Entrepreneurs are always finding ways to trim their shipping costs, which is one of the largest business expenses, notes a leading supplier of clear envelopes. One of the greatest drawbacks to online shopping is that someone has to cover the cost of transportation.
Major online retailers tend to offer free shipping on select items while charging low shipping costs on the rest. To this end, people tend to gravitate toward companies that offer low-cost or free shipping options. As a small retailer looking to break in the market, you need to find creative ways to get around this problem.
Refine your packing process
The size of your packing materials determines how much it costs to mail your products to your customers. Naturally, the larger the packaging, the more you’re likely to pay to ship them. Rethinking your packaging can help you cut down the weight and size of your packages.
For instance, you could consider using a poly mailer instead of boxes and save on costs. Poly mailers are lightweight, cheap, and perfect for shipping non-fragile items, such as apparels. If sending fragile items, opt for padded envelopes for they offer more protection from damage.
Trimming down the weight and size of packages lowers your costs, which can let you reduce your shipping charges or even ship items free of charge.
Build your shipping charges into the price
It’s only natural that you want to keep healthy profit margins when running a business. Otherwise, you’ll run into financial headwinds somewhere down the line. Offering free shipping on items is a popular way to attract customer, but that doesn’t mean that your profits have to take a hit.
In most cases, sellers build the cost of shipping into the prices, and then offer free shipping. The trick works because the customer is thrilled by the prospect of getting something for free or without additional costs.
However, you need to be careful when using this approach as you still need to price your products affordably to compete in the market. If your products fail to match the competition, you might have a dip in your sales.
Do your due diligence
There are many shipping options on the market, and you should find the one with the best service. Ideally, you’re looking for the mailing service with the most efficient service at the lowest possible cost. That would call you to do extensive research to establish a database.
Luckily, you don’t have to stick it out with one mailing service. Instead, you can maintain a roster of services and use the one with the lowest rates when shipping to a particular region. Again, you might consider shopping around for to get cheaper options.
The stiff competition in the retail space often causes businesses to resort to offering free shipping to grow sales. High shipping fees can hurt your sales and impact your bottom line. As such, you need to find creative ways to keep the costs low and affordable without your financials taking a hit.