One of the great things about the internet age for entrepreneurs is that it’s helped level the playing field a significant degree between small businesses and huge corporations. According to eMarketer, the size of ecommerce will grow to almost $2 trillion by 2020. Ecommece allows small companies to compete with the big dogs on Wall Street by shipping products through the mail to customers. Here are some tips you can use to compete with big business shipping.
Offer Shipment Tracking
One thing consumers now expect from their online purchases is to have their packages tracked through the mail until they reach their doorstep. All the big online retailers offer this. If you want to compete, you must do so as well. Thankfully, doing so is quite easy. Most shipping partners offer tracking numbers for clients. These tracking numbers, as well as shipping updates, can be shared with customers via e-mail.
Purchase a Used Semi
In certain cases, however, you may want to ship your products in large numbers by truck to retail stores and other clients. Some companies, like Arrow Truck Sales, know that even though you could outsource this, it may be cheaper to do so in-house if you can keep up with the pace of orders. While semi-trucks used for such deliveries can cost up to six figures, you can get a significant discount by purchasing your big rig used.
Offer Free Shipping Deals
Many of the large online retailers offer free shipping to customers. While this may seem cost prohibitive, you can make free shipping cost effective by setting the floor for free shipping at a certain amount spent in the online shopping cart. For example, if you only offer free shipping for customers that spend $60 or more, you may greatly increase the amount the average customer spends per order. While this may seem counter-intuitive, customers will spend more to get something they perceive as free in return.
Outsource the Returns Process
The returns process for sending products back to an online store is a huge factor in determining customer satisfaction. If the process is cumbersome and time consuming, your online reviews could suffer as a result. Simplify the process by outsourcing returns to either UPS or the USPS. With the USPS, returns can even be picked up in the customer’s mail box.
Ecommerce has taken the business world by storm. If you want to compete with the huge corporations that dominate the market, your shipping operation needs to be customer friendly. Do what you can to make sure your customers are satisfied with your shipping practices.
