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E-Commerce Shipping And Fulfillment

While running an e-commerce brand, you put a lot of effort into making the overall shopping experience great for your customers. Everything that you do for the marketing of your brand tends to make your customer happy.

Dealing with the shipping process, however, maybe like handing over the rest of the job to a procedure that is not under your control.

With some planning, you make the shipping process work in the favor of your brand. What’s crucial here is to formulate a shipping strategy to make. In this article, we will discuss some basics of shipping and fulfillment to let you understand how to create and implement a strategy of e-commerce shipping and fulfillment.

Shipping strategy

You are going to have to work on some basics to set a foundation for the rest of the shipping procedure. Here are the key decisions that you need to make in order to boost your shipping and fulfillment strategy.

  • First, you have to decide about the shipping rates. Are you willing to make your customer pay the full shipping fee? Do you want to pay it yourself? Are you going to offer flat rate shipping? These are the questions you will need to find the answers for.
  • The next thing to consider is the weight of the product. With the proper information about the product weight, you can easily estimate the total shipping costs. It will help you adjust the product price.
  • The type of packaging materials you use for the product packaging also plays a significant role in determining the total cost of your product. Keeping track of this information can be plenty helpful.
  • You can outsource the product packaging process to some carriers, such as USPS, DHL, and UPS. You are going to have to see if it is suitable for your product and brand, though.

Packaging and marketing

The growth of the e-commerce industry has created fierce competition among brands. Due to this, the consumers who buy online tend to have high hopes for product quality, shipping, and delivery. They also expect brands to pay attention to presentation.

These expectations result in brands going the extra mile to impress their customers. One of the ways is to use packaging inserts, which can be anything from a thank you note to a sample product to a gift.

Make sure to improve the unboxing experience of your package. The process to create this experience refers to the use of packaging materials that tend to please customers.

Using fulfillment warehouses

Working with a fulfillment warehouse can help automate the shipping process quite effectively. You can choose to store your entire inventory in that warehouse. People working at that warehouse will receive orders, pack your products, and ship them on your behalf.

The most significant advantage of working with a fulfillment warehouse is that you will be able to reduce shipping costs drastically. It is because most fulfillment warehouses work with 3PL companies.

You can strategically choose a shipping warehouse to make sure that your packages have to travel over shorter distances to reach their destinations.

Whether or not contracting with a fulfillment warehouse is right for you depends on your requirements. You may want to discuss all your options with a packaging consultant.