Pricing your shipping so drop ships don't lose money

When a distributor drop ships an order to your customer, the distributor charges you for it. If the shipping you charge the customer is lower than that, you lose the difference on every order, and on cheap items it can wipe out the whole margin.

Know what drop shipping costs you

Typical drop ship charges at most distributors, as of October 2026:

• Firearms: about $14.95 to $20.
• Accessories: about $10 to $15 at most.

These are the distributors' own charges and they change, so check the current numbers with each of your reps. As one example, Chattanooga publishes $10.95 for accessories, $13.95 for ammunition, $14.95 for handguns and $13.95 for long guns, plus a $7.50 minimum order fee under $50 (see Chattanooga (CSSI): orders under $50 and hazmat ship to store).

Your website

Open Shipping & FFL > Shipping in your admin (the page is called Shipping Settings).

• Start in the Simple view. It shows the everyday shipping fees.
• Rate Mode controls how checkout works out shipping. With Price-Based (Flat Rates), the Standard Shipping box has a Firearm Rate and a Non-Firearm Rate. Set each one at or above what your distributors charge to drop ship that kind of item.
• The other modes charge a flat amount per item, a flat amount per firearm class, or real carrier rates through EasyPost. Whichever you use, run a few typical orders through it and compare the result with the drop ship charge.
• The page's own advice is a good one: start your fees a little high. You can trim them later.

GunBroker

Open System > Settings and choose the GunBroker tab.

• Under Shipping, Flat rate by item type charges the buyer a fixed amount for each of Handgun, Long gun, Accessory, FFL accessory and Hazmat. Compare these with your drop ship charges the same way.
• Under What may be listed, Minimum item cost stops very cheap items being listed at all. It is your cost, not the sale price. Something around $25 keeps items whose drop ship charge would eat the sale off GunBroker. 0 means no minimum.

Card processing

Card processing (about 3 percent of the sale) is not part of shipping and is not in the profit figure on your orders. Your markup has to cover it. See Why the profit on an order says Pending.

Free shipping

Free shipping can sell well, but every free shipping item still costs you the drop ship charge. See Turning off free shipping for one product.