Shipping Products from Home is Now Easier than Ever

In today’s era, everything is digitized. We as a people are more dependent on online regiments than on the traditional ways of dealing with things. E-commerce has become one of the most thrashing business segments in recent times. That’s why shipping products from home has been taken into consideration.

With every technological evolution, common people are being more accustomed to the idea of making their purchases online with the full comfort of their particular homes. With such a pervasive idea, the small business enterprise is getting hang of the whole concept and how they work and so they are finally catching up the pace in this industry. 

The most essential process of any sort of e-commerce business tenure is shipping. This is the most significant and primary part of e-commerce business and without shipping an e-commerce business is incomplete. Therefore, in order to ensure that your pre-shipping endeavor is paid to a full extent, the first thing you need to do on your part is to make your shipping processes perfect. 

How can you make an actual plan of your shipping processes in India?

First, the question comes why you need a shipping plan?

You need a shipping plan because if you are doing private label products and you are doing for fulfillment by saying Amazon, you need to ship products into the Amazon fulfillment center. In order to do so, you need to create a shipment plan so that Amazon knows what to expect with your inbound shipments. 

In addition, once you complete the shipping plan you will be given shipping labels that need to go on each one of your shipping cartons. These will identify the shipping cartons for who they belong to and what is inside when Amazon receives each shipment.

Then comes the question, when do you need to create a shipping plan?

In order to create a shipping plan, you need you first need to create a listing for your products otherwise you cannot create a shipping plan. It is highly recommended to create a shipping plan early in the process while you are still doing product research before committing to the product.

Find out if there are any possible restrictions on your product as far as having to go through any hazmat reviews or if there is any category or product restrictions with your product. When you create a shipping plan these issues may pop up. Therefore, you can take care of them right away.

More importantly, once your supplier has started manufacturing and you have an ETA of when it should be completed, you should create your shipping plan prior to the completion date. Therefore, you can have a shipping plan and all the shipping labels ready for your supplier so there is no delay with your shipment.

Inventory placement option

Now before you complete your shipping plan there is a setting in seller central that you need to be aware of and it is called inventory placement option. Typically, your supplier will ship your products in multiple shipping cartons and therefore when you create your shipping plan, the center is going to split up your shipment so that it goes to several fulfillment centers around the country. 

Because of this reason, a lot of beginners think that they can save on shipping by having all their cartons shipped to one fulfillment center. You can do that by changing the inventory placement option in cellar central.

Various methods of shipping in India

There are various methods of shipping followed in India. Some are:

Courier agencies

You can use this method if you are low on the workforce. Here several companies or agencies take up the courier responsibilities under them by aggregating and compiling many well-known courier services under them. Some of the well-known courier companies in India are Bluedart, FedEx, Ecom express, iThink Logistics, etc. 

There are certain agencies that manage these courier services under them and tie the know courier services under them. You can simply approach them, a particular person will be sent to your home for the product pickup, and later it will be shipped to the customers accordingly using any of the above platforms. For this particular method, you need to provide a cancel cheque and your respective pan card.

Direct courier services

The second method you can use is that you can directly contact the courier companies like DTDC, Aramex, First flight, FedEx, Blue Dart and as such. You can directly email any of this company and they will give the proper details of any documents required. Then they will send their particular delivery person.

This could be really cheap but this can also little problematic as there will be confusion on whether your customer can avail of the particular company’s services and whether they are subscribed to the same company as you are and etc. but this particular issue doesn’t arise with the previous method.

These are the main two processes that you can avail for the shipping process. After deciding the method, you would prefer for your shipments, you could make an actual plan and proceed further with that.

What are the ways that you use for shipping products from home to customers?

With a few key points to the process, you can easily excel in the process and gain your customer’s trust.

• The way the packing of the box is done makes a huge difference. You need to have different types of packing with different variety of products you ship. 

For example, fragile items need to be packed lots of stuffing and ample bubble wraps, to avoid any kind of breakage. Similarly, another variety of items might require some kind of space while being packed.

The main point in this is that you should provide your item in a presentable and attractive way so that the customers get fully satisfied with your product. Packaging plays a very important role in shipment.

• Go for different packaging specifically corrugated pads or some kinds of secure fold mailers for particular kinds of products.

• Always go for convenience and choose a friendly shipping carrier that properly meets your budget and does not go overboard. You can always contact local shipping companies depending on the kind of product you want to ship and their cost.

• Always be clear on the constraints that you want to impose on your customers. This includes free shipping or chargeable shipping of the products. Any policies regarding this have to be stated separately.

• Shipping rates should be calculated and stated from beforehand based on the following attributes like packing size, package weight, insurance, and departing country.

Once everything is set and ready for the shipment to your customers, you need to stay very active with your shipping carriers. If you take good care of every step and be professional at the same time, you can meet your customer’s expectations with ease.

Free Shipping strategies

After we know how the products works, now it is very important to know how strategies your shipping processes. The key to successful shipping with all the conformity to your customer’s requirements is to know the strategies behind it. Questions you need to consider before strategizing your shipping processes:

• You need to know how to set up your shipping rates so it will calculate the right rate depending on how many products are in a shipment and exactly where that shipment is going.

• What if some of the products are bigger and better than other products in the competitive market.

• What if we offer ground two-day air or next day delivery options? How can we set that up?

The main key points to remember for shipping products from home

Shipping carriers

Online retailers have several options on how to ship their packages. Off course, that everyone is well aware off many major shipping carriers. Each of these carriers offers opportunities. There are many carriers that offer up to 60% on domestic shipments and 25% on international shipments. Depending on the size of your operations, you might be eligible for discounted rates that go up to 50%on certain services of FedEx and UPS. If these are your preferred carriers.

Pricing strategies

The most common shipping strategies are the three laid down strategies. These are free shipping, flat rate shipping, and live rate shipping calculations. It is understood that free shipping is a shopper’s favorites. In addition, it has been researched that this particular shipping is more popular and valuable. Because, this gives the customer the ultimate satisfaction.

Shipping optimization tips

The foremost thing is to learn how to make your shipping profitable. Once you do that, that is when the shipping optimization comes in. the following steps are to be considered:

1. Firstly, you need to establish a baseline that is trying comparing conversion with and without free shipping offers. 
2. Create a threshold that is you need to increase the minimum order values to test the improvements of the margins.
3. Set restrictions that analyze the positive changes. Offer free shipping and that too on selective products which seems profitable.
4. This will help you streamline shipping for your online business.

Conclusion

So that’s some of the basic ways to ease out a shipping process. How do you ship your products? Do let us know in the comment section below.