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Last Updated on November 22, 2023 by Work In My Pajamas
Your customers will appreciate your company more if you can provide prompt, reliable, and affordable delivery services. But you could be losing customers if products tend to arrive late, the wrong items are shipped, or purchases get damaged en route. Inefficient packing and shipping practices could be costing you more than you realized. Keeping these processes organized consistently can be a challenge to small businesses with limited resources. Here are some keys to implementing shipping systems in your company.
In This Post:
1. Evaluate and Prioritize
It’s important to do your research and find shipping companies that best fit your needs. The major shipping companies in the U.S. are UPS, DHL, FedEx, and the USPS. All can get your packages there, but each has different pricing and services according to what your shipping and where it’s going. It’s important to understand exactly what your shipping requirements is, and go with a freight company that provides the most cost-effective and hassle-free services. The price of postage is important, but services such as free pick up or online tracking tools could be just as important in determining their value to your business.
2. Know Exact Postage
When you sending items, you don’t want to be over-paying or for that matter under-paying for inferior levels of service. The former is wasteful and the latter won’t produce happy customers. It’s important to know the exact weight of packages and calculate your postage costs on a regular basis. To make this simpler and more manageable, you could go online and pre-pay your postage. There are also check weigher systems that can automate weighing and calculating postage to reduce your time and effort.
3. Organize Your System
Reorganize your layout so that you can pack and ship product without any wasted time and effort. Your process should involve minimal movement or re-touching of goods and materials. Everything you need, including label-makers, scales, computing devices, bubble wrap, different box sizes, and packing tape should be right there within reach. Stock up packaging materials at the end or beginning of each workday. Roller tables or conveyor belts can minimize the need to stack up completed packages or carry them back and forth.
4. Outsource Your System
If these processes become overwhelming, consider drop-shipping or logistics management companies. Drop-shipping companies can individually package and ship items you place into their inventory. Drop ship companies will have more physical and technical resources, and have refined their own processes so well that paying for their services may be saving you money and valuable time. They also tend to operate at lower bulk shipping rates that will save you even more money.
5. Strategize Your Shipping
There are three basic approaches you could use singly or as alternatives. Flat-rate shipping is used by many retailers to control costs for their customers. While prices and rates fluctuate over a period of time, establishing a fixed rate helps to improve profits when rates are low, hopefully enough to come out ahead even when costs occasionally rise.
Calculated shipping means charging customers based on actual shipping costs to cover your own expenses, though some companies will round up these figures to ensure they’re coming out ahead. In fact, many businesses will inflate this “round up” to the point where they make a small profit on every package.
Free shipping is more of a sales incentive. By offering free delivery, you attract more customers looking for better value. The strategy is to draw enough sales to more than cover the expense of paying for shipping yourself. Many companies may also bump up their prices slightly to offset these shipping costs.
There is no single strategy to ensure your shipping is always optimal. It’s a business process that should be regularly evaluated and revised like any other.
