The e-commerce industry continues to grow with every passing day. Vendors are dealing with the shipping of high volumes of products, and fulfillment procedures are seeing exponential expansions. Special events and holidays add much to the number of orders and sales.
With more businesses and brands entering e-commerce, we can expect a significant transition in packaging and shipping methods to facilitate those newcomers. In this article, we will summarize the shipping and fulfillment procedure for e-commerce brands.
The process of shipping starts well before a customer clicks on the buy button in the checkout. You will have to consider several factors to ensure the effectiveness of your shipping strategy.
First and foremost, you will have to pay attention to the shipping costs. It will include packaging and shipping rates.
The weight of the product has a significant impact on shipping costs. Make sure to add this factor to your shipping costs calculations.
See if you can offer free shipping. Also, analyze whether or not this tactic will help reduce the cart abandon rate.
See if you can ship your products abroad.
Also, pay attention to the shipping time.
It is crucial to formulate a fulfillment procedure. Fulfillment refers to the process of receiving, packaging, and shipping goods against consumer orders. If you are an e-commerce company, it is crucial to have software support to integrate incoming orders with the fulfillment procedure. This step will help control tracking, SKUs, and other critical factors necessary in the order and product management.
You can also consider using outsourced fulfillment. Outsourced fulfillment companies handle your product orders expertly, allowing you to focus on other critical business processes. These companies also let you know about the shipping and distribution best practices.
If you want to retain an effective fulfillment procedure, you have to ensure high-quality product packaging. With the e-commerce industry becoming more competitive and consumers becoming familiar with the unboxing experience, you have to make sure that you are using high-quality packaging materials.
You can look through different packaging options for your e-commerce product. Make sure to choose the one that fits your requirements nicely. You can get help from your packaging vendor in this regard.
Another necessary consideration for an e-commerce company is to have a flexible packaging line. You must build brand value to help your business come on top during the busiest times of the year. A prominent example of this is the holiday time when there is a rush of incoming orders. Your packaging line needs to be capable of processing all those orders to help you meet consumer demands. It is possible when your packaging line is flexible.
A flexible packaging line also allows you to increase your offerings because you will be sure about its capability to pack every unit.
You have to make sure that your business is ready to handle product returns effectively. Since 30% of all e-commerce orders are returned to their respective companies, having a robust and effective return policy in place is a must for any business. While handling returns doesn’t seem to benefit your business quite too much, a well-optimized product return management plan can help you retain about 92% of your consumers.