For your business to be successful, it pays to remember that customers don’t just expect your goods to be high-quality; your customer service needs to be high quality as well.
Customers don’t want their items arriving late, damaged, or not arriving at all. Maintaining control over the shipping phase of your operation is essential for repeat business and client satisfaction.
Read on to learn about the most common problems you’ll encounter when shipping your goods and how you can avoid them.
1. Choosing the Wrong Courier Company
Any business that offers delivery and ships items to their customers needs to do their research when choosing a courier company.
When choosing a carrier, do your homework and research the company properly. Look into the company’s history to better understand its track record, read online reviews, and compare shipping prices among several different carriers. If a courier company is charging exorbitant fees for their service, it can eat into your profits and threaten the longevity of your business.
Reputable courier companies like floridacouriers.com will also offer features like advanced real-time GPS tracking, same-day delivery services, and 24/7 customer service.
2. Not Packaging Your Goods Properly
One of the most common problems companies that ship goods face involves the way the items are packed. Common packaging errors include incorrectly sized boxes or envelopes, cramming too many items inside one package, and failing to wrap and secure each item correctly.
These packaging errors increase the risk of the goods arriving damaged – creating dissatisfaction from the client and causing you to pay out of pocket. When packages enter the shipping stream, they need to withstand getting loaded on trucks and transported on bumpy roads.
Always make sure you’re using the correct size box to fit all the goods and additional protective wrapping snugly, and take extra care to wrap and secure fragile items.
3. Not Preparing for the Holiday Season
Nobody enjoys their packages arriving late – especially when they are time-sensitive.
Unfortunately, delays due to the sheer volume of packages in the shipping stream do happen – usually around the holiday season.
While this problem is unavoidable at certain times of the year, you can lower the chances of late deliveries. One way you can do this is to emphasize that customers need to place their Christmas gift orders before a specific date.
If packages are delayed, inform your customers as soon as possible so they know what to expect. Keep your customers in the loop via a customer service page – they will value transparency so they can make alternative plans.
4. High Shipping Costs
Another common shipping problem has to do with shipping prices. If a business makes the wrong decision about what they will charge customers for shipping, it will cause significant losses in profit in the long term.
Depending on the size, weight, and destination of the package, the price to ship it can be high. Make sure you’re charging all your customers the correct amount for shipping fees right from the beginning. If the shipping cost turns out to be a lot higher than the goods you’re selling, you should rethink your delivery strategy.
How will you avoid these problems?
Coming towards the main problem on avoiding the delivery delays;
1. Make proper documentation
The problems that your company can face with delivery delays are caused by improper documentation. The address might be misspelled or misplaced. It is also possible that the information is not complete.
For example, the person responsible for taking orders was too busy to recheck and wrote wrong spellings. Now you can only call the customer to confirm the address. But you see no phone number. What will you do now? Find any other contact information. If you cannot do so, it will be a problem. The customer is waiting for you and you do not know how to send the package.
Therefore, proper documentation is crucial for deliveries. So instead of making a person do the thing, you should get an automated system. In this way, all the information will be safe and secure.
2. Ensure timely maintenance and regulation
If you are using an automated system to save all the information, it needs maintenance too. You have to get rid of any possible cyber-attacks and also choose your hosting and servers carefully. This will allow you to do your work without any problem.
The biggest problem that your e-commerce business can encounter is related to software performance. If there is a cyber-attack, you will lose your information. So you should get safety precautions and a firewall for that. Make sure to update them on time too.
Likewise, e-commerce works 24/7. Therefore, you need better hosting and servers. If the existing hosting has started to show problems, you should just change it. This will save you from any future problems.
3. Keep updated about the weather forecast
Another problem that you can encounter in your delivery company is weather conditions.
You might have vans to carry the packages but also bikes to make delivery to certain areas. During extreme weather events, it is not possible to make timely deliveries.
Therefore, if you are living in any such region where you encounter extreme weather events, you should make commitments accordingly. For example, if the weather forecast shows a hailstorm, you cannot even dispatch your vans. Although rains can delay delivery time from one to two days but no hail and snowstorms. So, if there is any such weather forecast, you should inform the relevant authorities on time.
4. Ensure smooth logistic performance
This might become a major hindrance for your company. If the company is unable to handle high demand, it should not take so many orders. So while you are running your company, you should have an idea of your performance. Do not take many orders if you cannot handle them.
And if you are at such a point where you cannot avoid orders then you can outsource some of them. Instead of putting everyone on their toes and delaying the orders, you should simply outsource them and prevent any mistakes.
