A report by the Baymard Institute says that ‘High Shipping Cost’ is the topmost reason for shopping cart abandonment in the USA, nearly accounting for half of the total abandoned carts.
Ecommerce retailers, primarily mid-scale business owners, often encounter shipping challenges as popular brands like Amazon have already set the standard so high by offering free shipping or keeping the shipping price minimal.
In this write-up, I have listed a few shipping challenges faced by e-retailers and have also put forward the required solution. Let’s have a look.
1. Choosing the Shipping Provider
When starting out your online business, you may rely only on one or two shipping providers. Even while picking one, you may find yourself in a lot of confusion. As your business grows, you will have to come up with more choices for your customers.
FedEx and USPS are ideal to start with. With time, you will get a better understanding of what’s best for your business, like knowing about the best shipping providers which have a reasonable operation cost and take less transit time.
2. Free Shipping
Though free shipping is often seen as a marketing tactic to increase sales, it involves compromising with the profit margin.
If your online business is well set-up, you may adjust with the concept of free shipping, however, the same cannot be said for new businesses.
Start-ups cannot afford to offer free shipping easily as it will be difficult to include the overall shipping cost into the product. But it’s also a fact that free shipping is necessary to entice customers and encourage them to purchase.
Some of the effective ways to offer free shipping without affecting your profit margin much are-
1. Free shipping on a minimum order value
2. Limited-time free shipping
3. Free shipping on certain products
4. Free shipping in specific regions
5. Free shipping on a certain weight
Read more at Free Shipping Strategies: Why to Offer? How to Offer? When to Offer?
E-retailers slightly increase the product price to cover the shipping cost.
3. Damage during Transit
One of the major eCommerce shipping challenges e-retailers face is the safe transit of the product from the warehouse to the customer’s delivery address.
Many times, the customers complain that the product was not in a good state or damaged when it reached them. Though it is possible that it was already in a bad condition, it is very likely that it got damaged during the transit.
Fragile items need to be packed carefully else they can get damaged.
To overcome this, ensure that the packaging is rightly done. Get to know everything about the shipping provider before you tie-up with them.
4. Flat Rate Shipping
Another dilemma that eCommerce retailers find themselves in is whether to have a flat rate shipping pattern or not.
Flat shipping rate has its pros and cons. Setting up a flat shipping rate for every kind of product without understanding and comparing the product value of other items on your store can backfire as well.
For example, a flat shipping rate for a lesser value product may seem too high and the same shipping rate can eat your profit if its actual shipping cost is more than the flat shipping rate.
Offering the right shipping rate is crucial to avoid cart abandonment.
How can we play a role in your eCommerce shipping?
Knowband provides a variety of modules related to shipping that can be beneficial for your eCommerce website. The modules are-
Free Shipping Manager
This module is available only for the PrestaShop website owners. It allows the merchants to adjust the terms and condition from the back-end configurations in order to offer free shipping to the shoppers.
You can specify the factors that need to be matched to get free shipping.
One Page Checkout
This checkout module supports a majority of shipping methods such as Mondial Relay, So Colissimo, Ulozenka Delivery, Zasielkovn Delivery, LP Express 24 Delivery, Paczkomaty InPost, Zasilkovna, Poczta Polska (owppoczta), Webshipr, Paczka w Ruchu.
It is available for PrestaShop, OpenCart, Magento, and Magento 2.
Shipping Cost by Zipcode
Available for PrestaShop, this module allows you to adjust the shipping cost for different regions.
Product Availability Check by Zipcode
This module adds a zip code validator on your product pages, hence allowing shoppers to check whether the product is available for delivery at their location or not. It is available for PrestaShop, OpenCart and Magento.
For any kind of assistance, you can reach out to us at support@knowband.com