Owning your own e-commerce business comes with its own set of expenses. You may not have to pay for a physical building, but you may have to pay for website hosting and a sleuth of other things. These costs can add up before you even start seeing any profits. Some expenses you cannot avoid while others, like shipping, you can cut cost in creative ways. Since shipping is your business’ lifeblood, you may be looking for ways you can cut costs in this area while still running your business as efficient as possible. Shipping is not cheap and it is not fast unless you have tons of money to spend. If you are a small e-commerce business looking for ways to minimise your shipping costs, here are some best ways you can do that.
By Team Savant
Image: Hans Vivek
1. Use A Shipping Platform
When you use a shipping platform as a business, you will receive plenty of discounts. Since you are shipping large quantities of items on a frequent basis, you can find tons of shipping deals on any shipping platform. Instead of going to the post office all you have to do is connect it to your e-commerce website. Every time a customer makes a purchase, it will automatically upload to the shipping platform. It makes keeping track of all your shipments and orders so much easier. When it is time to ship, you can enter in the package details like the weight and size of the package just like you would at the post office. It may even allow you to print shipping labels at home.
2. Check USPS Flat Rates
Using the USPS flat rate boxes is a great option for shipping your materials to your customers. As long as whatever you are sending is less than 70 pounds, there is only one rate to have your package shipped to anywhere in the country. Another great thing about these flat rate boxes is that they will typically arrive to your customer between one to three business days.
3. Print Your Own Shipping Labels
You can either purchase a shipping label printer or you can print a label straight from your computer. Both get the job done, but one is a cheaper option. Printing your own shipping labels is ideal if you are just starting out. You could even use your shipping platform to automate a shipping label for you.
4. Outsource Your Top Selling Products To A Fulfillment Center
Having a top-selling item is great. It is always in demand, which means it is always being shipped out. Sometimes handling all that volume of orders in-house can be overwhelming. Outsourcing your top-selling products to a fulfilment centre will take some of the load off of you. The fulfilment centre will store some of those top-selling items. When it is time to ship, they will likely use freight to ship those items out. You can find more information about that at this link: https://www.shiply.com/us/ltl-freight-shipping.