Making sure that you have the optimum delivery strategy in place for your eCommerce store is one of the fundamentals to success in what is an increasingly competitive market. Proper organisation, an efficient packaging process and an effective courier partnerships are just a few of the key elements at play when it comes to making sure your delivery process is in the best possible shape.
One of the primary reasons that customers fail to follow through on interest and actually make a purchase is a lack of convenience when it comes to delivery. Be it too expensive or too slow, customers are no longer satisfied with sub-par delivery options. These days we are getting more and more accustomed to super fast delivery, often next or even same day, provided for free at a discount price.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the simplest, most effective steps you can take to improve your eCommerce delivery strategy…
Proper Stock and Inventory Management is Vital
To make sure that the delivery process runs as smoothly as possible, it’s essential to sort out every single stage, which means starting at square one. When stock is effectively organised and inventories are well managed, you will be well placed to avoid leaking money through issues such as overstock or incorrect stock.
Rather than looking at stock as an afterthought, stock should be treated as an eCommerce outlet’s number one priority. If the stock is well organised and looked after, everything else will come naturally. One key way of ensuring that you don’t overstock or under-stock products is simply analysing your order history. The most popular orders should be stocked more frequently and the less popular, less frequently. Although extremely simple, this is a great way to run an efficient inventory and keep stock to a high standard.
Your inventory should help you to avoid overselling and underselling at all costs. By keeping one single inventory, you will be able to maintain a better grasp of stock levels and therefore avoid any nasty accidents leaving customers disgruntled and looking elsewhere.
Packaging Should be Quick, Efficient and Effective
Today, the opening of a package containing a new product is the equivalent of what was once referred to as shelf presence. This can best be described as a product having the ability to capture the customer’s imagination on first sight. This means, then, that packaging should be at the top of the list when it comes to concerns regarding your eCommerce store. If a customer receives a poorly packaged item that’s late and, upon opening, sees that it has been sluggishly organised, what’s to stop them returning it?
So, along with top notch presentation of products in their packaging, it is essential to make sure that packaging is done quickly, efficiently and effectively.
They key to packaging things quickly and efficiently is making sure that the team performing this task is well trained and highly able. The team should also have instant access to materials such as boxes (or your preferred container), tapes, bubble-wrap and whatever else may be required. When packaging products, the team should be made aware of the importance of choosing the right size packaging to avoid damage when moving around and to preserve aesthetics. Labels and addresses should be clearly visible.
Consider Signing Up to a Quality Courier
Whist many new businesses prefer to perform their own packaging duties, and this is particularly true of eCommerce businesses, the benefits of signing up to an established courier are man and varied. It can be a great idea to try and cut costs in other areas of your eCommerce business, but shipping is not one of them.
First of all, signing up to a courier service streamlines the whole delivery process. As soon as the package leaves the warehouse, you are no longer responsible for ensuring it arrives at the intended destination. This means that any accidental hiccups along the way, and they do happen an awful lot, are the responsibility of the courier and not the company. This not only saves a huge chunk of time – after all, less problems to deal with means more energy spent elsewhere – but it means that your team can focus on increasing conversions and growing the business in ways that really make a difference.
From a consumer point of view, couriers are the gold standard of delivery and effectively provide a rubber stamp that the purchase is a safe one to make. More than anything, customers are seeking clear and accurate tracking information when they make a new purchase. In addition, they want high quality, proactive communication and this applies even more so if there is an issue with the delivery, when anxiety levels rise.
Although leaving your shipping duties to a third party can be risky, all in all using a courier service to deliver your products, especially a reputable name, can make the entire process of running an eCommerce outlet much more streamlined and hassle-free as a result.
That’s an elaborate business strategy. I am procrastinating on starting an online retail business. But caught up by the challenges of not only shipping but also warehousing, variety and scaling. How much is too much and how little is too little.
Own web-store or use the Amazon-eBay platforms.
Difficult math
Indeeed, e commerce is more of a logistics business than a marketing one. When it came up, people mistook it as an online channel to sell stuff without understanding the complexity of processes you need to get in place to successfully deliver them.
I think for starters, amazon market place is a very good starting point. They also have items from start up as a separate entity which gets marketed and promoted. It certainly needs more thought and work. But I do admit, it is a complex world indeed.