As a cross-border seller, it’s essential to have a smart shipping strategy in place to service as many customers in as many countries as possible. The undeniable impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on global eCommerce, including consumer shopping habits and logistics, means it’s become more critical than ever to reduce your parcel spending to expand your business.
To help you eliminate unnecessary expenses and to reduce shipping overhead, we put together the following three tips that you can easily implement into your long-term business strategy. Please note that even after COVID-19 has receded, these tips can go a long way toward making your business leaner and more effective.
The first step to reducing shipping overhead is to research where you’re spending more than you should be and then to introduce alternative cost-cutting solutions. While doing this, however, remember that unless you’re offering free shipping, you need to consider your customers’ standards and budget, especially when it comes to same day, overnight, ground, or express shipping.
Begin by reviewing the shipping costs that are directly passed on to your customers. Then, identify how you can reduce your actual shipping overhead. Possible solutions include a flat rate shipping fee or real-time rates based on package weight, departure and destination points, tracking information or insurance. Reviewing these options can help you identify whether they align with your customer preferences and your company’s budget. Collectively, these efforts will better position your business to reduce parcel spend.
A multi-carrier strategy will not only enhance your efforts to meet customer expectations, it will improve opportunities to reduce shipping overhead. Through data available to shippers, the most favorable carriers can be identified based on transit time, pick-up locations, and more. This clarity then helps shippers reduce unexpected fixed fees, identify alternative shipping routes and provide shipping alternatives to help reduce overall shipping costs. The simple addition of multi-carriers into your shipping strategy is among the most effective ways to minimize parcel budgets. Just note that having real-time data from these carriers is a must.
While evaluating your current shipping overhead may seem like a complicated, time-intensive task, it doesn’t have to be.
“Thanks to modern technology and the clarity that data reveals, parcel auditing should be the easiest of checkpoints on your shipping to-do-list. Incorporating a parcel auditing strategy into your shipping efforts, like the one offered by Refund Retriever, has many benefits.”
Auditing allows you to detect issues with your shipments, apply for refunds, and then confirm refunds appear in your account. In other words, it saves you money. By auditing your weekly FedEx and UPS invoices, your business can save money and eliminate responsibility from your shipping to-do-list.
Another perk? Parcel auditing companies charge a percent of the refunds which are found and verified, meaning you don’t need to spend anything upfront, saving money in the long-term.
Make sure to review your FedEx and UPS contracts. This may uncover unexpected or unnecessary charges that you can have adjusted to support your shipping budget goals better. In fact, most agreements that are analyzed lead to a savings of 15-20%.
Finally, for your shipping strategy to be as effective as possible, it must continuously be monitored. Incorporating external business partners helps track your shipping efforts, all with the goal of reducing your overhead.