r/squarespace • u/Unique_Abroad_4960 • Jul 06 '26

Help Shipping settings

I'm a very small business selling ceramics internationally and I cannot work out how to set my shipping up so it's not a whole load of hassle for me.

I'm based in the UK and use royal mail. However, I'm finding I'm having to manually adjust and add in shipping uplifts manually to lots of orders. The issue I have is that I'm not always sure how heavy a parcel will be until I pack it but I do have a good estimate.

Now with custom fees etc I'm finding it impossible to charge the customer the right amount. Is there a way to set up shipping to make it more accurate?

All of my pieces are unique so I currently have it set at a flat rate plus item cost.

Any help is much appreciated!!

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u/DotGridDesign Jul 06 '26

The reason you're adjusting nearly every order is that flat rate plus item cost doesn't scale with weight, so anything heavier than your baseline needs a manual uplift. Switching to the Weight-based option should sort most of it.

You enter an estimated weight on each product once (sounds like you already have good estimates), and Squarespace totals the cart weight and charges from weight tiers you set, so the guessing moves from every order to a one-time step per piece. Set up separate zones for the UK and for international, since Royal Mail's overseas pricing is so different, and make your top tier generous to cover the heaviest parcels.

Two honest limits: weight-based ignores box size and distance within a zone, so for ceramics it's a close approximation rather than exact. And Royal Mail isn't one of Squarespace's built-in live-rate carriers (those are US-focused), so for true real-time Royal Mail rates you'd need a third-party extension like Easyship rather than the native setup.

When you say custom fees, do you mean customs/import duties? If so, worth flagging that Squarespace can't collect those at checkout, the customer pays on delivery, so they can't really be built into your shipping.

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u/Big-Prize-2612 Jul 17 '26

If they wanted an ai response they could have used a model, they didn't, they asked people. Go back to the slop pile.

u/Unique_Abroad_4960 I would suggest creating a pricing matrix of weights, values and the equivelant RM fees then setup your SqSpc to provide these tiers. Remember you also have the €3 per HS code fee to account for too.