Best 5 Ways to Improve E-commerce Shipping Efficiency

If you own e-commerce store and you want to improve relationships with customers and increase conversions, you need an efficient and optimized e-commerce shipping strategy. This strategy can be really crucial to the viability and overall success of your e-commerce store. It can be key to keeping your operating costs low and maximizing your business resources. This helps to pave the way for the continued growth and expansion of your store. If you are able to deftly combine technology, strategy, and analytical processes, it is possible for you to make the best out of your shipping strategy. That by itself can help to distinctly stand your store out and differentiate it from the competition. Increased shipping efficiency can help to boost your profits. Following are 5 of the best ways you can combine technology and strategy to increase efficiency in your e-commerce business.

 

1. Deploy AI to Your Advantage

Digital marketers have since discovered that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is hugely valuable in the shipping and logistics processes of e-commerce business. Marketers can now use AI effectively to:
Enhance inventory strategies: AI tools can be handy to predict when demand for certain products will increase or when congestion in the logistics landscape may occur. This vital info can help with developing better logistics plans. Plans that can be really vital to speed up deliveries and avoid lost opportunities.
Improve shipment safety: Marketers can also use AI to improve package safety. To enhance this, they can for instance deploy AI camera systems effectively. These systems can help minimize collision risks, detect threats on a container carrier and even reduce the risk of theft.
Optimize shipping routes: AI solutions can be effectively deployed on the shipping landscape to detect the best cargo route at least cost. These tools can be handy to alert shippers of inclement weather conditions and disruptions that may cause shipping delays. This vital info can help shippers to quickly adjust routes in real-time to save time.

2. Partner with Digital Freight Forwarders

E-commerce business is a global business. This poses unique challenges for business owners to effectively navigate the complex and hugely challenging landscape of e-commerce shipping. So, how do you handle these challenges if you want to expand into the global market? Your best option is to partner with digital freight forwarders to have your parcels delivered anywhere in the world. Aside from other services they render, digital freight forwarders can make available to your businesses, a comprehensive platform and human support team to have your packages delivered intact. They can even help in managing complex processes like taxation, import duties, customs clearance processes and the like. These companies can even help your business to save significant shipping costs because they can offer you real-time insights into carrier rates and shipping options to help you make better decisions based on your shipping budgets and requirements.

3. Link your E-commerce Store to Logistics Tools

To make your shipping processes more efficient, you can align all of the various tools you use to manage logistics with your e-commerce platform. This alignment and integration can help you to easily track product sales, prepare for peaks in customer demand, and avoid stock-outs. This helps customer experience and consequently helps you to make more sales. Some of these tools are versatile enough to be easily integrated with email and SMS automation tools that provide customers with instant order updates and notifications.

4. Leverage Data/Metrics to Drive Processes

You can significantly improve the efficiency of your shipping strategy if it is data-driven. You can thus effectively leverage your data/metrics to improve customer experiences and reduce costs. If you gather valuable data from your supply chain, logistics processes and customers, it can help you to identify ways to reduce shipping costs, mitigate common problems, and improve customer satisfaction. You can thus effectively leverage the reports and metrics available on all of the digital tools you use to make informed decisions to enhance the growth of your e-commerce business.

5. Automate some Processes

Automation increases efficiency. So, if you can effectively align all of the tools you use to manage your fulfillment process, supply chain, and partners, it significantly reduces the manual work you put in. If properly set up, your workflow automation solutions can help put multiple stages of your delivery processes on some sort of “autopilot”. This helps you to save the time you spend on various repetitive tasks like updating inventory data, sending requests to suppliers when inventory levels run low for certain stock, or informing customers about a change to their order status. What this means is that you’ll have more time available to you to focus on more tasking jobs like interacting with business partners or tackling customer questions/concerns.

Best Shipping Strategy for New ECAs

Shipping costs are always a very important cost consideration for ECAs. In some cases, shipping costs can even be higher than the actual cost of goods depending on where in the world the ECA is operating from. For a fairly new ECA, since you want to sell your products and in a very competitive market, you must watch your shipping costs very closely.

Generally speaking, the farther you ship your goods, the higher your shipping costs. For that reason, I am inclined to recommend to fairly new ECAs to limit their shipping to their geographical regions of the world at first to “test the waters” of international commerce. By the time you get known in the business and your customer base is encouraging, you can decide to expand further afield. That to me is what makes good commercial sense.