Gone are the days when you had to rely on a physical store to keep your business afloat. Nowadays, you can only maintain your business success with an established business website in your working plans. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the evolution of online stores and online shopping has gone into an extra gear. People have started buying products from the comfort of their homes rather than going to the stores themselves.
In the current period, the age of online shopping is expanding more than ever. With the increased reliance on online stores, business owners must develop reliable and affordable eCommerce shipping solutions. However, despite technological evolution, government regulations influence how business owners manage their eCommerce shipping options.
According to a survey posted by Shopify, 51% of people in business found it challenging to conduct in-store shipping during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as time passes, companies try to convert themselves to established online stores.
What is Ecommerce Shipping?
Ecommerce shipping refers to the methodology you use to ship products to your customers. It involves different shipping options for purchases made on your online store.
Nowadays, how you ship products and how your customers receive them greatly improves the customer satisfaction score. To satisfy your customers, shipping options also involve securing your product through firmly sealed packaging. Furthermore, you can ensure that your shipping partner maintains your product packaging properly.
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Going through the product packaging is essential to the product and the customer experience you are selling. In addition, your strategies for shipping products will impact your marketing when you send PR packages to social media brand ambassadors or micro-influencers.
Important Methods of Ecommerce Shipping
1) Free
Customers who purchase from an online store expect free shipping options. You can make free eCommerce shipping happen in your business regardless of size. If you integrate the cost of free shipping into the price of your products or require a minimum spend for each purchase, you can bring free shipping options to your customers.
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Free shipping can improve your overall shipping efficiency because you would need less weighing, pricing, or measuring to conduct across your shipping products. Instead, you can deliver your products to the customers, including the shipping price or the price threshold, before moving on to the next customer order.
2) Flat-rate
Flat-rate is one of the eCommerce shipping options in which costs don't depend on the weight or dimensions of the product. Instead, the retailer tries to put as much product into one flat rate as possible. Many shipping carriers tend to go with this method. Ecommerce stores use this method because it is a cheap way of delivering more products to the customers in a single shipment.
3) Expedited
If customers need faster delivery of their products, they can go for expedited shipping. In this method, you prioritize packaging over slower eCommerce shipping solutions, such as economy or a flat rate. Furthermore, this method can provide definite delivery times, so the customers know when their package will arrive. Expedited shipping usually allows you to deliver products on the same day, overnight, or two-day shipping.
According to a stat shared by Metapack, 27% of customers prefer another retailer if they have better shipping options. Hence, providing expedited shipping will stop them from changing their retailers and improve your revenue.
4) Hybrid
As you can determine by the name, hybrid services combine two different delivery services or shipping partners to help you manage or deliver products efficiently. For example, FedEx SmartPost and UPS SurePost combine to deliver products to the customer's doorstep. This method is one of the best eCommerce shipping options for online retailers because you can choose the best or most profitable services.
Shipping Tips for Entrepreneurs
1) Understand How Much Your Products Weigh
Many entrepreneurs feel that the weight of shipping products is an obvious move. However, when we talk about calculating shipping costs, it is not. There is no guarantee that the product's shipping weight will be the same as its actual weight.
For example, let's assume that you sell glass vases. Your products will weigh a few pounds by themselves. However, if you want to ship glasses from one city to another, you must layer your vases with effective packaging materials, such as air pillows, foams, or packing peanuts. These packaging equipment, a strong corrugated cardboard box, and even tape will all add to the overall weight of the shipping products.
Since you are the business owner, you must know how much your products weigh when they are full, packed, or ready to be shipped. Once you determine your shipping weight, you can use it to estimate shipping costs.
2) Use Shipping Software
The customer service counter in your local post office or UPS store could be better for buying products or getting shipping labels. However, you will benefit from shipping software even if you have just started your business. Regardless of the small benefits, such as buying your postage online, your business will benefit.
Using shipping software will allow you to purchase shipping products or postage at a discount typically. Moreover, you will enjoy other features, such as integration with marketplaces, improved tracking, or certain levels of shipping automation.
3) Box Representing Your Brand
When you deliver an order to the customer, you don't just deliver the product; you provide information about your business in some shape or form. Your product, shipping label, and box represent your brand, respectively. Therefore, you should refrain from using boxes delivered to you.
Usually, new eCommerce businesses get their products shipped in from various suppliers. The new businesses understand that boxes cost money, so there is a temptation to take a box delivered to you, put a new shipping label on it, and set it on.
As a business owner, it looks extremely unprofessional to use the same boxes repeatedly. Furthermore, if your customers recognize it in the first instance, you won't get a chance to get a positive impression from them again.
4) Shipping Costs are Part of Business Plans
Being a business owner, you must accept that you will lose money on certain orders. For example, the shipping costs are likely more than what you anticipated, or customers have returned the product. Therefore, inexperienced business owners tend to argue with shoppers and look for alternatives. However, this approach needs to be better, and it may put your reputation at risk.
You must accept your fate as it comes and embraces the fact that shoppers don't like your products. Ecommerce shipping is a huge part of your business operations. For some orders, shipping options will generate profits; for others, you must go through deficits. Being a business owner, the right approach is to ensure that most of your sales are profitable. Focus on your orders in a week or month rather than on everyone would be best.
Shipping Features of Strikingly’s Online Store
Image taken from Strikingly
In today's day and age, you can no longer rely on physical stores to improve your presence and increase sales. Every business owner must have an eCommerce website to support their business plans. Hence, you can use different website builders to help you build your website. Strikingly is a professional website builder that allows you to develop your eCommerce website within an hour with all the relevant features. You can also rely on Strikingly to manage your eCommerce shipping options.
Image taken from Strikingly
Once you land on our homepage, you can register for a free account. The free plan will allow you to build a simple eCommerce website with all the essential features. In addition, you can use the Strikingly website editor to add a Simple Store section to your website.
Strikingly provides multiple options for the type of products you can sell. Apart from adding the product name and description, you can simplify the product name and price. We also enable you to modify the stock quantity for each product.
Strikingly lets you set up different eCommerce shipping options when you customize your Simple Store section. For example, you can establish shipping rules to a flat rate per product or determine the shipping fee based on weight and store pickup. For the options you add for your shipping products, you can add different costs and regions for which shipping options are available. Ecommerce shipping has been made easy by quality website builders, such as Strikingly. You must consider our subscription offers if you want to upgrade your eCommerce features.
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Conclusion
Optimized eCommerce shipping solutions aren't just good for your business in the short and long term. It will make your business more profitable in the following months and years. Eventually, it will result in happy customers, who will be satisfied with their shipping experience.
Ecommerce shipping and fulfillment are two things that are dealt with by influential website builders, such as Strikingly. Since you are a business owner, you must do everything to ship products to your customer's doorstep without compromising quality. Therefore, your shipping products need concern and care until they get delivered to the new homes.
With a quality eCommerce website and correct shipping partners, you don't need to worry about anything when you ship products. If you need help building your eCommerce website on Strikingly, you can consult with our Happiness Officers immediately. So sign up on our platform now and take advantage of all our eCommerce shipping solutions.
