In the fast-paced e-commerce world, shipping plays a key role in e-commerce by significantly impacting customer experience. Fast, precise, and reliable ecommerce shipping isn’t just an added advantage but a foundational requirement. Many e-commerce brands still face major repercussions due to ecommerce shipping mistakes, leading to angry customers, negative reviews, delayed shipments, inaccurate orders, and losing valuable customers and revenue.
In this article, we’ll talk about some most common ecommerce shipping mistakes that can hinder your business growth, and also, some top effective methods that help you avoid these faults to ensure your e-commerce operations run smoothly and precisely.
Most Common E-commerce Shipping Faults to Avoid and How to Fix Them
Inaccuracies in Bill of Lading (BOL)
The Bill of Lading (BOL) is a crucial legal document that serves as both the receipt for goods and acts as a contract of carriage between the shipper and the carrier. Unfortunately, due to the complex and sheer volume of information, you can expect so many errors, leading to fines, denied claims, delayed delivery, or other unexpected and unknown charges.
How to Fix It: You can fix this problem by implementing a verification process. You can either choose someone from your internal team or hire a third-party logistics expert to review BOLs before finalizing the document. This will drastically reduce the likelihood of errors, encouraging smoother and streamlined shipping operations.
Wrong Shipping Addresses
This is one of the frequently made e-commerce shipping mistakes, resulting in delays in shipments, impacting customer satisfaction and overall experience. Even small faults like wrong ZIP code, state code, etc., can lead to delays and add to your total costs. These additional costs are charged by major couriers, including Amazon, UPS, and FedEx, for handling undeliverable packages.
How to Fix It: Reviewing shipping addresses is essential before dispatch. For accurate deliveries, it’s crucial to verify shipping addresses to avoid delays, minimize costs, and enhance customer satisfaction.
Damaged or Imprecise Orders
Sending out incorrect or damaged packages is one of the biggest pitfalls in e-commerce. Misleading or inaccurate product descriptions on the website are key reasons for dissatisfied customers, negative feedback, and high returns.
This mistake mainly occurs due to incorrect product listings or errors during the order fulfillment process. An inefficient system can be the core culprit of this shipping fault, adding unnecessary costs and damaging your business reputation.
How to Fix It: Leveraging the right, dedicated Warehouse management system is the best way to deal with this issue. With a reliable 3PL Provider and 3PL WMS Software, you can ensure accurate product descriptions and precise order fulfillment. An ideal WMS integrates seamlessly with your e-commerce platform to reduce listing errors and support the workforce through efficient picking and packing. Moreover, ensuring stock safety and following quality control protocols reduces the chances of damaged items reaching your customers.
Ineffective or Improper Packaging
The wrong or ineffective packaging can impact your brand reputation by damaging products, making your customers unhappy and dissatisfied. Even the most well-packed packages can lose much of their strength after just one shipment; however, if the packing is not effective, the likelihood of damage rises significantly.
How to Fix It: Here are some tips on how to ensure your products are packed appropriately:
Choose strong materials for large or heavy items.
Use the ideal size boxes to prevent unnecessary movement, avoiding damage.
Use tools like temperature indicators, padding, and others for sensitive and delicate goods.
The right packaging is key to safeguarding your products, reducing returns, and improving customer satisfaction and overall brand reputation.
Overlooking Hidden Costs in Shipping
Many new shippers are caught off guard by the shipping costs after making alterations to their delivery choices. This often occurs when not all contributing costs are considered upfront. While initial expenses are usually based on package weight and destination, other factors such as delivery charges can add up to total costs.
How to Avoid It: You must fully understand all the variables that add up to shipping expenses. Extra costs charged by carriers like Amazon, FedEx or other companies for last-mile deliveries, extra handling charges or address corrections are potential add-ons that you must be informed of to better frame strategies for the future, reduce unnecessary costs, and avoid unexpected expenses.
ShipRelax- How the Right 3PL Can Help Revolutionize Your E-commerce Business
Managing a comprehensive supply chain while meeting ever-changing customer demands is no small task; it requires the right third-party logistics partner whom you can trust completely for your e-commerce business to scale smartly and efficiently.
Partnering with the ideal 3PL company for warehousing, logistics, order processing, and order fulfillment offers significant advantages. Outsourcing these functions with them can help you scale faster, improve efficiency, give you access to expertise, improve customer experience, and help you focus on core business aspects and grow your business rampantly.
ShipRelax is a leading US 3PL provider that offers powerful and scalable tools to manage real-time stock levels, warehousing, transportation, e-commerce shipping, order fulfillment, and reverse logistics. Additionally, it sets reorder notification points to avoid stockouts, sends order tracking updates to customers automatically, and our 3PL platform comes with other impressive tools.
Moreover, this top-performing 3PL platform offers seamless integrations with major platforms, marketplaces, return solutions, inventory, and order management systems, and customer support tools. This advanced 3PL platform for ecommerce provides data-driven insights, assisting in informed decision-making for your modern ecommerce brand.
Other than this, it also offers insights into shipping costs and transit times, SKU-level sales performance, and informed recommendations on optimal inventory distribution across fulfillment centers, allowing e-commerce, retail, omnichannel, or other similar brands to minimize costs and accelerate delivery speed.
ShipRelax has helped several e-commerce brands, including Vastrami, Manihaarin, and others, to optimize their logistics and warehouse functions, enhancing their business efficiency, performance, customer satisfaction, and increasing ROI.
Wrapping Up
Ecommerce shipping is a comprehensive and time-consuming process; it involves a lot of expensive mistakes, regardless of the shipment type. Ensuring a seamless and overwhelming shipping experience demands a clear and comprehensive understanding of common shipping disruptions and a proactive approach to dealing with these issues.
ShipRelax (3PL expert), combined with FulFillor (3PL WMS), is a go-to solution to elevate your shipping processes. Our advanced, AI-driven, robust, and scalable platform can seamlessly integrate with your system and ensure smooth, optimized logistics.
