Shipping Setup Best Practices
Traditional stores have both a physical and digital presence. If your company operates as such and is in an industry where shipping for your product is normally allowed, you will need to do the following:
- Set up a prepayment method. The existing available options are Stripe, Square, Aeropay, and Kindtap. If you would like to use Apple/Google Pay, you will need to use Stripe as only our Stripe integration has Apple/Google pay connected.
- Determine your shipping setup. There are two options:
- Separate menus: you can create a separate menu. This provides customers with a more differentiated experience between what is available to be shipped and what is not.
- Separate Categories: you can also create a separate category for shippable items. See here for more details about setting up shipping categories.
- All items within any category included in a shipping zone will be eligible to be purchased and shipped by a customer. Make sure to only add items that you can truly ship.
This will be dependent on the type of goods, industry and preferences that a retailer has and there is no one size fits all option. For example:
- Separate menus: A garden supply store may sell a variety of categories such as decor and plants. Certain items in each category may be shippable, such as lawn gnomes and smaller house plants. Other items may only be purchased in store, like trees and boulders. In this scenario, setting up two separate menus makes for a better user experience
- Separate Categories: A coffee shop has a number of in-person products but only a few categories of shippable products, like coffee bags and merch. In this scenario, having a few separate categories is sufficient for creating a good user experience.
For companies without physical storefronts, the process is fairly similar. As before, you'll set up a prepayment method. However, for digital brands specifically, you should set up Separate Categories for shipping as there is no need to use separate menus.
- Companies in highly regulated industries will first need to request permission from AIQ to set up shipping. Even if your primary industry is highly regulated, it might be possible to sell and ship secondary products like merch.
- If approved, you'll need to set up prepayment options. For highly regulated industries, payment providers often provide an explanation of what is permissible. For example, Stripe includes this page on restricted businesses. You'll need to check with the payment providers you're interested in using and get any necessary approvals from them as well prior to setting up shipping.
- Finally, determine which shipping setup you would like to use. As before, you can select between separate shipping menus, or setting up shipping enabled categories.
Choosing to use Stripe or Square is highly dependent on every individual company’s specific needs and requirements. As previously mentioned, one difference between AIQ's integration with Square vs. Stripe is that Apple/Google Pay is only available through Stripe.
Outside of that, there isn’t a single best practice or recommendation to make and both are excellent providers.
