eCommerce Fulfillment & Shipping Solutions
Wednesday, June 12, 2019Eric Zegarski
eCommerce Shipping and Fulfillment Solutions from ShipStation, ShipperHQ, ShipBob, EasyShip, & Aftership
Let's face it, once your customers purchase, they want their products in their hands ASAP! As a merchant, there are many things in your fulfillment process that might cause headaches for you. If you’re looking to limit how many Advils you take during the week then you're in luck. We explore how software solutions from ShipStation, EasyShip, ShipperHQ, ShipBob, and Aftership can help you optimize your shipping and fulfillment process.
Offer Different Shipping Rates
One of the biggest conversion roadblocks is shipping rates. Most eCommerce sites offer a flat rate shipping option in combination with a spend X amount to get free shipping option.
ShipperHQ allows you to offer a more customized shipping offering for each customer.
As an example, the holiday season is looming to a close and you have a bunch of last-minute shoppers looking for that perfect gift for that special someone on their list. Since your standard shipping offering do not offer a rush service, you’re at risk of losing those sales. In order to avoid this dilemma, ShipperHQ has the right solution for you. They allow you to connect to almost any carrier and customize the shipping options that are shown to your customers. In addition, you can have negotiated rates with multiple carriers displayed live via EasyShip.
Printing Shipping Labels
Printing labels is one of those annoying tasks that everyone dreads. If you're doing it the old school way, there's a lot of copy and pasting involved as well as you keeping your fingers crossed that the printer doesn't jam. But wait, you’re not selling on just your eCommerce site, your products are listed on Amazon as well. This means that you must print a different label of those orders.
Have no fear it’s
ShipStation to the rescue! ShipStation allows you to set up label printing rules. This means you can have channel specific labels. But it gets even better, you can import all your orders into ShipStation and do big batch label printing. Therefore, no more copy and pasting shipping information for you!
Package Tracking and Handling Returns
Once shipped, your customers like to know the status of their package. Providing an excellent post purchase experience is crucial in earning customer service brownie points with your shoppers. Software like ShipStation will send an email to notify a customer that an order has shipped and include a link to a tracking page. There they can see the shipping status of their order. In addition, the shipping info page can be modified to reflect your company’s branding!
On occasion you will have to deal with a customer who wants to return a product they purchased. Managing these returns is easy with
Aftership. Aftership allows for merchants to streamline their return process. All that a customer must do is enter their order number and email, select what products they want to return, and if they would like a full refund or store credit. Once this is done, they can print a shipping label from their end and send the merchandise right back to you.
International Shipping
Commerce is now a 24/7, 365 day global grind. One of the biggest barriers for merchants expanding globally is being able to offer cost effective and reliable cross-border shipping. On the merchant side you might of have found yourself swamped with paperwork and calculations in relation to duties and taxes. In addition, you had to ensure that your duty calculations are accurate, or the customer would have been faced with additional fees upon delivery.
EasyShip makes it easy to automatically calculate taxes and duties and print all required customs documentation. As a bonus, if the calculation by EasyShip is incorrect, they themselves will pay the difference.
3rd Party Logistics and Warehousing
If you wish to ditch the packing and shipping process all together, then outsourcing your fulfillment is your best option. This will allow you to focus on selling rather than packaging boxes. Companies like
ShipBob have warehouses located all over the continental United States. This means you can take advantage of their established network and fulfill orders faster as well as shorten delivery times. As soon as an order is received on your site, it will be sent to ShipBob. ShipBob will then examine the purchaser's location as well as you inventory levels at warehouses housing your product. Then they will choose the right warehouse to get the order into your customer’s hands as soon as possible.
We Bring it All Together with Integration
Did you know that eBridge has a pre-built connector for ShipStation? This means that we can send order information between
ShipStation and your
ERP instantaneously. We are also hosted on Microsoft Azure, therefore ensuring an almost 99.9% uptime and industry leading security. With an integration solution, you can ensure that your commerce network has an automated solution that will streamline your fulfillment process.