monthly page views
Privy convert $20 per month for stores with an average of 10,000 monthly page views.
3. Referral Candy
Referral programs are great for spreading the word about your Black Friday sales. Each time a customer refers your discount to one of their friends and family, they receive a special prize. It’s a win-win for everyone!
Referral Candy helps you set up winning referral programs that grow your list and drive new customers. You can create special Black Friday discounts that turn customers into brand advocates and share your sales with people around them.
You’ll be able to generate extra sales with not so much effort on your end.
Pricing:
$49 per month
4. Rise: Gift Cards & Loyalty
If you plan to use gift cards as part of your Black Friday strategy, then Rise is the tool for you. Customers can send their gift cards to their friends or relatives seamlessly with their email addresses.
You can set up as many rules as you want to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction. Rise also allows Shopify stores to issue gift card returns and run bulk discount campaigns.
Pricing:
Starter plan: $19.99 per month and $0.2 per order above 100
Small-business plan: $59.99 per month and $0.15 per order above 400
Pro plan: $199.99 per month and $0.1 per order above 2,000
5. Klaviyo
Email marketing is a big part of running a Black Friday campaign. With customers getting bombarded by brands left and right, however, it can be challenging to make your emails stand out from the crowd.
Klaviyo is an email platform that makes it easy to send engaging, personalized emails that convert. You can segment email campaigns for wherever the customer is at in their purchase, such as if they abandon their cart or are browsing your products.
The tool dives deep into the mind and behavior of your customers so it can structure the best emails. As a result, you’ll always be able to send the right message to the right person during Black Friday.
Pricing:
Free for up to 250 monthly email contacts. After that, it starts at $20 per month.
6. Back in Stock & Restock Alerts
While your goal should be to make as many sales as possible, selling out on items too quickly can make you lose potential opportunities. There are customers out there who wanted your product, and they didn’t get the chance to purchase.
Back-in-stock alerts solve this issue by allowing customers to sign up so you can notify them when your item is back in stock. That way, if you plan to restock after Black Friday, customers can get another chance to buy the product.
You can also use this to gather presale orders. Collect emails from customers who want to be notified when the product is ready for sale!
Pricing:
Basic plan: free for 15 emails/push notifications per month
Starter plan: $15 per month for 300 emails/push notifications per month
Pro plan: $29 per month for 10K emails/push notifications per month
7. Carthook
An excellent tactic to boost your average order value is upselling. It’s a sales technique that consists of persuading customers to buy other complementary products on top of their original order.
Carthook is a platform that allows businesses to offer three upsell offers for the customer once they make a purchase. It auto-fills the checkout page, so customers don’t have to re-enter their payment information.
You can style your Black Friday upsells however you want with trust symbols, customer testimonials, and countdown timers.
Pricing:
Growth plan: $500 per month
Scale plan: Contact Carthook to get a quote
8. Sales Pop Master
Social proof is a powerful tactic to win more sales in e-commerce. It offers trust to the customer and boosts your brand reputation.
With Sales Pop Master, you can showcase social proof in your Black Friday offers to make customers feel they might miss out on something big. By clarifying that the offer won’t last forever, you will be driving extra sales and acquiring more customers.
Pricing:
From $9.99 per month
Final Thoughts
From driving urgency to delivering a better customer experience, these tools should provide you with everything you need to spur additional website sales this Black Friday.
Aside from implementing these platforms, however, you need a strategy to promote your Black Friday sales and grow your list before the big day. Check out our last post on how to grow an epic list of hungry customers before the holiday season.
There are over 3 billion people today who use social media. That’s almost half of the world’s population at your fingertips!
Social media is accessible to the individual, but getting started as a brand isn’t always straightforward. What platform is the right fit? What kind of content should you post for your audience?
So, to help you, we’ve compiled a list of the 16 best social media steps to grow social. Let’s dive in:
Develop a Strategy for Content
Not planning is the equivalent of planning to fail. To deliver the best posts on social media, you need to develop a game plan for the type of content you’ll be sharing. Here are some of our best recommendations:
1. Research Your Target Audience
Before you even get started with social media, do some research on your audience. No single channel fits everyone: what platforms do your customers use the most? What are their demographics (gender, age, location, etc)?
This tells you where to find your audience. But what kind of content do they consume? Memes? Blogs? Podcasts? Do they love infographics or informal posts?
Answering these questions gives you a solid idea of what type of content will resonate the most with your audience.
