With e-commerce growing at an unimaginable speed, online businesses are now emphasizing mainly on convenience and shipping. Shipping plays a crucial role in making B2B or B2C business big and successful. And with this growing competition, it is very imperative to make your presence felt in the market and stand out the competition while filling the bills of customers.
Providing desirable shipping and returning options to your customers can work in your favor. Contrarily, unclear return policies and poor packaging contribute to the list of reasons for the disappointment of customers.Being a leader in providing fulfillment and distribution services to e-commerce companies, we have acquired in-depth knowledge about how e-commerce businesses can keep their customer satisfied.
To ease down confusions and difficulties, we are going to discuss some of the facts and tips that will help you build a working shipping and fulfillment strategy.
- Be Clear and Straightforward with the Policies
Having an effective shipping policy creates a big difference between a customer purchasing the product or customer abandoning the cart. Order fulfillment and shipping strategies are the essentials of an e-commerce website. In order to prevent customers from abandoning the cart, your order fulfillment and shipping policies should be in the front of a website that is directly seen by the buyer. This brings convenience while buying as it automatically clears all the doubts of a customer related to buying that product from your website. You can amend your shipping options or add new ones as your business grows to incorporate flexibility in your business.
- Free Shipping is More Preferred to Fast Shipping
An appreciable increase in sales and revenues has been observed by the online retailers when they offered free shipping even with minimum purchasing conditions. Free shipping entices buyers and is their first choice regardless of the minimum purchasing amount. No matter how fast you bet to deliver the products shipping charges are never appreciated by the customers. It seldom leads to purchasers leaving your website without shopping and not coming back ever. They might even influence their acquaintances about the same.
- Keep a Track of Inventory
Being a vigilant e-commerce store, you must be very meticulous about which item in your store are out of stock and in high demand. Supposedly, customers are looking for some particular product which is unavailable at your store but available at your competitor’s store that too on sale. You might lose on a lot of customers whilst giving a chance to your competitors to benefit from your drawback. There are a lot of online stores present in the market, therefore, it becomes very essential for your business to earn trust and loyalty of your customers as soon as you can. This can be accomplished by fulfilling the order requirements of the customers whenever they need it.
- Make the Most Use of Shipping Tools
After planning out and deciding order fulfillment and shipping procedures, you can further utilize the tools available. While going for B2B and B2C transactions, no one wants to receive one package at a time from the stores. Also, you must keep a track of shipments and schedule the pickups efficiently. You can integrate some ace shipping software with to your e-commerce store to offer required solutions for shipping.
For instance, Magneto, an e-commerce development platform, capably offers shipping strategies for all kind of businesses.
- Software and Automation
Implementing a strong e-commerce and e-commerce fulfillment services will help you ship orders automatically from your store to the destination without requiring manual help. The software will automatically update the order status and inventory list of the products. This automatic procedure will make your tasks a lot easier and make your website function in real-time. Also, the software will let your customers know their order details and shipping status such as of the order has hit the system, or the order has been received by the warehouse.
Summary
By now you must have understood the importance of proper shipping and fulfillment for acquiring unhindered growth of your e-commerce business. Whosoever you are serving, customers or businesses or both, it is always better to give them choices to create a flexible shopping experience. Therefore, it is always better to find a middle road in a way that your customers get a tailored solution and you get your profit.
