Strategies to streamline your shipping process

Even though your store might be providing the best online shopping experience, it might not be enough. You might have a modern and attractive website, and you manage to sell a lot of products. But trust us, it’s the shipping process that ultimately wins the customers.
You need to keep in mind that the shopping experience begins on your website, and ends when the customer receives their product. This is why you need to streamline your shipping.

Here are 5 things you should take into consideration when streamlining your shipping process:

Make the Returns process easier and quicker

The ability to process the return orders quickly is one of the important criteria of every e-commerce business. If a customer wants to return the product but finds your return policy complex, they might end up never buying your products again.

You need to make sure that descriptions of the products are detailed and accurate and do not lead to confusion. You can even display your return policy prominently during checkout so that customers know exactly what to expect when purchasing your product(s). With the right order management system in place, you can increase the productivity and can process the order returns hassle-free.

Using an order management software

In today’s highly competitive business environment, retailers strive to achieve consistency, effectiveness and profit but the cumbersome manual process continues to hurt them. By opting for automated software solutions, you can get sales reports to track the cost of sales and can identify the best and worst performing products. Moreover, you can save a lot of time by using order management software which will speed up the entire ordering process.

This can also greatly reduce the risk of human error when handling orders. As such, we are certain that an easy-to-use order management software can help create a streamlined shipping service.

Insurance

Many e-commerce companies tend to do away with the concept of shipping insurance, but having a proper insurance coverage can prevent a lof of losses which can incur due to unforeseen circumstances. Shipping insurance gives you and your business an additional layer of security, greatly minimizing losses. Insurance and tracking depend on what you are selling their value. You can get insurance and tracking services at a low price and you can even cut off the price when it comes to the packaging value or if a package needs insurance when shipped internationally etc.

Create pick-waves

To increase the shipping efficiency, you can pick a certain time of the day to process the orders rather than shipping them individually. For example: You can ask your customers to order before 4:00 pm for the next day free delivery. Once its 4:00, you can assemble all the orders and connect with courier service provider and ship all the orders received before 4:00 pm all at once.

You can also create multiple pick-waves for couriers. For example, have one at noon, and one at 4:00 pm. This makes it easier for both you and the couriers to handle the parcels.

Aggregate your orders in one place

Do you find yourself around stockpiles of inventory for different channels? Is it a nightmare for you to measure, control and manage the stock on multiple channels? If yes, then it is better to manage your multiple channels from one single place rather than dealing with each channel individually. You can opt for a multi-channel management solution that can aggregate all your orders in one place, including the offline orders.

This will help you adjust inventory quantities across all channels when an order is received from an integrated channel. It will also help you to get insights of how well a selling channel is performing and you will be able to make better decisions about where to invest time and money.
Another aspect to keep in mind is packaging. Having quality packaging can help you save a lot of money. Even if it might seem a bit expensive at first, just think about the number of parcels that you could prevent from being destroyed during the shipping process, just because the packaging was high quality.

To sum up

Shipping is and will always be one of the most essential parts of any e-commerce business. You shouldn’t overlook it. Always choose a reliable and trustworthy partner to work with, even if we’re talking about a courier company or any third-party software you might be using to manage your orders.

With the help of an automated order management software, a great courier company to partner with and some useful tips to follow, we are sure that you can streamline your shipping process and make room for your online business to grow.