2. Take a Look at The Competition
A crucial next step in creating a strategy for content is to take a look at your competition. Go through other brands’ social media pages and get an idea of what content they’re putting out there.
Now, we’re not encouraging you to copy whatever your competition is doing. Instead, try to understand what’s working for them and see how to apply some of the same concepts to your social media.
Suppose you can see that specific posts get good engagement and others do not; learn from what is (or isn’t working) for that brand. Looking beyond competitors, you can find other brands that do social media really well and copy their practices into your space/industry.
3. Create a Posting Schedule
Consistency is critical to growing your follower base. Social media algorithms tend to favor accounts that publish frequently.
The best way to stay consistent is to use a social media calendar that keeps track of your content. Check out platforms like Sprout or Hootsuite.
You must outline which channels you want to use (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc) and how much you plan to post. We recommend that you post 4 – 6 times per week for the best results.
Wow With Photos
It’s not enough to post pictures of your products on social media. You need content that will stop customers and grab their attention.
That’s where optimizing your brand photos comes in. By making your pictures eye-catching and engaging, you’ll spike the customer’s interest and drive traffic to your website.
Here are some of our best tips to make sure your pictures look on point:
4. Include a White Background
A white background on your Instagram pictures is an excellent way to showcase your products. It does a great job of highlighting the colors and details of your products.
5. Use Apps to Style Your Photos
Sometimes, the filters that come with Instagram aren’t enough to style your photos the way you’d like. Thankfully, there are various apps you can use to improve the quality of your photos, such as:
Snapspeed: The app is one of the best photo editing tools. It gives access to various advanced editing features, such as adjusting the white balance of your photos or the geometry of buildings.
Canva: Canva is a free tool you can use that gives unlimited freedom in styling your pictures. The platform comes with various templates you can use for social media posts.
A Color Story: You can use this app to make specific colors pop in your social media pictures. The app comes in 20 different colors designed by professional photographers.
A Design Kit: This software makes it easy to personalize content by layering stickers, fonts, and designs over your photos.
6. Hire a Professional Photographer
Lastly, If you have the budget, consider hiring a professional photographer for your social media pictures. Not only will it help create a steady flow of posts, but it also makes sure you’re posting the highest quality content possible.
Focus on Branding
To stand out on social media, you want your accounts to reflect the look and feel of your brand. There are various tactics you can use to make your online presence feel unique, which include:
7. Use Hashtags
Don’t underestimate the power of a hashtag—social media posts with hashtags average more engagement than posts lacking them. An excellent tactic to give your social media presence a unique feel is to use branded hashtags. They help followers find content created by you and build a community around your business.
Hashtags are another way for people to find your brand. Use hashtags that are on-brand and resonate with your audience, product, and message. Don’t just add them in to throw a wider net; be specific and purposeful in what you use.
To stand out on social media, you want your accounts to reflect the look and feel of your brand
8. Keep Your Visuals Consistent
To excel at branding on social media, you want to make sure that the visuals on your page are consistent. On Instagram, for example, select a theme you want to use for your page and stick it to it throughout your feed.
It does help to experiment with different types of posts and visuals from time to time. Optimizing your feed over time means you try different things and do what works the best!
9. Find Your Voice and Tone
Lastly, you want to find your brand voice to spice up your social pages with personality. What’s your type of humor? What are your brand’s qualities? Next, think about how you can express these features in your captions.
Messaging is extremely important in marketing and social media especially. Will you talk about products directly? Talk about life? How you speak to your audience will be the key to keeping or losing them.
Offer an Experience to The User
To create epic content for social media, you want to focus on delivering an experience to your followers. This way, they won’t feel like just another prospect and will be encouraged to engage with your brand.
Here are some of our best tips to make your social media more memorable:
10. Share User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content (UGC) consists of any form of content that you create for your customers.
If you have any pictures of customers using your product or testimonials, consider publishing them on your social media pages. Not only does it humanize your brand, but it also allows the customer to share their experience.
11. Organize Contests and Giveaways
Another way to engage your audience on social media is through contests and giveaways. You can also use these to leverage existing customers into bringing new followers to your brand.
You have many options, from simple comment-to-win contests to asking followers to ask users to drop a caption in exchange for a prize.
Promote Your Products
As an e-commerce brand, you don’t want to settle with just engaging content for your audience. You need to also think about how you can promote your products to drive more sales.
