When you run a business that provides a shipping service there are several things that you should be considering. Often the way you deal with the shipping of your goods to your customers is one of the biggest areas that a company can fall down on. It’s essential for you to get this right in order to be successful. Being able to provide an efficient and good service for your customers is bound to help you entice new customers and hold on to existing ones.
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Have a look below at some of the things you should be thinking about when it comes to shipping goods:
The Packaging
One of the first things that you should be thinking about is how you are going to pack your goods. It is going to depend entirely on the product that you are sending. If you are shipping something that is fragile it could be a good idea to invest in decent padding to help reduce the chance of breakages. You also need to think about the size of the goods being shipped. Is it small enough to fit through a letterbox? Or is it going to take more than one person to lift? If you need more than one person to lift a package you will then need to make considerations over the amount of delivery staff you are going to send to deliver the package to your customers as you shouldn’t expect your customers to help with this.
The Delivery Method
Depending on the size of your product may change the way you send them. If you are only sending small products and not very often you might just use a general postal service. If you have more regular stock leaving then selecting a service such as a parcel specialist may be a good idea. You can often get a reduced rate if you use them on a regular basis. If you’re in the position to have your own fleet of trucks to make deliveries then you need to think about training costs and how you are going to monitor the deliveries. Using electronic logging devices may be a good idea as it will allow you to see what deliveries have been made in real-time.
Dealing With Deliveries
You need to think about the processes you are going to have in place for when deliveries are actually being made. If you are using a service they may have their own protocols that you can adopt whereas if you deal with your own deliveries you will need to think of your own. You will need to think about areas such as what happens if someone is out? Do you offer free redelivery? Will you take the items into the home if they are heavy or will you only deliver to the doorstep? Will you leave cards to say you tried to deliver? There are many more options too, it’s best to conduct some market research into what works best and what your customers would like.
These are three things that you should be thinking about when shipping goods, do you have any other areas that should be considered? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
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