Shipping management

What is shipping management?

Shipping management is one of the essential parts of your online business management. It is crucial to ship goods at the right time and to guarantee that the shipment will be completed successfully. Shipping management defines the way that each product goes from the warehouse to the customer. It includes choosing the shipping carrier, shipping method and shipping insurance. You also need to take care of parcel picking and packing, tracking numbers and returns.

Importance

Shipping is a crucial part of your daily workflow that affects your overall business success. Most often shipping impacts your customer’s feedback and comments. A late shipment will cause negative comments, while a delivery completed according to the estimated delivery date can increase your ratings. Basically, your rating is the main thing that attracts new customers, or on the other hand, could cause them to look elsewhere. As you can see, good ratings are acquired through perfecting the basic parts of selling and shipping management is one of those parts.

Options

Because of how important the quality of shipping is, online sellers keep searching for the best shipping companies that can manage their orders and offer the most cost-effective solution. Of course, you can make do with only the help of your team members and manage your shipping in-house. However, when you combine third-party shipping management software and either one or multiple respectable shipping service providers, the quality of your order fulfillment will skyrocket.

We are talking about the fact that it will affect your sales, but haven’t yet mentioned exactly how. Basically, the shipping management software will automate the whole shipping process. This will not only improve your order fulfilment but also eliminate any possibility of mistakes. You also don’t have to worry about double-checking or confirming any details for your shipments. The system will do it for you, and it will do it quite a few times faster than any of your employees could.

Terms

There are a few essential terms that you should understand while managing your online orders. Knowing them will help you realize what you need to take care of before deciding with whom you should ship your goods.

1. Printing labels

2. Shipping insurance

3. Tracking numbers

4. Order status

1. Printing labels

A shipping label is essential to ship an item with any shipping carrier. As soon as you decide to ship your order, you need to stick a printed label on your parcel. Unless you use services like fulfilment by Amazon. Then Amazon will do it all for you. But basically, you need to print a label that fits the requirements of your chosen shipping company and stick it on your parcel. That is why you will need to take care of eventually sourcing a printer and suitable label paper.

2. Shipping insurance

Before you ship your goods with any shipping carrier, you should learn about the insurance options that exact company provides. It is important because there will always be some unexpected accidents that can occur during transit. Because of this, every online seller has to make sure that these accidents won’t cost too much. That is where insurance comes in and protects your shipments.

3. Tracking numbers

Tracking numbers are unique strings of characters that identify each shipment. These numbers are provided by the shipping carrier as soon as the parcel is shipped. Once your shipping company provides a tracking number, it is important to update the order in your store and inform your customer as soon as possible. Because when you do, your customer will be able to track their order.

4. Order status

What we have in mind by emphasising order status as one of the most important shipping management terms is that it is crucial to update your order status as soon as it changes. There are two reasons for that. One is that you need to inform your customer. The second one is proper order management to avoid shipping the same order twice. Nowadays it is not necessary to do it manually. Modern order management software does it automatically, as soon as you ship your order.