With more and more customers relying on deliveries to get everything from their clothing to their groceries, it is highly important that your business is prepared to offer an excellent shipping system. When you are competing against so many major players, you need to make sure that you have a system that is highly efficient and effective. While you may not need to offer overnight deliveries, the least that you can do is make sure that you are offering a realistic delivery date and a product that arrives in tip-top condition. Of course, there are plenty of ways of improving your company’s shipping, and we will be examining a few of them in a higher level of detail right here and now.
Ensure All Orders are Logged and Processed
The first step that you can take is the proper logging and processing of each and every order that you receive on your website. There are plenty of online tools that can help you out in this task. If you do not start off well by processing the orders as soon as possible, this makes it much more likely that they are not going to be completed on time. When a customer makes an order, it makes sense that you send them a confirmation email that tells them that it is in the process of being completed.
Make Sure Communication Is Prioritized
If you run a business from home on your own, communication is not such a big issue. However, the more people who work at your company, the more important it is that everyone is talking to each other. This means that the office and the warehouse need to be working together in harmony with one another. Ultimately, what is most important is that you use a standardized system to ensure that everyone is on the same page at all times.
Keep Items Stored Correctly
The last thing that you want is to end up losing your products as they are not stored in the proper conditions. A big part of this can refer to not exposing them to the wrong amount of light, temperature or moisture level, so you need to make sure that you are keeping your items in a place that is protecting their integrity to the maximum level. You should also consider how everything is located based on how much they are selling and whether you need to rotate it all based on the expiration date on the packaging. Ultimately, this is something that you tend to get used to over time, so if you notice that the same type of products are springing up time and time again, this is the opportunity to really do something about it.
Choose the Optimum Courier Service
While you may have a good level of control over your own part of the shipping process, there is also the courier aspect, which is out of your hands to a much higher degree. For this reason, it is highly important that you put enough time and energy into selecting a courier service. Think about whether you are going to use the same service for every single one of your orders or if you would prefer to book loads for each individual order that you dispatch. Ultimately, this all comes down to the total number of orders that you are dispatching and the regularity with which they need to be sent out. There are a number of different factors that can all add up to influencing your final decision including the delivery service type, the security, the speed with which the products are sent out, and the overall sense of reliability. You can get a certain grasp of this information by reading the reviews that are widely available online, but you can also work it out with a trial period of your own. If the courier service simply is not working out, it is important that you switch things up sooner rather than later.
Decide on the Distance You Can Deliver
To begin with, you may only start with doing smaller deliveries in the local area to get to grips with what you need to do and how efficiently you are able to dispatch orders. Over time, you can then start to build up to making deliveries across the country to see how well you get on here. If you are planning on making dispatches on an international basis, it is important that you have do plenty of research that gives you a clear idea of all the customs obstacles that you have to clear. Ultimately, you want there to be as few nasty surprises in this regard as possible. There also may be limitations on what you are able to send out and which countries you can target. In some situations, the excess costs and legal headaches may mean that it is all not as worth while as you initially thought that it was.
Keep Your Customers in the Loop at All Times
While customers do not necessarily expect to get all their packages and parcels overnight, what they cannot stand is not being kept up to date with what is going on and a realistic timeframe of when their deliveries will get to them. If there are expected to be any delays along the way, it is important that these are explained sooner rather than later. The standard way of getting in contact with customers is via email, but you can also do this with an SMS message, which has the advantage of having a high rate of being opened.
Getting the shipping process at your business right can make a huge difference in terms of whether it is going to be a success or a failure. Each of the tips in the blog post above can add up to making a big difference to whether items are going to arrive on time or if your customers will end up getting frustrated and disheartened.
