Take a look at how you ship your product. Is there any way that you can make it faster or more efficient? Whenever there is an opportunity to reform your methods and modernize, you should grab it! Maybe you’re not sure where to start? Here are a few strategies that can help you streamline the shipping process:
Group Your Shipments
To increase efficiency, you'll want to batch-fulfill orders all once, as opposed to fulfilling them throughout the day. To streamline this process, and give your customers a heads up, set a cut-off time and advertise faster shipping for shipments placed before within a specific window of time. Amazon does this by prompting the customer with an earlier estimated delivery time if they place their order within a certain number of hours. This gives the buyer an incentive to check out faster and it relieves the pressure off your business to be driven by orders.
Outsource Fulfillment
It's nearly impossible to grow your inventory if you're trying to handle everything on your own. If you're still fulfilling out of your garage, you can still use an affordable fulfillment solution with low volumes. By spending time picking, packing and shipping your orders, you're taking away valuable time from building your actual business. Take it from an eCommerce business owner who was able to increase her sales by 150% through outsourcing her shipping and fulfillment.
Automate Order Fulfillment
Automation has streamlined shipping faster than ever before. Your shipping can easily be integrated into your checkout page on your eCommerce site, so as the customer pays for their order, their shipping request has already been made. If you're taking it a step further and outsourcing your shipping to an eCommerce fulfillment centre, you'll be able to gain an entirely hands-off experience, with full transparency. This means that once a customer places an order to your store, the fulfillment centre will pick and pack their order, then send it off for shipping with full tracking. You'll be notified if inventory is running low, and be able to keep tabs on the handling of your products.
Automated Insurance
It's always a good idea to insure your shipments in case of any loss or damage during the shipping route. Insurance shouldn't require manual work, however. Create a shipment price or size requirement threshold to determine different levels of insurance. The rules that you set down will automatically dictate how much insurance is needed and raises efficiency by reducing time constraints.
Have a Strong Return Policy
Having the ability to process returns quickly is key to optimizing the shipping process. Nothing will cause a customer to move to a different business faster than a complicated returns experience. 92% of customers said they would buy again if the returns process was easy. Make sure that the returns policy is easy to find on your site, and extremely clear and concise. The buyer should quickly be able to determine the time window and process for returns.
If you want to go the extra mile, offer free returns. Free returns can actually boost future sales. Just make sure you don't make free returns too easy. It's not a good idea to include a free shipping label right in the package. This encourages serial returners to buy with the intention of returning what they don't need, which can leave a detrimental impact on the environment through extra packaging materials and fuel being consumed. There's a happy medium, and that's creating a returns policy that's easy to find and free to use, without doing the hard work for them.
By introducing these solutions into your shipping, you give your eCommerce business room to grow. Your company can dedicate more time toward development and increasing your orders to new heights. eShipper is here to help! Many of the issues that companies run into with shipping are taken care of fast and efficiently by eShipper. Contact us today. Let’s grow together!
