How To Cope With Shipping Demand For The Holiday
Holiday seasons are coming with a huge amount of goods, customers, and thus massive shipping demand. While the eCommerce stores usually get troubles with the delivery process, the holiday season will put them in challenging situations as a lot of issues are arising in the busiest season of the year. To help you handle the sky-high shipping demand for the holiday, we are going to tell you some practical approaches to apply to your eCommerce shipping activities. Ways To Fight Rapid Shipping Demand For The Holiday. Plan A Transparent Shipping Process To ensure every shipment can be delivered in a consistent way with high shipping demand, the eCommerce business runners should take time to map out the shipping process. You may need to point out every step in that process, how many steps, what steps are and how long it takes. The popular shipping process would be: After order fulfillment, generate order data into Spreadsheets to re-check Examine and detect fraudulent orders Connect with logistics third-party companies to send shipment information Finish the packing slips, labels, packaging, etc. Send the shipments and keep tracking. Having a clear procedure will help you to monitor, manage and control the shipping process easier, if there is any problem arising, you can locate which stage it is in, and take suitable actions to deal with. Ensure Everything Goes As Scheduled To ensure everything goes as scheduled in the high shipping demand contexts, the shipping process should go under strict control. Keeping track of all the delivery steps, keeping in touch with the logistics service and customers will help you manage and control your shipment delivery. How to keep track of all the delivery steps? The real-time notifications about shipping status can notify you about the process, and thus you may realize the abnormal points and tackle them immediately. Keeping in touch with the logistics service and customers may help you make suitable adjustments when they are needed, ensure the shipment will arrive on time, and minimize unexpected cases. Establish Approaches To Deal With Delivery Delays Delayed delivery is inevitable in the busy holiday seasons. Besides trying to avoid it, you should plan for the solutions. What do you do to deal with the delivery delays? You should detect which step your shipment is in, find out the reasons why the process becomes slower, and tackle them. Then, you may find ways to contact the shipping service and speed up the remaining steps. You should let the customers know about the risks of delayed delivery via email notifications. In detail, you can utilize Atom8 on Shopify and Bigcommerce platforms to set up an email notification automation workflow; then, those emails will be sent if the shipments have not changed to “shipped” status after some days. Also, you may need to compensate the customers for delayed shipping in some cases. Pay Attention To Customer Care Customer care is truly necessary during the shipping process. You may allow customers to keep track, receive information about the shipping status. Also, you should create chances for them to contact your stores for any further support such as a wrong address, wrong phone numbers, or other adjustments. For the delivery delays due to the increase of shipping demand, you may need to compensate by offering a free shipping fee, vouchers for the next purchase, special gifts, etc. Moreover, don’t forget to apologize for the late shipment and say “thank you” for shipping completion. Conclusion The rising shipping demand for the holiday will cause many challenges for your eCommerce stores. Preparing for them with our guides may help you minimize mistakes and have solutions for any unexpected situation.
Holiday Inventory Preparation Checklist For Online Merchants
Holiday inventory preparation is always a headache problem for online merchants. As the huge quantity of products and customers increase significantly in peak seasons, the eCommerce sellers will deal with more than an issue but if they can overcome those challenges, they will gain over-expected revenues and profits. Our article will list out necessary tasks for online merchants to prepare for holiday inventory step by step. Things To Do For Online Merchants To Strengthen Holiday Inventory Decide The Main Product Lines The attractive product line is the decisive element for your holiday sales success. Depending on each nature of the holiday season, there are different product lines that you need to consider which items should be stocked most. You may need to pay attention to your target customers, based on their behaviour to forecast their tendency, then you can decide the main product lines for each segmentation. Moreover, the common trends may have some effects on customers’ choices. Therefore, online sellers should add some trendy items in holiday inventory to satisfy customers’ demands. Contact With Suppliers Before starting the holiday sale season, online merchants should prepare for products with their suppliers after deciding on main product lines. You should notify the suppliers about your stock plan and advanced requirements in peak season to help them prepare for the products as soon as possible. Moreover, it would be better if you can allow suppliers to access your inventory management and keep track of your stock status; then, they can provide items immediately. Set Stock Quantity The next step in holiday inventory preparation is setting stock quantity. The most trustworthy sources to help you estimate the must-prepare number of products is former selling or inventory reports in previous holiday sales seasons. You can set the same level of stocks or make any adjustment based on the current situation for your stock quantity. Moreover, maybe you need to analyze and conduct market research to forecast upcoming demand, especially in the current changing world. Run Backorder Besides the main plan, a backup plan is truly crucial for any project. Holiday inventory preparation is not an exception. Backorder is the powerful backup plan in peak season, that can allow customers to buy your products despite them being sold out. If you use Bigcommerce platforms, you can utilize BackOrder app to set all your products as a backorder. Therefore, whenever they are out of stock, the customers can make orders as normal and receive them after a later date. This approach can help you maintain customers relationship, increasing customers satisfaction and your stores’ revenues. Speed Up Shipping Process Holiday inventory is super busy. Besides automating order fulfillment to save time, online merchants should speed up the shopping process to enhance the smooth flow of products and maintain customers’ satisfaction in these rush days. Also, the sellers should keep in touch with third-party logistics to keep track of the shipping process, make immediate adjustments and reduce late delivery via accessible order tracking systems. Conclusion While different holiday seasons have different selling characteristics, our recommendations will work well in the inventory preparation of any type of holiday. Also, you can adopt all those approaches to both daily and holiday inventory plans to increase your productivity and keep high revenues all year round.
