Square Online Store Overcharging Customers for Shipping

[bluemule]

We have the highest level Square online store with real time shipping rates.  The real time rates come from our UPS account that is connected to our online store.

Problem: Our online store charges customers approximately twice as much as our cost to ship!  It's been a couple of months if not more since we made Square aware of this problem.  Once the Square online tech team started looking into the problem, it took them 2 weeks to determine that, quote, 

"What you’re describing has been identified as a bug, and is being investigated by our engineering team.  Although we can’t provide a timeframe for when we’ll have this fixed, our engineers are working hard to resolve all bugs submitted as quickly as possible. If there is anything else we can help you with please feel free to contact us and have a great day. "

It's been 6 weeks without another update or response from Square!

Surely there are other Square merchants experiencing this issue!

[megan-k]

Any update to this?  I'm just getting up and running with this platform and the real time rates are astronomically high.  I'm guessing I'll have to switch to flat rate and real time was one of the hooks to convince me to go with the big plan.

[BernadetteA]

Thanks for reaching out, @megan-k

I'm not sure what happened with the initial comment on this thread, but we can take a look into your inquiry. 

Can you give us more details on why you think the rates are higher than they should be? 

Thanks in advance! 

[megan-k]

Part of the issue I think is that there is no way to account for USPS flat rate boxes in shipping calculations, or at least not that I can tell.  A customer ordered 3 items totaling 3# the other day and it charged $30 for USPS Parcel Select.  I had to refund half that after I processed it in a flat rate and even the actual Parcel Select price when I went to print a label was somewhere around half what was billed to the customer.  My handling charge is only $1 I think, so where is this bloated rate coming from?

I'm also getting a lot of general bugginess around shipping and gave up on it today, switching to weight tiered flat rate.  It's been very discouraging getting going and getting help with this system.  I love how straightforward and reliable Square itself is, but feel like this web platform is absolutely nothing like the reliability of regular Square.  

[BernadetteA]

Thanks for the clarification. I can definitely understand the frustration of having to issue a partial refund, and the concern that the shipping price is deterring customers from ordering from your website.

Can you post a link to your website so we can take a look at your shipping setup? My initial thought is that you have a quantity limit on the assigned box.

You can verify this by clicking Fulfillment > Shipping > Shipping Boxes from the Square Online dashboard

[megan-k]

Hi Bernadette,

I have several boxes set up and none of them have an item max.  In the case of the example above, it was a 3# package and the default package has a weight limit of 14#.

My website is littleavalon.shop but I have removed the real time rates after a customer couldn't check out yesterday.  It didn't help, she eventually gave up and sent me a direct payment.  Now I'm on weight based flat rate.

[BernadetteA]

Hm.. that is definitely odd. You are welcome to send me a private message with details from the order if you want. I can try to recreate it in my test account to see if I can figure out why it was double/triple charging for the shipping rate. 

[tinyturns]

Hi. Just checking to see if there was any resolution to this? I was just notified by a customer that the shipping rates are completely crazy on our site. We use real-time calculations but it seems like the way the weights are adding up are quadrupling the rates, so if i put the calculation manually into our shipping service (shippo) it offers a first class rate of $7.11 and a priority rate of $7.50, but the rates it offers the customer are $34 for first-class and $68 for priority. Is there a way to feed the rates directly from shippo?

[DLRosenberg]

this is frustrating... we use flat rate shipping because of the which costs us a great deal of $$$

[BernadetteA]

Hi @tinyturns Yes, this should be possible. Can you post a link to your website, and let me know what items the customer tried to order? I can take a look at your shipping settings to see if there's something off.