12. Include Product Link to Your Pictures
On Instagram, it’s possible to add product links to your images. That way, as customers browse your feed, they can also click on the picture to land on your store and purchase the product that interests them.
13. Add Product Links to Instagram Stories
You can also include product links as part of product links on Instagram. Since its algorithm heavily favors stories, it’s a great way to boost your reach and drive more traffic.
14. Run Targeted Social Media Ads
Another great tactic with an excellent ROI is running ads on social platforms. You can run ads that target anyone who’s liked your page, follows you, has visited your site, or even go after new customers that match your existing base.
You can also structure your ads based on where the customer is in the sales funnel. For example, you can run a retargeting campaign whenever a customer abandons their cart and doesn’t follow through with their purchase.
Build a Relationship With Your Audience
Lastly, long-term success on social media consists of building a relationship with your audience. Here are small things you can do to engage them and form a bond:
15. Respond Fast to Your Audience
Customers want you to respond quickly to their requests on social media. For example, Twitter users expect to receive a brand response within a few hours.
If you cannot address their needs quickly, you risk losing them forever. It’s why you want to make sure to reply fast and get their issues solved quickly.
Most of the platforms have automated responses you can enable. Facebook Messenger, for example, has a host of options for answering common questions.
16. Engage With Your Followers’ Posts and Comments
To build a relationship with customers and show that you care, you can reply to their comments and engage with their content.
Customers love receiving personal messages from their favorite brands. It makes your brand feel more human and encourages a conversation between you and the customer.
Final Thoughts: Best 16 Social Media Practices for E-commerce Brands
There you have it! These tips should give you a roadmap of where to go with social media. It will take a bit of time, but by applying these sixteen tactics consistently, you’ll see your following on social media grow exponentially.
So what are you waiting for? Go out there and take action!
The checkout page is the last step in creating a customer from a visitor. Optimizing checkout is a key to reducing cart abandonment and driving sales.
Here are some essential practices you can implement on your checkout page to deliver significant results:
8 Things You Must Be Doing During Checkout
Include Customer Testimonials & Trust Symbols
One-Page Checkout
Offer Free Shipping
Optimize Your Checkout Page for Mobile
Highlight Upsell Offers
Use Exit-Intent Pop-Ups
Offer “Save Item” as an Option
Let’s dive into each and see how you can easily upgrade your checkout.
Include Customer Testimonials & Trust Symbols
To get the customer to purchase, you first have to gain their trust.
Adding customer testimonials on your checkout page reassures the prospect they’re making the right choice. Seeing others enjoy your product gives them the confidence to make the purchase.
Furthermore, if they don’t know you’re brand, they may hesitate on the quality of your product and service. You can promote trust by using testimonial & review apps like Okendo, Product Reviews by Shopify, or Stamped.io.
These apps make it easy to collect and publish reviews on your home, product, or checkout pages.
Security is also a big concern for customers since you handle their payment information. A good tactic to give them peace of mind is to include security badges on your checkout page, such as the below:
If customers know their payments are in good hands, they’ll be more likely to follow through with their purchase.
One-Page Checkout
Any friction during the buying process will cause customers to drop their carts. No one wants to go through loops and holes to make a final purchase.
The checkout process must be as simple and straightforward as possible. The best way to simplify your checkout page and get customers across the finish line is to offer a one-page checkout:
One-page checkout works because it’s shorter and reduces the steps the customer has to go through. It’s convenient and can lead to better conversions.
However, we recommend testing multi-page and single-page to see what works best for you.
As a small business, however, you may not be in a position to offer free shipping. Free shipping isn’t free to you and can hurt your profit margins in the long term if you’re not careful. If you’re wondering how to decrease your shipping costs, you may be interested in the cubic pricing program.
Optimize Your Checkout Page for Mobile
More and more customers are using their smartphones to shop. By next year, mobile sales will represent a whopping 54% of total e-commerce revenue. It’s the reason why your checkout page needs to be mobile-responsive.
You must also ensure your checkout page loads fast on mobile, especially when the customer gives you their payment information. 53%of visitors will ditch your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Highlight Upsell Offers
Upselling is a sales technique to persuade the customer to buy more items, upgrades, or add-ons once they make a purchase. It’s a tactic used by top brands such as Amazon, GoDaddy, and Booking.com.
Your checkout page represents extra sales for your store. As the customer is about to checkout, you can recommend complementary products.
