Understanding ecommerce and shipping
Here we breakdown and understand the most appropriate shipping strategies for your ecommerce business
Sometimes, shipping and ecommerce can be a hassle. So finding the right goals and strategies to support your businesses shipping demands is crucial. Before your products are shipped, it is important to determine which strategies best suit your business.
The two most common methods of ecommerce shipping includes:
- Offering free shipping as this is the best way to reduce cart abandonment
- Charging a flat rate.
If charging a flat rate is the best option for your business, it is important to make sure you don’t significantly undercharge or overcharge your customers. Flat rate works best when you have a standard product line that have similar sizes and weights. Therefore, selling a variety of products with different weights can become problematic and complicated
Calculating Rates:
To effectively calculate the base shipping rates, a variety of factors are involved. These factors include size, weight, origin country and destination country. Therefore, it is important to stay up to date with your business margins and finalise all costs associated with getting your products to your customers. With every business developing and increasing as well as the expectations of your customers. This means people are regarding shipping, packaging and presentation as part of the ecommerce experience.
Packaging is important as you need to ensure your product remains secure whilst in transit. As well as staying light and small. Also depending on the value of the package, shipping insurance and tracking can offer a great amount of security. Tracking and insurance ensures you and your customers will be covered if a package gets lost. In most cases this is very rare however, does happen. Therefore, most carriers provide this service and are relatively inexpensive.
Implementing Goals and Strategies:
When developing your ecommerce shipping platform, find a strategy that suits your business. It is important to implement some goals you wish to achieve. Some goals may include:
- Increasing conversions
- Increasing AOV through offering promotions or free express shipping
- Expanding your target market through offering international or alternate shipping
Finally, improving overall efficiency is crucial as you always need to stay current and up to date with the latest services or fulfilment schedule. To remain efficient, having things like on-demand printing for your shipping labels or running a multi-warehouse pick, pack and ship will also enhance your businesses ecommerce shipping abilities.
Get in touch with us today, so we can help you build and determine which shipping strategy is best for you.