When you start an online business, your first priority is designing the perfect product. Once you have done that, you can start building a professional website so you can market your product and, hopefully, attract your first customers. After your website launch and a successful social media marketing campaign, you should start making some sales. Now you just need to manage the shipping of products, and this is something that you need to put a lot of thought into. New online businesses often underestimate the cost of shipping when they first start out and it causes them some financial trouble. If you have just started your own online business, here are a few things you need to consider when shipping products.
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Should You Outsource Or Not?
Outsourcing shipping is very common among small businesses. Using a courier service gives you access to infrastructure that you simply cannot afford to implement yourself, and you benefit from having an experienced courier deliver your products. As long as you choose a reliable provider, you can ensure that your products arrive in a timely manner and your customers are happy. However, there are some potential issues with couriers. You are not their only customer and your products are not always a priority. They also do not have an in-depth knowledge of your product and, in some cases, may not know the safest way to transport it, which leads to more breakages in transit. Whenever you use a courier service, you are giving up some control over your business and some people do not like the idea of that.
If you don’t want to outsource, you could consider handling the delivery yourself. It is fairly cheap to get a few second-hand vehicles from companies like Trade Cars and Commercials, so the setup costs are relatively low for a small operation. But when your business starts to expand, you will need to invest in storage and hire a full team to load and distribute products, so you should decide now whether you want to take that on.
Is Your Packaging Right?
Your packaging is more important than you may realize and if you don’t get it right, it could hurt your business. Firstly, you need to make sure that your packaging offers enough protection so products do not get broken during delivery. You also need to think about the materials that you are using because non-recyclable plastics will put people off and it could even lead to a dip in sales. It is important that you find more eco-friendly packaging alternatives if you want your business to stay relevant.
How Do You Manage Returns?
If you set up a reliable delivery service, either in-house or through outsourcing, and you get the packing right, you should be able to reduce returns. However, there will always be the occasional breakage or a customer that changes their mind and wants to return the product. It is so important that you have a clear returns policy in place and you make things easy for the customer. If you are difficult about returns and they take a long time to process, you will get a lot of negative reviews and lose a lot of customers.
When you are managing the shipping of products from your online business, make sure to consider all of these things.
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Zoe Campos
December 3, 2020 at 2:24 pm (3 years ago)It’s good to know from this article that working with a third-party courier service can give me access to materials that I can’t afford at this point. We only have limited capital and can’t probably afford to do shipping for our planned products on our own. It might be better to look for a courier service that offers same-day pick-up and delivery services once we have started planning for our business.