It’s a great way to boost your customer lifetime value (CLV) and make prospects come back. Here’s an example from Dollar Shave Club for inspiration:
The best tool we recommend to help you do this is Carthook. Once the customer checks out, Carthook sends them three different upsell offers. The platform auto-fills the page with the customer’s details, so they don’t have to re-enter their payment information.
Use Exit-Intent Popups
Just as a customer abandons their cart or is about to leave your site, you can launch exit-intent popups to promote discounts they can use for their purchase:
Exit-intent pop-ups work well for two reasons. First off, it gives the customer an incentive to stay on your checkout page. Secondly, your store gets a second chance to make a sale.
There are various tools you can download on Shopify that help you capture the customer’s attention with pop-ups. Check out our 8 top picks of pop-up tools for boosting sales.
Remove Any Distractions on the Checkout Page
A key theme that we’re repeating here is keeping everything as simple as possible. To maximize your conversions, you need to eliminate any distractions that might draw the customer away from making a purchase.
There are various ways to do this. You want to avoid having any ads, navigation bars, or eye-catching graphics that might get in the way. You also don’t want to surprise customers with hidden fees they weren’t aware of before.
Offer “Save Item” as an Option
Lastly, there are many reasons why your customer doesn’t follow through with their purchase. They may not be ready to buy, or something distracted them as they were about to check out.
To help returning visitors, make it possible for them to save your product so they can go back to checkout whenever they have time. Amazon does this on their store with their “wishlist” feature, so customers can come back at any time to finish their purchase:
Conclusion
The checkout is the final and most critical part of the buyer’s journey. Even with the best marketing and products in the world, customers will ditch your store if the checkout process is not optimized the right way. By applying our tips above, you’ll be on your way to setting up a killer checkout page and boosting your sales.
It’s Cheap to Be a Cube
Every industry has its little annoyances. You know, those aspects you wish you didn’t have to deal with, the ones your friends in other verticals hear about and say, “Sure am glad I don’t have to deal with that.” That frustration can turn to gratitude very quickly, however, with the right motivation.
Let’s pick a random example, such as…brick-and-mortar retail vs. e-commerce. It’s pretty easy to imagine e-commerce brands envying their retail relatives in the physical realm when it comes time to charge users shipping fees and customers abandon their carts.
That dynamic might invert itself if, hypothetically, worldwide circumstances are arranged in a manner that either compels or impels large percentages of the human race to do as many daily activities from home as possible.
In such an environment, retailers, great and small, would likely find that if people can’t do it online, they won’t do it at all and that shipping fees are only a secondary concern.
Such a situation—should it ever come to pass in our lifetimes—would, however, make the cost of shipping a central point of competitive advantage. Brands that can charge less for shipping will earn more market share, and those that can reduce their shipping overhead will maximize profits.
But how, exactly, can e-commerce brands capitalize on that without Amazon-level budgets and infrastructure?
The same way you win a poker game against a cheater: with an Ace up your sleeve.
Priority Mail Cubic—The Shipper’s Secret Weapon
There is a little-known shipping program that the USPS offers for packages under 20 pounds that can meet certain size restrictions. It’s cheaper and faster than other shipping methods for qualifying parcels, but most e-commerce retailers either don’t know about it or don’t use it.
So, what is this mystical gateway to delivery delightfulness? It’s called Priority Mail Cubic, or just “Cubic” for short. It’s a unique service the USPS offers, and it can do wonders for reducing shipping overhead for your business.
With Cubic, your business gets charged based on the dimensions of your package, not its weight. It’s an excellent alternative to FedEx and UPS if you want to save the most money on shipping, as it’s just as fast (if not faster), and you don’t have to stress about package weight as long as it’s under the 20-pound limit.
Let’s take a closer look at how it works. The trick is to use software that offers this incredible service at the correct rate (some shipping platforms mark this up to make more money).
Let’s learn about the benefits of Cubic pricing and how the service works.
How USPS Priority Mail Cubic Works
The Requirements
In order to avail yourself of Cubic shipping, your package has to meet specific criteria, so before we explain how to calculate costs or what savings you can expect, we should determine whether your shipments are candidates for the program.
Cubic parcels must match the following three attributes:
Weight—less than 20 pounds
Volume—0.5 cubic feet or less
Size—no dimension longer than 18 inches
If your shipping meets these precise specifications, it can be shipped via Priority Mail Cubic.
