Holiday season is one of the busiest days of a retailer; aside from securing purchases, he/she must also secure that all the sold products are shipped on the scheduled date assuming that they are gifts for the celebration.
Shipping period is crucial and must be taken seriously as it is key to keeping the trust and loyalty of the consumers. However, there will be challenges during the big day especially on holidays. So, here we will discuss how you can be better prepared and how you can overcome shipping issues to deliver your customer’s packages on time.
First, let’s tackle the three default shipping methods available. The free, the flat rate and the local pickup. It is important to offer your customers options so they have alternatives in case one of these doesn’t work for their situation.
But, if you’re wondering what is best preferred, it’s safe to say that obviously, people love free shipping and it is an effective strategy to encourage purchases. In fact, studies show that majority of online shoppers are motivated to buy more products if free shipping is available. But, if you decide to offer a free standard shipping option, you might as well want to provide rush or special shipping for an additional fee. Apart from this, there are various of other shipping options that you can consider offering to your customers based on their needs.
Now we proceed to talking with a Shipping Carrier. They also play a big role as they directly influence rates, arrival times, and delivery quality. There may be different carriers to attend to different needs but there are some general considerations including the location, the products, the available shipping rates, tracking, insurance and even the holidays.
There may be times that you will need to use multiple carriers such as when some of your items might have special handling requirements, or you might need to use different carriers for some countries that you ship to. On instances like these, you can allow your customers to choose between shipping methods or use extensions.
Once you have set up your shipping rates and methods, you should now let customers know the last day they can purchase a product in order to receive it before the actual holiday such as Christmas, Black Friday, etc. This should be in line with the cutoff dates for your chosen shipping carrier.
Meanwhile, in terms of international shipping, you should have a flexible schedule as it often takes longer and there is a tendency that international holidays will affect your shipping times.
In short, your cutoff dates should be based not only on your own processing time but also on your shipping carrier deadlines, and on holidays and on weekends.
You just have to make sure that you clarify your deadlines on your site to avoid any issues with your customers. It’s also a plus if you provide them with tracking information for them to know when they can expect their package to be delivered.
More importantly, you have to do everything you can to make sure that your packages arrive on time as promised because the name and integrity of your brand is what’s at stake. It would be helpful to do extra preparations to make the process faster for you such as printing your own shipping labels, creating an order management process and securing all shipping and packaging materials.
Do all this and you’ll have less to worry about these coming holidays. Know that you are not only doing this for the sake of profit but also to give your customers a merrier holiday season.