Customers expect fast delivery. Being an online seller, providing customers with their products is no more than a mission. And when the product is to be delivered under the scorching sun, the mission becomes more complex and hard to achieve. The Holiday sales season is the main culprit to increasing complexities in “Mission Delivery”.
However, the holiday season comes up with huge opportunities for making good sales and revenues. It also ensures immediate sales and profits. It also comes with an opportunity to make sales in the future too. For many eCommerce businesses, the question that comes in their mind is “should we offer free shipping?” and if yes then “how should we offer free shipping?” and many more.
Being a seller, it’s very important to come up with some diligent strategies to take advantage of these holidays in a fruitful way.
Many times, retailers are able to do more than one annual sale in a few months only. As it is a good opportunity to increase their sales and revenues, this could also bring the opportunity for shipment errors.
Since, every aspect should be up to the mark, shipping failure could scuttle all your opportunities and will result in loss of sales. The shipping glitch would not only make retailer pay extra shipping charges but also create frustrated customers, killing the chances of repeat sales too.
Although it is difficult to fulfil all the shipment related problems we can at least learn from our missteps and avoid them in the future. Here are 5 shipping mistakes to avoid this summer are as follows:
1. Not communicating with shipping carriers:
Almost every summer holiday sale has a deadline. Online customers expect their product to arrive by this deadline unless you set a proper set of guidelines. Each carrier service has its deadline for summer holiday sales. So, before the summer holiday approaches, it’s better to be in touch with them to know their delivery schedules.
Generally, orders are needed to be placed 10 days before from the day the customer wants the delivery. However, the date will differ a little depending upon the location of the warehouse and order destination too. So, it’s important to talk with your carrier service to confirm the delivery on that particular eve otherwise, you can lose the order and perhaps lose customer’s trust too.
2. Not maintaining enough resources:
Imagine you have 20 employees who can pick, pack, label and pile 200 orders in a day. That means if you accept 400 orders a day, then it would be difficult for you to fulfil the shipment process on time. Hence, you will be unable to handle the placed orders resulting in loss of sales and revenues.
To avoid this situation, you should think wisely and play smartly. Whenever the sale is high especially in holidays, you can hire temporary workers or call them in shifts. This will help you to maintain all the placed orders easily.
3. Insufficient packaging material:
Now you have enough human resource and plenty of inventory to work with. But as soon as you started to pack the products, one of your workers says – We are out of Bubble wraps.
If you are supposed to ship 1000 orders per day, then you must be equipped with 1000 cartons along with bubble wraps, tapes and other packing materials. Running out of packaging material would slow down the shipping process resulting in delayed delivery.
4. Forget to validate delivery address:
Once the order is packed and out for delivery, the delivery agent is unable to find the address and returns back with the product. It often happens that due to an incorrect address, the orders are unable to be delivered.
Jonathan Poston, director of technical SEO for The Tombras Group once said – “An incorrect zip code can not only throw off shipping but can land a package into an almost infinite state of limbo”. A wrong address can lead to big problems. So, always validate the shipping address before placing the order to avoid shipment related problems in the future.
5. Fallacious shipping estimates:
Bad shipping can lead to the biggest consequences for your eCommerce business. Shipping is a very double edged game. If you make a lower estimate and provide one day delivery, then you have to pay the difference while if your shipping rate is too high, then the customer will automatically leave the cart abandoned.
According to Statista, 73 percent of respondents stated that free delivery greatly impacts their decision to purchase an item online. Shipping charges are the top reason behind cart abandonment as customers don’t want to pay delivery charges. So, you should be accurate with your shipping estimates to grab maximum leads.
6. Spoiling the surprises on Holiday sales:
It’s better to deliver the products in a plain box rather than delivering in branded logo box and that too with the invoice attached on it. So you can avoid making this mistake so that the giver get some time to hide his surprise from the would be a receiver.
Over to You:
After viewing all the above mistakes created by retailers in the shipping process, it’s important to learn from our missteps and try to avoid them in future for better generation of sales and profits. Regardless of whatever method or carrier you are using for delivery, it’s important to choose the right carrier for shipping process. Also it’s very important to keep a check on the quality of your products as many times sellers deliver bad quality products which is results harms your Marketplace reputation. So, work hard, play smart!.
Selling was never that convenient before! KnowBand offers Marketplace Integrators which enables sellers to integrate their eCommerce store with renowned Marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, Walmart, Google Shopping and Newegg. They are available for various CMS platforms like Magento, PrestaShop, Shopify, Magento 2 and OpenCart.
Features of Marketplace Integrators are as follows:
- Effortless product listing process with the bulk uploading feature.
- Mapping of the store attribute and category with the respective marketplace attributes and category.
- Effective management of the product inventory.
- Effective management of the marketplace orders.
Hey Joe!!
Previous year, I faced these kind of issues in shipping process. This year I would keep these points in mind and try to improve my sales these holidays.