These days, if your business does not offer to ship for your customers, you are missing out on a big chunk of potential sales. The rise in online sales that has been seen just in the last year and a half alone is enough to convince any business owner about how important it is to have the ability to ship products and goods to customers across the country.
That being said, offering to ship is not always as easy as it sounds. For example, your products might be difficult or expensive to ship. Furthermore, you might need to have the ability to ship products a great distance, meaning that the logistics involved must be planned and executed perfectly.
While the process of perfecting your shipping might take a bit of trial and error, it is not something that you can really afford to pass on any longer. Thankfully, there are a few things that you can do to create the perfect shipping process for your business.
If you already have some sort of a process in place regarding shipping out your products, you might actually be looking for ways to optimize the process. These five tips can help you accomplish your goals of shipping your products more effectively and efficiently, which will only benefit your business and your customer satisfaction.
1. Onboard Carriers the Right Way
So much of the shipping process involves having the right carriers in place to move your products from one point to another. Choosing the wrong carrier or neglecting to onboard them correctly can spell disaster for your company.
Furthermore, when the carrier you are using is unreliable or has not been onboarded properly, it can result in lost or broken inventory. Should such occurrences happen time and time again, you can end up losing a great deal of money and wind up losing customers in the process.
To ensure that your carriers have been onboarded properly, consider calling in some experts to take care of this part of the process for you. Utilizing the experience and expertise of a carrier onboarding company can help you to reduce risk when it comes to your shipping process and contribute to your efforts to optimize your shipping process.
2. Focus on Communication
Another major piece of the puzzle when it comes to having an optimized shipping process is communication. When it comes to shopping, there are so many moving parts. If a communication breakdown occurs somewhere along the line, it can throw the entire process into chaos.
Start by addressing how communication is handled among your team members. For example, there might be a more efficient way to conduct internal communications about shipping. For instance, communication software can help to improve efficiency with the communication process and allow for a way for all of your employees to access past correspondence.
Once you have the right software in place, make sure that all aspects of the communication process are interacting as they should. For instance, your CRM needs to be functioning properly regarding your shipping systems to avoid issues with things like addresses and other customer information.
3. Address Issues with Packaging
When it comes to shipping your products, how things are packaged is also a significant thing to keep in mind. Everything from the size and weight of your packages to how your products are protected during shipping needs to be taken into account. You will find yourself losing customers in the long run if your packages are arriving broken or damaged in any way.
Regarding the dimensions of your packages, you should look to utilize the most effective sizes at your disposal. When you are working with larger dimensions than necessary, you can find yourself paying more for shipping than is necessary. That being said, the size of your packaging needs to be adequate for the items that you are shipping.
If you have been experiencing problems with your packaging dimensions, take the time to coordinate a realistic solution with your box manufacturer. They should be able to troubleshoot any issues you have been dealing with to ensure that your packaging is as optimal and fit for purpose as possible.
4. Hire the Right Team
With so many moving parts, you do not want to entrust the various components of your shipping process to those who are not equipped to handle the responsibility. However, after evaluating your current process, you might find that you need to make some changes regarding personnel to fully optimize your shipping process.
The right team is an important thing to have in place when it comes to your shipping process. From managers to floor workers, everyone needs to have the ability to work together as part of the overall picture. Finding the right people might take some time, but failure to do so can have devastating effects on your shipping process.
If you find that instead of making personnel changes, the issue is more in relation to employee training, take the time to retrain those who are not on the right track. This might cause a bit of disruption to your process for the short term, but once your team is fully equipped with the right training, the long-term benefits will vastly outweigh and inconveniences you experience at the moment.
5. Optimize Your Website
To fully optimize your shipping process, you must see to it that your website is working properly as well. Optimizing your website’s ordering portion will help improve the customer’s experience and allow you to receive and process orders more easily and efficiently.
It is important to remember that a website that is not functioning properly when it comes to placing orders will deter clients. Do not expect customers to go the extra mile to place their orders if a site is slow, or difficult to navigate, they will just abandon the cart and go elsewhere. If the process is not simple enough for your customers to manage, they will turn to your competitors for their orders instead.
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