As the E-commerce market is on the rise, more and more companies are pushing their products online. However, as the influx of online business continues to grow, more and more companies are mis-managing their growth and are finding it hard to maintain scalability. Grow to fast and your legs might crumble underneath you. Here we will discuss some solutions to scalability and some options that you should consider as you grow your E-commerce business.
ACQUIRING AGGRESSIVE SHIPPING COSTS
As an ecommerce business owner, you have a limited amount of time each day, week, and month to get everything done that you need to. You have orders to fulfill, product to box up, shipping labels to create, a website that needs updating, a sales video to shoot, etc. The entrepreneur’s life is fast-paced and can get very hectic with everything that needs to be done.
With such little time and so many things to do how much more could you get done if you didn’t have to worry about handling any of the fulfillment and shipping? How much time do you spend each week just packaging and shipping your products? By saving that time each week what more could you get done that would greatly impact your business?
As tasks and responsibilities begin to rise, it can become difficult to ensure that you have negotiated the best possible shipping rates. There are a few factors to consider when negotiating aggressive shipping costs:
- Are you using the right shipping carrier for my business?
- How far below retail cost are you currently being charged?
- Are you currently benefiting from group volumes?
- If shipping internationally, are you saving the most on shipping charges, duties and taxes?
Shipping is a huge expense for any eCommerce business and one that if given proper focus, could save you tens or even hundreds of thousand of dollars.
ASSESS HOUSING OR OFFLOADING YOUR PRODUCT
If you are shipping your products and fulfilling customer orders that means you are storing your products somewhere close by, usually in your house. I have customers whose houses looked like they were furnished with boxes of product. They would store product in every square inch they could find. Most of them also packaged everything in their homes leaving a mess of boxes, tape, scissors, label makers, etc.
Many of these customers used to tell me about all their late nights staying up until 2:00 in the morning with their kids or significant others packaging and fulfilling all of the orders for the day/week.
This is a beautiful impasse for any company to reach. It means your business has grown to the point where you either need to offload fulfillment to a shipping company or make the time and financial investment into a warehouse and employees of your own. Remember, as a business owner, there comes a point where your time is simply too valuable to be spent doing all of the packaging and shipping on your own.
PACKAGE PRODUCT ACCORDING TO YOUR BRAND
Packaging is vital for your brand presence. However, it is often an afterthought for some businesses. Package can make your company seem much larger or even much smaller than it is. Packaging can be broken down into two aspects:
Physical Product Packaging – This is the packaging that will house the physical product. This is often a bottle with a label, shrink sleeve or products in printed boxes. This will have the most effect on how customers perceive your product. It’s important to that your product packaging directly matches your company brand and/or vision.
Shipping Packaging – There are two additional items to keep in mind when evaluating shipping packaging. The first and most important is whether keeps your product safe in transit. Shipping carriers do not have the same level of respect for your package as you do. It’s vital that your master shippers are damage tested. The second aspect of this category is the customer facing side of your shipping packaging. Quite a few of our clients use custom outside or inside printed boxes to provide more of a wow factor for their eCommerce customers.
HOW CAN WE HELP?
Launch Fulfillment is a fulfillment warehouse in Utah. At Launch we handle all the shipping logistics (the behind the scenes shipping details).
Saving yourself all the time and hassle of fulfilling orders and shipping your products is very easy and affordable through Launch Fulfillment. Launch Fulfillment has secured very competitive shipping rates, allowing you to offer more savings to your customers at checkout. As a warehousing solution, we also offer freight storage and freight shipping. Our team of packaging experts will help ensure that you are meeting your packaging needs.
Again, stop wasting your precious time and money. Save yourself the headache and the hassle of fulfillment and shipping by giving us a call today.