When was the last time you preferred going out and purchasing things available at a lower price on Amazon? The majority of us prefer Amazon only, right? Covid 19 pandemic and social distancing rules brought a compulsion to boost online shopping, which has become a habit nowadays.
With more and more people inclining towards eCommerce shopping, the demand and the competition also witnessed a considerable rise. If you are not offering something extraordinary in such fierce competition, it will be hard for you to keep the eCommerce business profitable with shipping tips.
Being a store owner, you must focus on building a customer experience out of the box. Every phase of the customer shopping process should offer a personalized touch. Meeting customer demands is the prime duty of eCommerce store owners.
This article will highlight the shipping process and help you with ceramic shipping tips to help you ace your customer experience game.
First of all, What is eCommerce Shipping?
ECommerce shipping means accumulating a few steps of processing the order received in the store. This includes receiving and processing orders, packing and picking the product at the warehouse, and printing the labels, including return management.
Post receiving the order on your eCommerce store, you’ll need to check the inventory in the stock. Moving on, you will need to verify the customer’s identity and shipping address. At last, the items are picked up, packed, and prepared for shopping.
It would be best to keep in mind specific tips while customizing the shipping process. An alignment is required in all the people working to make shipping work. If all the team members work in sync, it will be easier to manage and improvise the overall shipping process. Let us have a look at the tips:
Offer Free Shipping
Free shipping tips isn’t a luxury anymore, and it has become the most basic requirement for an eCommerce store. Even research backs it up:
According to research, 36% of online customers who abandon a purchase do it because they don’t want to pay for shipping.
Free shipping is a game-changer. But it is free for customers, not for the store owners. If you’re looking to offer free shipping, you must do your calculation. You can choose to test at first, like offering free shipping on some of your stock and some without it.
Notice the difference in sales. If there aren’t any significant sales changes, why bother offering free shipping. If there is a considerable difference, adopt the free shipping method asap.
You can also create thresholds for free shipping methods. Being a store owner, you should experiment with certain variables until you get what is suitable for your store. Try various order amounts as essential for qualification for free shipping, adjusting that amount until you find the correct profit number.
You will need to be well-planned and organized to implement this level of experiment successfully. Missing out on something can lead to some cut in customer loyalty. No customer would be willing to visit a store that frequently changes its policies.
Restrictions play well. You must plan the shipping offers by checking the inventory and selecting the products that lend themselves to free shipping. Set restrictions accordingly, based on the weight and volume of the product. This strategy can also be a great help to push slower selling items.
Another strategy to adopt is to spread the shipping cost across the whole inventory. Increasing the rest of the stock even slightly can help you cover all extra fees. Division of the shipping cost can be great for bringing the best of both worlds. ie. Great for customers as well as profitable for the store owners.
Implement Flat Rate & Table Rate Shipping
Does it all seem foreign? Let me explain.
Talking about Flat rate shipping, it is standard practice across numerous stores. As the name suggests, it is a rate that offers a standard flat rate for items irrespective of their weight or size. Flat rates are generally easier to manage as all you need to do is work out a reasonable aggregate for shipping across all the items.
You won’t need to set it too high or too low, but it should be reasonable enough to benefit both sides. If you aren’t sure about the rate, excellent and detailed research and checking your competitors might help.
Now, Table rate shipping is quite a complex strategy. It relies on developing tables that offer different rates based on destination. It can either be postcode-based or country-based. The prices keep increasing based on the distance from where the products are being shipped.
Table rate can also be an excellent choice to implement according to the order value. The only snag is that it can become complicated. This will make customers go back because of navigating through many continually changing price options. When customers note a sizeable difference in shipping from place to place, it can also become a reason for a higher bounce rate or abandoned carts.
Offer Live-rates
ECommerce is a world of runtime updates, whether shipping charge or delivery tracking. Live rates are also known as real-time shipping tips calculations. This type of rates strategy helps you offer shipping rates at the exact carrier’s cost for distinct sizes, weights, and distances.
In simple words, you can charge what you want to charge for products without worrying about shipping costs. With this strategy, the shipping cost will sync in real-time, meaning if your carrier increases their rates by 10%, the shipping costs will also update your store.
This strategy will also help you increase customer loyalty as they pay the exact amount for shipping. It increases their trust that you’re honest about shipping charges.
You can also let your customers choose the option depending on the delivery date. The Shopify Delivery Date extension helps enhance the localization of the store. Using live rates can help the store owners and customers in various ways. Live rates put the decision in the customer’s hands. They will appreciate it, and they also have several choices.
With this option, the customers will choose to pay for the lower-cost options, hence will remove the need for you to offer free shipping.
Offer Same-day Delivery.
Just like what it sounds, same-day delivery is getting the order delivered on the same day of the order being received. It seems easier to define but is a lot harder to achieve. It is already a step towards successful customer engagement when you serve your customers successfully with this same-day delivery strategy. It requires a smooth logistics operation along with plenty of resources.
While this is a great strategy to gain customers’ trust, it shouldn’t be your first go-to strategy if you aren’t doing local business. Before starting with this, you can start with baby steps like two-day delivery or overnight shipping tips. Once you successfully achieve this, you can go ahead with same-day delivery.
Free in-store Pickup
If your business has multiple brick-and-mortar stores and an online store, this strategy could become a revolutionary one for your store. When you offer free in-store Pickup, you develop a win-win situation for you and your customers. You do not need to spend any special effort to deliver the product to your customers.
In-store Pickup is the easiest way to drive customer engagement. Customers can scroll products sitting at their homes and collect them from the store, making the overall shopping process shorter and better than ever with these Shipping Tips.
Conclusion
ECommerce itself is a strong game nowadays, and you must be ahead of your competition to get noticed. Earning customer loyalty is the prime goal, but profit can’t be ignored either. To keep up with the Shipping Tips advancements, the store owners should stay up to date with the innovations and updates taking place in the industry.
Shopify Delivery Date is an extension that will help the store owners keep up with the customizations across the industry. Particularly for shipping-related customer experiences, this is one of the finest extensions in the industry.
