How much efforts you have put in starting a business and how long it took for you to muster up the courage to have your own online business doesn’t really matter much for the customers. They will respect your efforts but won’t pay for them. What they pay for is customer experience i.e. the experience they get when they do business with you. Targeting customer experience has become the backbone of many online business’ marketing and branding strategies. Among the many things that need focus, shipping is one. You couldn’t think of having a good reputation without proper shipping.
It is a fact today that many customers won’t give you a positive review even if your product was perfect for them if they face problems with shipping. High shipping costs can put many customers off their orders on your website. They would even quit the idea of buying their favorite products just because they find shipping costs higher. Due to this reason, most ecommerce retailers are asked to offer free shipping or flat rate shipping. There are always ways for you to offer shipping at lower costs but in order for you to offer affordable shipping you have to make it affordable for you too.
In short, you don’t always have to ship the products with paddings and in expensive cartons and boxes. If the product you are sending to the customer is small and there isn’t a big danger of it getting damaged during shipping, you could ship it in affordable bubbling bags or even coffee bags. You can always maintain your branding identity by putting your brand name on these bags. There are hundreds of websites providing the services of creating custom stickers for your brand. Just give them the design and they will provide you with stickers and other marketing material to put on your shipped items.
Lowering your shipping costs will allow you to lower them for your customers too. One way of doing this is by saying goodbye to the expensive inkjet and laser printers for printing the labels. Have you heard of thermal printers? These printers are just as good at printing but their costs are extremely low. Your shipping providers such as UPS and FedEx can let you borrow these printers from them, all for the cost of just $2 every week. The lower your costs are for shipping the more affordable you can make it for your customers.
Make use of the modern technology and you will already start to become adept at what you are doing. For example, giving updated information to customers about their shipped items is always a great service and satisfaction for your customers. Integrate an ecommerce system on your website that allows you to add tracking numbers for the shipped items. This way, you can find out about any order’s status at any given moment by searching its tracking order on your system. Lastly, it is always highly recommended that you keep your customers informed. Inform them correctly of the duration of shipping, shipping delays, rates and any additional costs that they might have to bear if they are receiving their orders in other countries e.g. tariffs, excise duties etc.
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