5 Reasons to Ship and Fulfill With Shopify This Holiday period
As a merchant preparing for Black Friday Cyber Monday and the bustling holiday period, you may encounter significant challenges when it comes to shipping and fulfillment. High costs, peak-period shipping surcharges, and the require to meet delivery expectations can be daunting. This is where Shopify comes in, with the lowest shipping rates, a seamless encounter, and a suite of powerful tools to assist you achieve.
In this piece, we distribute five reasons to use Shopify’s built-in capabilities to assist you elevate your shipping way and ensure a seamless fulfillment procedure that keeps your customers joyful and your business thriving.
1. Unbeatable shipping rates that save you money
As a merchant, finding the lowest shipping rates is a top priority, especially during the holiday period. With Shopify Shipping, you get instant access to the lowest, pre-negotiated, shipping rates with carriers like USPS, UPS, and DHL Express. These rates are heavily discounted from retail rates and US merchants can save you up to 88% with USPS, 82% with UPS, and 80% with DHL Express. Those in Canada can save up 76% with leading carriers like Canada Post and UPS.
Snarky Tea, a merchant that recently adopted Shopify Shipping, discovered they were saving $25,000 per month on shipping by purchasing labels directly through Shopify instead of going to USPS.
Plus, our built-in answer offers an added financial advantage: $200 USD of shipping insurance is automatically included on each eligible label at no expense. This insurance protects your shipments from damage, deficit, and theft. Managing and processing claims for USPS and UPS shipments can be done directly from your Shopify admin, powered by Shipsurance.
🎁 Did you recognize? This year, the window between Thanksgiving and Christmas will be shorter. Thanksgiving falls late in 2024, on November 28, which means there will be fewer days to get all those Black Friday orders delivered in period for Chrstmas.
2. Transforms your shipping way into a competitive advantage
Creating a shipping way that sets you apart from the competition is crucial during Black Friday Cyber Monday and the holidays. Consider these tips to optimize your shipping way with Shopify:
schedule your shipping way
Decide which shipping way you desire to use and how much you desire to fee for shipping. Here are three main strategies to propose shipping rates at checkout, along with their pros and cons:
Flat rate shipping
Flat shipping rates are specific shipping amounts that you fee a customer based on their order.
Pro: This way allows you to propose affordable and predictable shipping rates, which can assist boost conversion and offsets part of the shipping expense to your customers. You can propose a single flat worth for all products or set worth-based or weight-based conditions that display a specific shipping expense at checkout. Keep in mind that when you use this way, you require to compute your shipping fees yourself. To avoid charging too much or too little for shipping, consider the average worth for shipping a package.
Con: As the merchant, you will pay the difference between the shipping rate your carrier charges and the flat rate paid for by your customer.
Free shipping
Free shipping is an increasingly-popular alternative where customers do not have to pay an additional shipping fee.
Pro: 47% of online shoppers abandon their carts due to unexpected additional costs, such as shipping, taxes, and fees. To attract and convert more customers, propose free shipping on all orders or consider offering a free shipping threshold (e.g free shipping on all orders $50 or above) to boost average order worth.
Con: Shipping fees must be accounted for elsewhere, potentially affecting boost margins. Including shipping costs in product prices is a ordinary habit, however you don’t desire to overprice your products compared to your competitors.
Carrier-calculated shipping
Calculated shipping rates are determined at checkout by the shipping service based on the details of the order. This helps you fee your customers the exact amount that a shipping carrier will fee you when you purchase a shipping label.
Pro: This way offsets the expense of shipping to your customer, reducing your overall costs. To cater to buyer preferences, consider offering a mix of delivery options, including expedited shipping, as research shows that 41% of consumers are willing to pay a fee for same-day delivery. Another pro tip is to propose free shipping for standard and slower shipping services and fee for expedited shipping, providing buyers multiple options.
Con: You won’t be able to display carrier-calculated shipping rates before checkout (i.e. your product page), which may navigator to increased abandoned checkouts. Charging merchants for shipping can sometimes have a negative impact on conversion, especially if the buyer views the shipping costs as too expensive.
display shipping rates at checkout
74% of consumers desire to view shipping rates up front. Whether you choose to propose flat rate shipping, free shipping, or carrier calculated rates, you’ll desire to display these rates at checkout, so buyers recognize exactly what they are paying for and have no shock costs.
