If you sell physical products, Ontraport can take a lot of the busywork out of packing and shipping. Say you sell an online fitness course, plus a bundle of equipment to go with it. For your customer, it's one simple order. For you, it means charging for shipping, telling whoever ships what to send, and getting the right items into the right box. Here's a quick look at the tools that help.
First, you can add shipping charges to your order forms. You create shipping methods under Sales, then Settings, then Shipping methods, and add them to your order form. Use conditions to charge different rates depending on where your customer is, like one rate inside the US and another for international orders. The next lesson shows you how.
Whether you ship orders yourself or use a warehouse or fulfillment service, the setup is the same, and there are two parts.
First, set up your packing slip settings, once, before you build your order forms. Go to Sales, then Settings, then Shipping settings and packing slips. Enter the shipper's contact info, which prints at the bottom of every slip. Your business information prints at the top. Choose how often fulfillment runs go out, and add the email addresses that should get them, like your fulfillment house, a team member, or yourself.
Second, on your order form, turn on Add to shipping/packing slip for every physical product you sell.
From then on, Ontraport creates a packing slip for each physical product order. All the orders placed in the same timeframe go into one fulfillment run. On your schedule, the run is emailed to your notification addresses, with the packing slips and a fulfillment list your shipper can use to print shipping labels. They match each slip to its order, pack the box, label it and ship it.
Every run is saved under Sales, then Settings, then Shipping fulfillment runs, and each customer's packing slips are under Shipped packages, so you can download them again anytime. The packing slips lesson covers all of this in depth.
If you work with a fulfillment company, check the Shipping and fulfillment integrations article in the Support Center. For example, Acutrack, which handles fulfillment for books and media, connects using your Ontraport API key and app ID. For integrations that aren't built into Ontraport, the vendor's support team is the place to go for help.
You can also keep a partner in the loop from an automation. The Notify With Email action sends an email to a team member or partner, like someone at your shipping facility.
And for orders that don't need a packing slip, use a fulfillment list instead. You create it under Contacts, then Settings, then Fulfillment Manager, and add contacts to it with the Send to Fulfillment List action. Ontraport emails you the list as a CSV file on your schedule.
If you pack and ship orders yourself, automate the steps around it. Build an automation that starts with the Purchases product trigger, set to your product. Add a Send an Email action to thank your customer, then an Assign Task action that reminds you to pack the box and send a shipping confirmation with the tracking number. The Ontraport for sales teams course covers tasks in depth.
So: charge for shipping on your order forms, set up packing slips once, turn on Add to shipping/packing slip for each physical product, and let fulfillment runs send every order to whoever ships it. Next up: shipping methods, where you'll set up the shipping options your customers choose from.