Determining Postage
The reason Cubic is such an effective tactic for reducing shipping costs is because of its unique pricing method that doesn’t take into account the weight of the package. As long as it’s less than 20 pounds, the USPS doesn’t give a ship what it weighs. If that’s the case, though, how do you determine shipping prices?
Well, it takes a little bit of math. So dig your old algebra notes out of the trunk; you might need them.
Here are the steps you need to take to calculate your package with Cubic:
Measure the length, width, and height of your package. Round each dimension down to the nearest quarter inch. For example: 3 x 10 x 12 package
Multiply the dimensions (Height x Width x Length) and divide that number by 1728. For example: 3 x 10 x 12 = 360 / 1728 = .2083
The decimal you get back is the size of your package in “cubic feet.”
Finally, round up your cubic feet measurement to .1, .2, .3, .4, or .5. For example: .2083 rounds up to .3
After you’ve done all that number crunching, you can compare the final cubic feet measurement against the USPS’s pricing tables (which you can find below, up to date with pricing for 2022). Determining the price is simply a matter of matching the cubic measurement to the number of shipping zones the package will have to travel. And that’s it.
Benefits of USPS Priority Mail Cubic
First and foremost, Cubic pricing means weight doesn’t come into the equation, allowing you to ship cheaply when your package is less than 20 lbs and is smaller than .5 cubic. Beyond that, though, USPS Priority Mail Cubic pricing offers many benefits you won’t find from other carriers. These include:
Fast Delivery Within 1 to 3 Business days: USPS’s Priority Mail Cubic service makes it possible to ship your items to customers within 1 to 3 days across all states in the USA.
Free Package Tracking: USPS will offer free package tracking on shipments so you can follow the journey of your product.
Reduced Shipping Costs: With Cubic, you get much more competitive rates than other shipping methods.
“That’s great!” you might be saying. “If it’s so easy to ship cheaply, though, why doesn’t everybody do it?”
Cubic Shipping Caveats (and How to Get Around Them)
Caveat #1: The Threshold
Cubic offers you the possibility to save big on all of your shipping. What makes it difficult is that the USPS won’t let just anyone ship Cubic. To get these special rates from your friendly neighborhood postman, you have to meet a certain order volume threshold.
Think of it as a minimum order value to qualify for free shipping. Except, instead of “free,” it’s just “much cheaper,” and instead of $30 in product, it’s 50,000 packages a year.
This requirement prevents everyone and their mother from shipping holiday gifts to faraway families using Cubic pricing. Unfortunately, it also prevents smaller retailers from doing the same, at least unless they have help.
Solution #1: The Inside Man
Okay, so you’ve found your secret weapon, but you need some help putting it to use. So, you do what any sensible individual would: you find yourself a wingman who will put in a good word for you. Though, in this case, it’s not necessarily a wingman, but a wingbrand.
Several solutions can help you bridge this volume gap, and there are some names to call them by. They go by titles such as “shipping aggregators,” “independent postage vendors,” and “online postage providers,” just to name a few.
But while there are variations on the business model or services provided, the base functionality is the same: they allow you to print your own postage and shipping labels.
This particular industry niche began as a way to save businesses a trip to the post office or other drop-off locations. As it grew, however, additional core features were added to make the service more beneficial and to give the brand offering it a competitive edge.
These included features like reduced shipping rates (resulting from the vendor/aggregator’s brokered deals with the carriers), API integrations to calculate and populate shipping costs automatically, and more.
We could go on and on here (and we have, in fact, in other places), but what’s relevant to the current discussion are the agreements with shipping carriers. These arrangements allow aggregators to treat an entire lot of shipments with a given carrier, made using their system in a given year, as coming from a single business entity.
In other words, the shipments are “aggregated” together, and it’s easier for ten retailers using a single aggregator to ship 5,000 packages each to break that limit of 50,000 than it is for any of them to do alone.
This is what a solution like this can offer: convenience and improved shipping rates. But not every brand approaches the task of passing on the savings to your business with the same philosophy.
Caveat #2: The Grift That Keeps on Giving
It’s essential to be aware that not all third-party shipping software offers Cubic as an option. For those that do, it’s not always the actual Cubic pricing they offer. Here’s what we mean.
The USPS offers the Cubic program because they want to reward shippers for using smaller packages (making it easier for them to ship more in fewer trucks/planes/etc.). That’s why the pricing is better. And they work with vendors and aggregators to offer the rates because it gets more shippers in line with those requirements.
