Tips for Cost Effective Shipping

For any small business, shipping is a complicated process from cost perspective. You might have to overpay if you haven’t or poorly planned the shipping of your package. As a result, you will not only lose the profit but you might see a drop in sales because of inefficiency in shipping process.

If you are a company that doesn’t deal with the delivery of pallets or can’t have logistic support due to affordability problems, you need to set and follow some guidelines that would help you make your shipping process effective from efficiency and cost perspective.

By managing shipping costs, you can actually enhance profitability of your small business. Every dollar you save, while shipping the package to customer, helps in improving your business services and profitability.

Some factors that should be taken into consideration before dispatching packaging supplies are as under.

Analyze requirements of delivery and shipping fee

After finalizing the carrier for shipping your items, work with the carrier’s small business specialist to know about shipping requirements which usually include mode of shipping and the time at which items are due to be delivered. Remember, not working on the shipping criteria can cost you up to 40% extra along with original fee.

What you can also ask from the specialists is the written comparison between two modes of shipping. That will help you to know whether or not your items would be safe if you pick less expensive option.

Transportation cost charging

Make clear policies on when you will pay for the shipping of package and when the customer will. Standard shipping, which usually involves delivery in three days after dispatching, is paid for by the company. However, the fee for item’s delivery within at most two days is payable by the customer.

After establishing the policies, share them with your customer support team to ensure that business management and customer-business interaction are on the same page.

Postage meter is a must

Postage meter is used to weigh the package and generate a label on which weight of the package is printed. The use of postage meter eliminates guess work which is done by mailers in order to avoid waiting for the package to be weighed.

Moreover, the rates of shipping may get doubled if weight of a package exceeds standard limits even by a few grams. This is the reason that accurate weighing using postage meter should be deployed by the businesses that deal with product shipping.

Manage consolidation

The packages that weigh in the range between 150 pounds and 20,000 pounds are referred to as “less than truckload” or LTL. While sending LTL, it is imperative to coordinate with consolidator, i.e. the service that combines shipments from different sources for creating a truckload.

Remember, if you insist on sending your shipment in a way that it wouldn’t be shipped with other items, you will have to pay more if your shipment turns out to be less than a truckload.