Using well-thought-out holiday shipping plans is a great way to improve your online business during the holiday season. If your customers need a better delivery experience, they could shop somewhere else instead of your store. You need to make sure your shipping methods are up to par. Here are the best ways to ship items through eCommerce during the holiday season.
Why should you make plans for shipping during the holidays?
Shipping is one of the most annoying things about the holiday shopping season for both buyers and sellers. When these things happen, you will need to come up with good shipping plans because:
Avoid Shipping Delay
During the holiday season, you will need good shipping plans even more because there are many things that could cause shipping delays and hurt your business, such as:
- Weather: If there is snow, fog, etc., or other bad weather, delivery times could be longer.
- Documentation Mistakes: Retailers or customers may give the wrong or insufficient address or fill out the order form incorrectly.
- Failures Of Equipment: Some failures of equipment, like problems with a vehicle, can slow down the shipping process.
- Because of a problem with the system, it will likely take longer for your orders to be delivered, unless you get information about your orders.
- Supply Chain: Firms’ supply chains can only handle so many orders at once, so if there are a lot more orders than usual, they may have trouble keeping up.
Meet the high demand during the holidays
During the holidays, there are a lot of people shopping, so eCommerce sales are at their peak. You can use the season to boost your sales, but you also need a good shipping system to make sure all the things you sell get to their customers on time.
Show how complicated the shipping process is.
There could be problems with the shipping process because there are too many orders to deliver during the busy holiday season. If you have a good plan and work with shipping companies that your clients trust, you can reduce these risks.
How to ship online orders during the holiday season
Use these shipping methods for eCommerce to handle fulfillment well. You can finish orders in a matter of hours without having to spend a lot on your eCommerce shipping system.
Have a clear plan for how to ship.
Don’t wait until the last minute to figure out how you’ll ship things for the holidays. Online store owners have a huge number of shipping options available to them.
Plan for shipping within your company. For small eCommerce businesses, shipping within the company can be a great option. But as demand for your products grows, you may need to do more than just ship them from your store.
Plan ahead if you want to work with a 3PL, because costs go up directly with the number of orders during the holidays. Outsourcing your shopping to a 3PL company can be a great choice for a lot of eCommerce businesses. Working with a reliable 3PL service during the holidays can save you time and stress by making sure that your customers’ orders get to them quickly and safely.
Plan to work with a shipping solution for eCommerce: Partnering with a shipping company that helps eCommerce businesses solve problems may make the holidays and the rest of the year less stressful.
Change your shipping company.
The power lies in the choice. Choosing a shipping company during the holidays can be hard, but the good news is that you have a lot of options. Some stores like to ship with a single carrier so they can get discounts based on how much they ship, but this method has some problems.
- Things That Can’t be Fixed: If there are problems with the shipping company, your packages may not arrive on time or at all.
- Prices That Are Hard To Understand: Since each shipping company sets its own rates, you can’t be sure you’re getting the best deal.
- Different Services: Some companies may offer guaranteed next-day delivery on a certain day, while others may not. During the holidays, people might be more willing to pay more for faster shipping.
- With a mix of different carriers, you can give your customers the best deals and make sure they get their items when they need them. They will eventually feel more comfortable, which will make them more likely to buy from you.
Make shipping rules for the holidays clear.
Making a detailed holiday shipping policy is the first step in making sure that both your customers and your team know what to expect when it comes to shipping. You should pay attention to the following sections:
- Possible Delays In Shipping: During the holidays, there can be a lot of orders that need to be packed and sent out. In your shipping policy, you should say that there may be delays during the holidays or give an estimated date when everything will be done.
- One of the most important things to them is when customers can get their gifts. You should put these dates in your policies so that customers place their orders in time to get their goods.
- After you’ve set up your shipping policies, make sure customers can see them before they place an order. Put them near the top of your product pages to make sure. You can also find your policies on the homepage, FAQ page, and Contact Us page of your eCommerce store, among other places.
Offer more ways to ship during the holidays.