Obviously, businesses in this space are, well, businesses, meaning they intend to turn a profit (as opposed to, you know, non-profits). So, almost every solution will either charge a fee or mark up the Cubic rates to generate revenue from offering those rates to their clients (and eHub is no exception).
But both as business professionals and as consumers, we are all well aware that there’s a difference between an equitable exchange and scalping.
Some brands mark up their Cubic prices more than others, obviously. But keep in mind here: this is an offering that requires effectively zero overhead.
Unlike product brands, which can market themselves as a “premium” brand off of the ostensible promise of products built with better materials, design, and engineering (no matter how flimsy that excuse might be—looking at you, Apple), these brands are only offering access to reduced shipping costs, so excessive markups aren’t warranted.
Solution #2: Second Opinions to Avoid Second-Rate…Rates
This may seem an obvious solution, but it’s hard to overstate its relevance or efficacy. Never be afraid to exercise your right to shop around—even in B2B arrangements—especially here.
The USPS doesn’t publicly list their cubic shipping rates, so you’ll have to do some good, old-fashioned price matching on this one. While we mentioned above that everyone using Cubic is essentially getting the same “product,” there are variances in the level of customer support you’ll receive from different solutions, not to mention how easy support is to contact.
Beyond that, what determines the value of a lot of these solutions (and which clients are happy with their service) are the available API integrations. There’s no universal solution, so your best bet is to look for one that offers the integrations that are most critical for your business or find one with a team willing to prioritize building the functionality you need.
So, look for positive reviews and ratings, check with your peers in the e-commerce industry for referrals, and ask any hard questions you can think of so you can find a provider that meets your brand’s unique needs.
The Nitty-Gritty: USPS Cubic Pricing
Cubic Pricing Tiers
Now that we’ve covered the what, the why, and the who, let’s talk about the “how”—as in, “how much?”
Regarding Cubic feet measurement, your package will fall into one of five tiers that USPS uses to calculate the shipping rate. Here is what each tier consists of:
Tier 1: Packages up to .10 cubic feet
Tier 2: Packages more than .10 and up to .20 cubic feet
Tier 3: Packages more than .20 and up to .30 cubic feet
Tier 4: Packages more than .30 and up to .40 cubic feet
Tier 5: Packages more than .40 and up to .50 cubic feet
These tiers don’t change year-to-year, so regardless of fluctuations in actual pricing, a given size of the package will always be the same tier.
2022 USPS Priority Mail Cubic Rates
Cubic Ft. Range Up To:
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
L, 1 & 2
$7.54
$8.02
$8.25
$8.37
$8.50
Zone 3
$7.81
$8.20
$8.62
$8.85
$9.07
Zone 4
$8.05
$8.49
$9.01
$9.57
$10.04
Zone 5
$8.37
$9.12
$10.03
$11.83
$13.18
Zone 6
$9.18
$10.96
$13.48
$15.92
$17.79
Zone 7
$9.77
$11.62
$15.22
$18.73
$22.31
Zone 8
$10.43
$12.67
$17.93
$21.59
$25.74
Zone 9
$18.56
$25.09
$34.46
$42.67
$51.21
The rates, on the other hand, tend to change on an almost yearly basis. How much you’ll pay depends on your cubic dimensions (the tiers mentioned above) and zoning—including the zone of origin, the destination zone, and the number of zones in between.
Here’s a table of what the 2022 rates for USPS Priority Mail Cubic look like to give you an idea:
How You Can Get Started With Priority Mail Cubic
There’s one more “how” to answer here: “How do I get started?”
The best way to start with Cubic is to find an appropriate vendor or aggregator and integrate their shipping app or API into your fulfillment process. We should warn you, however, that since Cubic is a relatively unknown program, it’s hard to find a platform that offers favorable pricing, let alone the shipping option itself.
Even some of the most popular tools, such as Shipstation, don’t offer commercial-level pricing for Cubic, so don’t decide on brand visibility alone.
We won’t pretend that we’re a perfect fit for every e-commerce retailer or 3PL outfit, but at eHub, we build our pricing structure so that we profit with you, not from you. In other words, if maximum access to the discounts of Cubic shipping is a significant factor in your decision, we’re probably worth a look.
While we can’t qualify you to sit on the throne of Asgard or claim the crown of England, we can help you significantly reduce your shipping costs (which is almost as good).
So, if you’d like to know more about the program or how it can save you 15% on car insurance shipping fees, give us a call.