How To Optimize Your E-Commerce Shipments

It is hard to do business these days without a good ecommerce presence, converting visits to sales and getting the packages safely to your customers. Improving your shipment strategy by a little can improve your sales by a lot, if you know how to do it. There are five main steps to building and implementing a good shipping strategy: building the right team, setting concrete goals, using good data, auditing the process and adjusting your packaging

Team

Your first step is to build the right team for your shipping processes. Putting together the right people from your marketing, web design and fulfillment teams to work on ecommerce shipping strategy is a good start. You will also want to add someone from customer service and find a financial advisor to help you go over the numbers. This way, your shipping strategy can make the most of elements from each of the other departments to bring your customers the best experience possible while increasing your profits.

Goals

After you have established the right team, it is time to set goals for your shipping strategy such as increased conversions, expanded target audiences and decreased costs. Your team should also focus on increasing the average order amount and improving the efficiency of your current system. Having a broad goal for each of these items will not work as well as having many smaller and more targeted ones. For instance, if you are working on improving the efficiency of your current system, then you could list your goals as audit the system, reduce waste and improve product tracking.

Data

Having the right data and analytics for your team to work with is a good way towards defining and redefining the ecommerce shipping goals you set to work best with your company. For instance, if you know that you need to improve your website, then you will want to look at where it slows down and what customers see when they click on advertisement links. Using website analytics tools can give you this data to work with. You will also want to find data on carriers and their services so you can compare them and decide who to work with for your shipping.

Auditing

Not only will you want to audit how your current system is working to make beneficial changes, you will also want to invest in shipping auditing software. This software can track your shipments for you so that both the customer and your company can know where an item is during the trip. It is also a good idea to audit the types of shipping options your company offers and how you pay for those options with the carriers. For instance, are you offering your customers free shipping when the cost of sending them their purchase is more than what you make from the sale? Knowing when and from where to offer the different options can make a big impact on your bottom line.

Packaging

How you package your products for the shelf as well as to ship will affect how efficient your ecommerce shipping strategy is. The heavier and bigger the items are, or the more fragile, the more you will pay to get them to the customers. This means that any added packaging should be as lightweight as possible, not too bulky for the item, and designed to protect the product as much as you can. It is also a good idea to keep in mind that many of your customers prefer discreet looking packages to show up at the door to protect their privacy as well as not advertise expensive items to would-be thieves.

Improving your ecommerce shipping processes can be easier than you initially think when you have the right team, goals and data to start building your strategy. Your team can help you see where your current system is failing and improve it through auditing the systems, researching carriers and shipping options, or even streamlining your packaging design.

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