Quick and cheap shipping options make people less likely to abandon their carts and more likely to buy. These are some techniques that have become popular in recent years:
2-day delivery is a shipping option that has come to be associated with online shopping. Even though this shipment will require a big investment, it would be easy to keep customers. You could use your budget in different ways to pay for this method.
- Same-Day Shipping: Getting orders to customers quickly and on the same day makes your business look better. Only businesses that offer fast services, like third-party fulfillment, are a good choice.
- Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) Shipping: At the moment, retailers use DTC shipping methods a lot. In direct-to-customer (DTC), you sell and ship your products directly to your customers instead of going through third-party vendors. This strategy makes your target markets more aware of your brand.
- Click and order shipping says that curbside pickup and BOPIS are good things about how businesses use omnichannel processes. By letting customers order things online and pick them up in-store, retailers can avoid shipping delays in eCommerce.
- International Shipping: During the holidays, international customers can only use your eCommerce site to send gifts to their loved ones. Make sure that you can fill their orders well in other countries. Find out about the tax and customs rules, as well as the shipping costs, in the country where the package will be sent.
Stock up on as much as you can to keep up with demand.
Before the season starts, make sure everything is in your warehouse. If your warehouse is well-stocked, you can handle a rush of orders. With this eCommerce shipping plan, you should be able to finish most orders and make your customers happy. Your eCommerce shipping system may work without any problems during the busiest time of the year.
But getting your warehouse ready for the holidays might change your regular work hours or give you more to do. Even the people who work in your office can work in your warehouses. Another possibility is that you run out of space in your warehouse. So, it takes time to set up your warehouse.
Watch out for Order Returns
Everyone knows that returns will happen, but no one wants to think about them. eCommerce companies must have clear rules about returns during the holidays. Here are three examples of this:
30-Day Return Policy: Many online stores have standard return periods of 30 days. The problem with this is that some gifts might not get returned in time for the holidays.
Mid-January Returns: It’s a popular holiday shipping option to let customers return their orders by mid-January if they order between mid-November and mid-December.
Self-Service Returns: During the busy holiday season for eCommerce, you can make things easier on yourself by letting your customers return items without getting in touch with you.
Integrate Shipping Solutions That Work
If you hired someone else to do your shipping, you would have less work to do. Shipping solutions takes care of your shipping costs, packaging, returns and replacements, and shipping methods.
By connecting to strong shipping solutions, your eCommerce shipping system can send orders both locally and internationally in a number of ways. Also, they will make sure that the orders get to the right person. They also make it impossible for orders to get lost, stolen, or sent to the wrong address. So, shipping solutions that work well can help you make more money.
Use order tracking to keep customers interested.
Most of what people spend during the holidays is on gifts for other people. You should take advantage of the fact that people are most willing to spend money right now. One way to make money from holiday spending is to use an order tracking feature for managing and advertising. During the holidays, people will check order tracking pages more often to see if their gifts will arrive on time.
You can also get customers interested in your business again by using order tracking pages.
- How you handle returns and refunds.
- Putting in a reply-to email.
- Including videos that show how to use products.
- Putting a link to your social media pages.
- A dropshipping tool called dropship-empire has many features that can help you ship more efficiently over the holidays. Some of these features are Auto-update order status, Customize shipping settings,…
How to deal with shipping delays is a bonus tip.
Even if you did everything you needed to, your orders could still be late. Here are some suggestions for how to deal with customers whose orders are late:
Keep Their Relationships: It’s best to let your clients know what’s going on and explain why there’s a delay. You can tell them when to expect the package by calling them or sending them a detailed message.
Give customers the option of free shipping. If you offer free shipping during the holidays, you can lower their expectations. But it’s better to try to make your customers happy by getting the products to them as soon as possible.
Offer gift cards and discounts. If your customers’ orders take longer than expected, you can offer them gift cards, special deals, discounts, etc. So, you might lessen their dissatisfaction and make it more likely that they will come back to your store.
Last Words
Since online sales go up during the holidays, you may have to ship many more orders than usual. If you want to keep your current clients, you should try to avoid shipping delays.
These are the best ways to ship online orders during the holiday season so that customers have the best shopping experience possible. On dropship-empire Blog, you can find more business ideas.