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Tips for Choosing a Shipping Strategy for Your E-commerce Website
Today, many business owners can create their e-commerce websites and start selling the same day, thanks to the innovation of e-commerce website builders. But after building an e-commerce website, one of the biggest challenges they face is shipping. It's very disappointing for a prospective customer to land on your e-commerce website, find a product they've been earnestly looking for, and at the desired price, include it in their shopping cart. And when they head to the checkout out page, they are met with a significant shipping charge and they wonder why they even went online to check out the product.
What will they do next? It’s pretty straightforward; they will abandon the shopping cart and head out to the competition. However, there are shipping strategies you can use to ensure customers don’t abandon their shopping carts on your e-commerce website:
Implement the exact shipping charge from your shipping companies on your e-commerce platforms
Some e-commerce business owners get reasonable shipping charges, but they can’t pass the same to their customers. They add a certain percentage to them and that increases the price of products. If offering the same shipping charges that you get from shipping companies don’t affect your profit margins, you can transfer the same costs to customers to make the products more affordable.
Use multi-carrier shipping solutions
E-commerce shipping software are becoming popular with e-commerce websites because they offer efficient, timely and low-cost shipping. In essence, the software allows e-commerce business owners to manage their shipping in a central location. This brings about efficiency in the entire shipping process. However, some business owners go up a notch and use multi-carrier shipping solutions that not only offer timely and efficient shipping, but also allows them to compare different shipping carriers worldwide to ensure you get one with the most competitive rates. With a cheap shipping option, you can be able to offer low shipping costs to your customers.
Offer flat shipping rates on your e-commerce websites
Shipping costs are calculated based on the weight of the product, product dimensions, packaging material used, and shipping distance. This can be costly for a customer who lives far and their mechanize is large and heavy. So to reduce their cost of shipping, you can offer a flat rate for all shipping. Customers can stick to your e-commerce website if they realize that you provide a flat rate for shipping.
However, this technique requires that you do your math correctly so that you don’t run into losses. You should figure out your cost of shipping per package. Essentially, calculating your shipping cost per package is something you should do beforehand to avoid overcharging or undercharging your customers. Note that when calculating the value per package, you will hit over or under, but that should even out in the long run.
Provide free shipping on your e-commerce websites
Offering free shipping is one of the most popular ways e-commerce business owners use to entice customers to buy from them. However, free shipping can erode your profit margins if you don’t do your calculations right. That’s why most e-commerce business owners only offer free shipping for domestic orders. However, if you can manage to offer free shipping and still get your profits, then many customers will flock to your e-commerce website. The best way to neutralize the effects of free shipping is to introduce a minimum order for free shipping. This way, you can be sure that you will cover the cost of free shipping.
Conclusion
Shipping is one aspect that can make or break your e-commerce business. Offer too high shipping costs, and customers will abandon you. You should strive to offer affordable shipping but still maintain the quality of your shipping processes.
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