How can a small business under a tight budget automate and optimize shipping operations?
Shipping is seen as one of the least fun parts of owning an e-commerce business. That’s no surprise. It’s costly, time-consuming and above all, if something goes wrong, consumers will complain and blame the online retailer.
One of the key questions for success is therefore, how to automate and optimize shipping operations?
Cut costs by matching your products with the right carrier(s)
First and foremost it’s important to select the right delivery company or even companies for the products you ship. It’s important to match the products you ship with the shipping methods the delivery company offers. Light-weight parcels are cheaper and the same, often, goes for service point delivery.
Of course, consumers still prefer home delivery. But offering multiple shipping methods can not only save you costs but also offer more flexibility to your customers which in the end will lead to an increase in conversion.
Keep in mind that the weight, dimensions, destination, and Track & Trace possibilities will all influence the proper delivery method and costs attached to that method. In order to optimize your shipping process, it’s important to check the delivery methods different carriers offer.
Automate your shipping process with a plugin
When it comes to automation, there are a lot of tools and plugins available for different shop systems that can help you automate such a time-sensitive process. Carriers often have a plugin or program that helps you to save time on your shipping labels.
But you also have options to use shipping software that meets your needs. An all-in-one solution for your shipping helps you both to automate and optimize your shipping process and to cut costs. It automatically connects your store to multiple delivery companies. By connecting your e-commerce platform to a software solution, you don’t need to worry about printing shipping labels, updating your clients, or even handling returns.
Manage returns wisely
When talking about shipping operations, one thing that’s often overlooked is the returns process. A seamless return process helps to keep customers happy, plus it leads to higher conversion rates.
By creating a return process that’s as efficient as can be, but in the meantime is also customer-friendly will lead to positive results for your business. 52% of European shoppers even check the return policy before deciding to buy anything online.
There are multiple solutions out there to help you to automate your return process. You can offer a digital portal to your clients for submitting their returns and printing a return label.
That way you will save a lot of valuable time and on the other hand, it will be easy for consumers to return the item. Online retailers are often convinced that making returns effortless leads to an increase in returns. That might be the case, but the other side of the coin shows that in the end more conversion and higher conversion rates will make up for it.
In what ways can a shipping tool help an e-commerce business?
Shipping software helps any type of e-commerce business to save time on shipping and to turn it into a competitive advantage. Whether you sell 1 or 10.000 parcels a month, the software offers maximum flexibility to automate and optimize the full shipping process.
Increase conversion with an optimized shipping checkout
Activate and offer multiple carriers and shipping options with our checkout widget. Consumers want flexibility and being able to choose when and where to receive their parcel.
Automatically print shipping labels and more
Shipping solutions have plugins for all popular shop systems and a custom API, so that you can connect all of your stores and online shipping channels to multiple carriers. This leads to saving time on printing shipping labels in bulk, shipping without any errors, managing order processing, picking and packing, automatically generating (paperless) customs documents and schedule pickups.
Inform customers while staying top-of-mind
Informed customers are happy customers. That’s why it’s possible to send branded tracking notifications that are fully automated too.
Tackle returns and drive growth
Put your return on autopilot while offering customers a great return experience that helps them to come back to your store. With a branded return portal you keep track of incoming returns and your customers don’t need to contact you any more to manage their returns.
You’re in charge with the right insights
Get actionable insights from order and return data with the analytics dashboard. Spot trends and pain points to improve your customers’ shipping experience.
Examples from the industry
What’s better to demonstrate how you can optimize your shipping process, than showing it?
Challenge
SUITSUIT is a brand for travel products like suitcases and bags. The brand faces a few challenges in their daily business. First and foremost, it’s very challenging to ship suitcases. Next to that, they were using different systems for their logistical processes. Shipping big parcels demand an efficient and cost-effective approach as it can be quickly very expensive.
Solution
Thanks to Sendcloud the brand integrated three different systems with each other. That way suitcases are picked & packed more efficiently. The brand is also saving costs thanks to using shipping rules that define what shipping methods are used for different types of products and shipments.
Result
The result of the collaboration is that SUITSUIT succeeded in shipping 30% more shipments with the same number of staff members. This cuts costs and when necessary they can easily scale up and won’t be held back by certain systems.