How you can improve your company’s shipping department

Effective shipping is essential in a world where online shopping is so popular. Businesses can suffer if their orders are not being shipped on time or if they are not regularly updating their customers. The following are some ways you can improve shipping.

• Improve your communication with your shipping facility: Communicating with your warehouse and shipping team or company regularly will mean that they are updated with orders and avoid delays.
• Offer order tracking and estimated delivery times: Letting customers track the progress of their orders and track shipping reassures customers that their package is on the way. Estimate delivery times are particularly useful so that customers can plan ahead for delivery if possible.
• Shipping costs should be built into the budget: Shipping rates will change regularly, but this should not change what your customers have to pay. When creating your budget, allocate more money to shipping than you have calculated to account for potential rate changes.
• Streamline your packaging process and do standard quality checks: Invest time into creating a process which works efficiently for your business. For example, you could find software which communicates with the warehouse and creates documents which make collecting and shipping the packages easier for staff. Quality checks should also be conducted regularly to guarantee that the product the customer will receive is what they were looking at online.
• Declare items for customs ahead of time: This is especially important if you offer and regularly conduct international shipping. Declaring your package online when the order is placed will help it get through customs faster, and to your customers earlier.