E commerce is one of the best ways to make good money without any extensive overheads. Finding a good product is half the battle, marketing it properly is also key and if you get both right, then you should start making sales. Once you’ve gained a bit of ground, you need to keep that momentum going if you’re going to see any growth. Repeat customers are what drives that growth so you need to ensure that they’re getting good service. The main thing that keeps a customer coming back to an e commerce site is the efficiency of the shipping. If you order something and it doesn’t arrive for a week, or it turns up damaged, they’ll just go somewhere else. There’s so much competition and they can easily find somebody else. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your shipping process is perfect at every stage. These are the main things that you need to sort out if you want to avoid losing customers.
Packaging
The packaging that you use for your products serves two important functions. Firstly, it protects the products in transit, and secondly, it acts as extra marketing. One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re sorting out their packaging is to buy standardized sizes. If you do this, it might be a little cheaper but your products won’t fit exactly. This increases the risk of damaging them in transit which is sure to lose you customers. Buying standard sizes also means that you’ll end up using a lot of unnecessary packaging. Environmental issues are important to a lot of consumers these days so if they’re receiving goods with loads of extra packaging, it will give your company a bad name and they might decide to go elsewhere.
The way that you present your packaging is also incredibly important. There are thousands of videos online of people unboxing goods that they’ve bought. The packaging has actually become quite an important part of the buying process so if you’re just using a boring cardboard box, you’re missing a trick. Go for something more inventive instead and make sure that you use branding on there, this will increase brand recognition and loyalty which drives sales up. Visit https://designschool.canva.com/blog/packaging-design/ for some ideas on creative packaging.
How To Ship
You could ship the products yourself but that’s a lot of extra work and money that you’ve got to spend. By outsourcing it, you could save yourself time and the costs won’t be that much different. By having a professional handle your shipping, you can ensure that everything runs smoothly. Sites like www.interstatecapital.com can offer load board services that will handle all of the details for you including fuel costs, for one simple fee. This is much more sensible because you’ll already have your hands full sorting out everything else.
Pricing
The price of your shipping will also determine whether customers will come back to you. The best thing to do is offer free shipping on your products. However, this isn’t always going to be possible otherwise you’ll be losing money. For smaller products or ones that you are shipping in large amounts, you should be able to get cheap rates and offer free shipping. You need to be careful though, if you start offering free shipping on everything, you might end up eating into your profits.
