You put a lot of effort into making sure your customers have a great experience. You approve the images, you tweak your store, and you write the emails, all with the goal of leaving your customers happy.
But when it comes to shipping, it can feel like you’re handing your brand over to a stranger.
With some thought and planning, however, it doesn’t have to feel that way—which is a good thing, because shipping is a key part of your business. It’s the point where a customer finally experiences your product in person, and it can also represent a major expense in your business, depending on your shipping strategy.
That’s why it’s so important to map out a defined shipping strategy. Since the world of shipping and fulfillment can seem complex when you’re not familiar with it, we’ve got an overview of everything you’ll need to know to make the best choice for your business.
We’ll go over some of the basics of shipping your products and help you understand this complicated topic. We’ll talk about setting your shipping strategy, packaging, provide resources and links to popular carriers, look at tracking and insurance, balancing shipping costs with profitability.
Shipping strategy 101
There are some basics that set a foundation for the rest of your shipping. While you can come back and change each of these later on, as you learn more, these are the key decisions and steps that make up your high-level shipping strategy.
Your shipping rates and methods.
Are you going to pass the full cost of shipping on to your customers or will you offer free or flat-rate shipping to absorb some or all of the cost? How will you get orders from your local customers? By the end of this post, you’ll have more information on how to make this choice for your business.
Product weights
To streamline the process, measure and update the weight of each product you sell. Having that information set up will help you get a good sense of your total costs, and pass along accurate prices to your customers.
Choose your preferred packaging
While there’s more to be said about what kind of packaging is right for your products, once you’ve selected it, you can add that information to a shipping application so you can calculate accurate shipping prices.
Source your packaging
You can order free packaging or invest in branded packaging if that’s part of your strategy.
If you have difficulty with shipping, AsiaCommerce has a service to help you. We can also help you to market and sell your products, both a retail product or a product that needs to be sold in a huge amount. We are making it possible for local business leaders to cooperate with the International global market. Besides export service, we can also help you to import, transport, search for foreign products, and handle distribution issues of your company in southeast Asia.
Warehousing, shipping, and fulfillment can’t be separated when you begin to establish an e-commerce business or selling products.
Even though making sells is always the exciting part, you need to make sure your products end up in customers’ hands.
There are three options you can choose to make this happen:
Sell your product through a drop-shipper who will place orders for you
Place your order independently
Collaborate with a logistics company that will handle your warehousing and fulfillment
There are certain advantages from packing and shipping your own orders: it’s cheap and flexible. Often times, businesses that are just starting out, and businesses that have extra packaging needs, usually handle their own logistics.
And regardless of age or industry, any business struggling with cash flow will be better off handling things in-house. Sometimes you have more time to spend than money.
But if your business has expanded and growing quickly so you have the cash on hand to outsourced, you may consider for using third-party warehousing and fulfillment.
There are many logistics companies that will store your product and take care of packing and shipping your orders, but not all logistics companies provide fulfillment services such as AsiaCommerce.
But What is fulfillment service?
A fulfillment service is a third-party warehouse that prepares and ships your orders for you. It does this from its fulfillment center. E-commerce fulfillment services are ideal for businesses that don’t want to deal with shipping or have outgrown existing warehousing capabilities to a point where they’re unable to ship orders themselves anymore.
If you’re scaling fast and looking to optimize your fulfillment strategy, working with a provider that offers a central view of your data and smart inventory allocation across multiple warehouses will give you the most flexibility. To learn more about the AsiaCommerce fulfillment services, visit us here
What does a fulfillment center do?
Source: All Things Supply Chain
While each fulfillment center operates slightly differently, they all accomplish the same thing: they act as a command center for all your order prepping and shipping needs. Fulfillment centers also double as warehouse spaces for inventory storage, allowing you to hold onto product.
Some fulfillment service providers have multiple fulfillment centers, allowing them to serve different geographic locations more quickly than if they were to have just one. This allows e-commerce companies to deliver fast and affordable shipping to a diverse customer base.
What do fulfillment services cost?
Source: Shipware
Fulfillment services typically charge by the hour or per unit/pallet. Providers add up costs for receiving, storage, pick and pack, shipping, kitting or bundling, returns, custom packaging, gift services, and setup. They then apply transactional (e.g., receiving, shipping) and recurring (e.g., storage) fees.
If your business has big goals, fluctuating sales, but not enough time to take care of things in-house, AsiaCommerce will help you! Just fill the form here
The past few weeks have been hectic and confusing. Every day we get more news about COVID-19, and it’s tough to know exactly what to do.
For me, making sure that all Client’s demands are still well met despite the unfortunate situation while making sure our team maintain a very hygienic condition is my number one priority. We’re also taking steps to make sure our team is informed and taken care of.
We want our customers to get the supplies they depend on. And yes, despite the situation, our business is running and we are taking and shipping orders as usual.
Here is what AsiaCommerce is doing to safely meet demand.
• We’ve always been a clean workplace, but we have ramped up our efforts by inviting Professional Disinfectant Specialist to come and do more efforts to increase our hygienic environment.
• We do take a great care with social distancing with 50% of our staff use online meetings to take care of business now.
• In accordance with the current national recommendations, our employees must wash their hands every time they enter the building, pass a sink, eat, or touch a doorknob.
• Weeks ago, we halted all cross-country and cross city travel for all business to keep employees close to home,
• we have also switched to 2-days work shifts at office and home to decrease the number of people in the building at one time.
• All our fulfillment team who are currently operating the Fulfillment Hub has been monitored continuously for body heat and has been using hand sanitizer before and after they did the work
• We have established a task force to monitor all COVID-19 information as it comes out and react accordingly.
Thank you for your continued support during these confusing times. Know that we are doing everything we can to get your supplies delivered on time while keeping our employees safe.