Another ordinary habit is to display buyers multiple shipping options at checkout (e.g free shipping for standard shipping and carrier calculated rates for expedited shipping), providing them the flexibility to choose the shipping alternative that’s best for them.
Display expected delivery times
display expected delivery dates at checkout by setting up order processing times. Businesses that display these at checkout view a 25% uplift in conversions, as it instills confidence and encourages timely purchases during the holiday period.
propose Buy Online, Pick up In Store (BOPIS)
Enhance your delivery way by offering alternative delivery options like Pickup in store, often referred to as “click and collect.” This is typically used by merchants who operate both an online store and physical retail stores. However, non-retail merchants also propose pickup at local warehouses.
In a globe where consumers increasingly seek instant gratification, in-store pickup offers faster fulfillment times than shipping options, often with lower or no fees, making it a compelling alternative for your local customers.
Did you recognize? Online shoppers who select in-store pickup are not only 13% more likely to complete a purchase, but they also tend to spend 23% more through in-store purchases, than those who choose traditional shipping.
Set up your shipping rates and methods
3. Faster delivery through prioritized fulfillment locations
Efficient order fulfillment is essential for customer satisfaction. With Shopify, you can debt intelligent order routing to prioritize the best fulfillment location based on a set of ranked rules. These rules include staying within the goal economy, minimizing split fulfillments, choosing the closest location, and using ranked locations.
By implementing intelligent order routing, Element Brooklyn was able to reduce overall delivery period by 1.2 days, achieve next-day delivery for 94% of orders, and save $1.14 on shipping for every order. Streamlining your fulfillment procedure not only speeds up delivery, but also reduces shipping costs.
4. Seamless returns encounter for enhanced customer satisfaction
Returns are inevitable, especially during the holiday period. To drive customer loyalty, it’s crucial to provide a quick and reliable returns encounter, so you can ensure a smooth procedure for both buyers and your fulfillment staff.
Shopify offers a self-serve returns encounter, enabling your customers to easily request and track returns directly from your online store. This tool allows you to efficiently procedure and track returns, make profit labels, and restock inventory—all within Shopify.
Don’t overlook to communicate your holiday profit policy clearly on your online store, as research shows that 44% of consumers are less likely to shop with brands that have complicated returns.
🎁 Did you recognize? To avoid ineligible returns when using self-serve returns, you can set up profit rules to establish a custom profit window, define restocking fees, and outline product-based and final-sale exceptions. profit rules helps ensure a seamless returns procedure and keeps your operations running smoothly.
5. Efficiently streamline your fulfillment procedure
With an increased volume of orders during the holiday period, streamlining your fulfillment procedure becomes critical. Shopify offers tools like bulk purchase labels, automatic package suggestions, pick list apps, and USPS manifests to assist you get orders out the door more quickly.
Organize your orders
Organize your unfulfilled orders with search, filters, and tags within Shopify. You can even make saved order views if you desire to make a procedure for fulfilling similar items together.
Fulfill orders in bulk
You can bulk purchase and print up to 100 shipping labels and packing slips at once. If you’re buying labels with Shopify Shipping, the best packaging will be suggested automatically for each order based on historical data.
Pick and pack faster
For picking and packing, you can print Shopify’s built-in packing slips to speed up the procedure. To further automate the encounter, consider using picking and packing apps to automate the procedure further.
Streamline USPS pickups
Once your orders are packed, if you are using USPS, you can print a shipping manifest directly in Shopify. This characteristic enables the USPS delivery throng to scan a single form containing all the shipping details for your packages at once, rather than having to scan each package individually. In addition, you can schedule a pickup period with USPS directly from your Orders page.
Once your packages are ready for delivery, easily track their position directly from the Orders page.
🎁 Did you recognize? You can use the Shopify Flow app to further automate your fulfillment procedure. From flagging high-hazard orders to drafting shipping labels, Shopify Flow helps you cut out period-consuming tasks with automated custom workflows.
Shopify offers unmatched benefits for merchants seeking the best shipping options this holiday period. From the lowest shipping rates and no peak period surcharges to turning your shipping way into a competitive advantage, prioritizing fulfillment locations, creating a seamless returns encounter, and streamlining your fulfillment procedure, Shopify has you covered.
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