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Four ways to optimise your shipping in 2021

Optimising your e-commerce site involves more than just tweaking the user experience and offering sales. While these adjustments can help guide a customer to and through checkout, the customer’s journey doesn’t end there. A transaction is not complete until after a customer opens their package. And if the process is done well, it’s more likely that they’ll be back. 

A good shipping experience is one of the main drivers of leading customers to buy from you again. Efficient shipping is about more than using an express delivery service. Ultimately, a streamlined fulfilment strategy and clear communications with your customers is the best way to ensure confidence in the delivery process. 

Fulfilment optimisation

There are a few things you can do on the fulfilment side to speed up the delivery process. The quicker you ship out a customer’s order, the quicker they can breathe a sigh of relief. Here are some ways to expedite the order picking process to get customers their orders more quickly. 

Automate your shipping

Sure there is an initial setup process to shipping. You have to find out which services work with which items and which destination. The service you use to ship within the same metro area may be wildly different from the one you use to ship across the country. But once this is established, there’s no reason to have to click through each order and select the shipping method. Luckily, most shipping services allow you to easily automate shipping based on a set of criteria. Do orders going to Melbourne need a specific service over ones going to Perth? Or, is there a quantity cutoff that requires a bigger box? These options and many more can be automatically configured in more advanced shipping optimisation platforms such as ShipStation. 

Offer different shipping options

Too many choices can be tiresome, but you want to at least offer a standard and an express shipping option. 

Free shipping

While free shipping may not be possible for all items, offering it for small items with low shipping costs can increase cart conversions. Typically, these are slower services that involve incorporating shipping costs into the item cost. 

Flat-rate shipping

Unless you sell items varying greatly in size and weight, domestic shipments don’t usually fluctuate too much from shipment to shipment. For instance, “$105 shipping on any domestic order.”

Express shipping

If customers do want an express option for a more premium fee, you should offer it. Services like Australia Post’s Express Post may be expensive; but for time-sensitive packages, some customers are willing to pay the price. It can be the difference between an abandoned cart or a high-price purchase.

Quickly print hundred of labels 

If you have customers place orders from different selling channels such as Amazon, your Shopify store, etc, they all need a label, they all need their respective notifications to be sent back to the customer and selling channel. To be more efficient, you should automate any order from any selling channel to have its shipping services, notifications, shipper assigned, and so much more upon import. With all that logic already set up, you can simply print labels in one big batch, saving you and your team hours of work. This also lets you cut down on manually sorting through all your orders eliminating the need to review every order and shipment. 

Mistake-proof your packing 

Scan to verify is a great way to make sure that every item in your order is accounted for. If you’re packing and shipping a lot of orders, it can be tricky to make sure everything is in order. To avoid mistakes and speed up the process, you can scan an item’s UPC barcode as you put it in the box, once everything in the order has been scanned, the label pops out. It lets you breathe a sigh of relief that your customers are going to receive the correct items – and only the correct items – they ordered.

Conclusion

Sometimes the best way to increase sales comes from reevaluating and fine tuning workflow processes. The more effectively you ship orders, communicate shipping updates, or offer shipping options customers want, the more established your business appears to shoppers. Affordable, quick fulfilment allows your online business to have an elevated brand recognition that empowers you to compete with much larger competitors in both service and customer experience. Regardless of if you are working out of a garage or a dedicated warehouse, these steps streamline fulfilment, concise shipping options, can grow your customer base and establish long-term customer loyalty while also saving you time and money.