How Eagle Mountain Flag Cut Cart Abandonment 30% with ShipperHQ

Delivering Competitive Shipping Rates to Every Customer

Since 1993, Eagle Mountain Flag has designed, manufactured, and sold patented flagpoles and flag hardware. The Texas-based business has earned a loyal customer base that’s roughly 60% commercial and 40% residential, and includes large national retailers across the US. As most of its sales come through its online store, it’s critical for the store to deliver a smooth checkout experience and offer competitive shipping rates.

Eagle Mountain Flag runs its store on BigCommerce, and had previously used ShipperHQ to manage the shipping and checkout experience. When another shipping rates provider approached the team at Eagle Mountain saying they could deliver everything ShipperHQ could at a lower cost, they decided to test it. But shipping is core to Eagle Mountain Flag’s customer experience, and they quickly found that matching ShipperHQ on paper wasn’t the same as matching it in practice.

Almost immediately, they started noticing concerning trends: Cart abandonment spiked. Their Google search ranking dropped. And they started losing money on shipping. “It didn’t take long to realize there were some major gaps,” said Dan Pitcher, Owner at Eagle Mountain Flag.

Cart Abandonment Spiked 30% and Profits Took a Hit

After moving to the low-cost shipping app, cart abandonment increased by over 30%. The root cause: the app couldn’t properly size and rate packages across the company’s 27,000 SKUs. This produced incorrect rates – overcharging some orders and undercharging others – which hurt both revenue and profits.

"We noticed our sales were dropping, and we were getting a ton of abandoned carts," Pitcher said. “When the app overcharged, a shopper might build up a cart worth $40, see a $300 shipping rate, and leave.” It even affected the company's Google search ranking, which dropped due to shipping costs being higher than the industry standard.

On the other hand, when the app undercharged for shipping, it hurt Eagle Mountain Flag’s profitability. Checkout might show a $15 shipping rate when the actual cost to ship was $30. This could wipe out the entire profit on an order, and consistently added up to nearly $1,000 a month in unexpected costs.

Improve Conversions and Stop Losing Money on Shipping

Eagle Mountain Flag soon returned to ShipperHQ.

Their goals were straightforward: Bring cart abandonment back down. Stop undercharging and overcharging shipping. And show every shopper a competitive, accurate rate.

Eagle Mountain also wanted to give shoppers choices. Some customers have preferences for specific carriers or methods, like in-store pickup or express delivery. The company wanted their checkout to deliver on those expectations.

To achieve all of this, they needed a reliable, proven solution that supports the full complexity of Eagle Mountain's operations: a diverse product catalog, growing LTL freight volume, drop shipping from dozens of vendors, and in-store pickup for local customers.

Pricing Shipping Right for Every Order, from 20 ft Flagpoles to 12 inch Flags

To present the right shipping costs and options at checkout, ShipperHQ rates each order based on what's actually in the cart, combining mixed items into the right packages and pricing them against live carrier rates. Here's how that works for Eagle Mountain:

• Dimensional Packing calculates precise rates for every item or combination of items across the 27,000 SKU product catalog. When a cart mixes products of different weights and dimensions, like a large flagpole section along with small hardware pieces, ShipperHQ figures out how they pack efficiently and what the real cost of shipping will be.
• Carrier Integrations give customers real-time rates across Eagle Mountain’s various carrier partners including USPS, FedEx, UPS and XPO freight. Shoppers can pick their preferred service and the best rate.
• Multi-Origin & Drop Ship routes orders efficiently across dozens of different origins. Because so much of Eagle Mountain's business dropships directly from vendors, accurate origin-based rating is essential. Whether an order ships from a factory in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, or anywhere else, rates reflect where products originate from.
• LTL Freight supports the heavy, oversized shipping the business increasingly relies on. As growing quantities pushed the business to use LTL more and more, it needed live rates from its carrier, XPO. The previous app repeatedly promised to deliver that integration, but never did. ShipperHQ integrates with XPO directly, so Eagle Mountain can now present its LTL freight option accurately at checkout.
• Address Validation reduces costly delivery errors by catching address problems before they turn into carrier correction fees.
  
• In-Store Pickup gives local customers a pickup option instead of forcing them to pay for shipping on orders they’d rather collect in person.

Cart Abandonment Down 30% and $1,000/mo Recovered Immediately

Switching back to ShipperHQ made a fast, measurable impact. Within a couple weeks of going live again, cart abandonment was already down and they were no longer losing money on shipping costs. Setup was smooth and easy: ShipperHQ had retained Eagle Mountain's previous configuration, so the team didn’t need to start from scratch. It was just a matter of turning it back on.

• 30%+ reduction in cart abandonment and sales improved dramatically
• ~ $1,000 a month in recovered margin – eliminating the $200+ per week the business had been losing to inaccurate, under-charged shipping rates
• Accurate rates across 27,000 SKUs, from small flags to multi-section flagpoles, resolving the both-ends mis-rating that drove the original problems
• A smooth re-implementation thanks to a retained configuration, plus the LTL freight support the previous provider had promised but never delivered
• Recovering search performance, after a Google ranking drop tied directly to shipping costs that were out of line with the industry

In the end, the other shipping solution cost Eagle Mountain a lot more than it saved. What brought them back to ShipperHQ was the product’s proven ability to rate shipping correctly, no matter how complex the product catalog or operations.