Expensive Shipping Mistakes Small Businesses Make

Collaborative Post

After a long time planning and gathering or making products to sell, you’ve launched your online store. All the marketing has done its job, and the sales are coming in thick and fast, and in fact, in no time at all, you’ve sold out!

It's time for huge celebrations.

After the initial celebration, the time for packing and shipping has arrived. As you finally start the shipping process, you notice that all of those huge profits you saw are being obliterated.

What has happened?

Photo by Bench Accounting on Unsplash

Wrong Weights

Small businesses are more likely to make some seriously costly shipping mistakes. Here are the most common ones you should avoid.

Instead of weighing all of the products when they are packed and ready to go - you weighed one or two items and guessed the rest. Every gram and ounce matters when it comes to shipping, and underestimation will see your profits get eaten up pretty quickly.

Bad shipping options

Who you ship with will make a difference to the total you will pay. And, because many businesses want to be competitive, they may offer shipping promises that they can’t deliver on. Not understanding how next morning and new day delivery requires people to be within a certain range of distance can mean you’re offering things you simply can’t do.

Lack of research

Focus on honesty because people will wait a day or two for a great product.

Shipping is rarely straightforward, and a common mistake that can cost you and your customers money is not accounting for tariffs and taxes. The complexities of UPS shipping fees and the taxes and tariffs for other countries can be tricky.

Imagine, as a customer, you purchase something and assume the $9 shipping covered the cost, only to be notified that the import taxes came to $50-$100.

Automation

Would you shop with that company again? It’s a nasty surprise that you receive when you haven’t done enough research to understand the impact.

Do you know that you could be paying more for a paper waybill? Often, there is a few dollar charge added to a paper waybill, whereas if you use an automated electronic service, it is free.

Estimation

Imagine all of those possible savings being passed back to the customer.

If you have chosen to build your business through one of the very popular instant-shop options, they will have some estimated shipping options. You can and should change these to be more representative of the actual shipping costs. When a customer pays the shipping, they assume that you have the correct amount.

Whatever is extra you’ll end up fitting the bill for, and it will eat into your profits - quickly. Take the time to make sure that you put an exact price in.

As helpful as the estimations are, they aren’t helpful to you when they’re wrong.

If you haven’t set up your store just yet but are looking at all possible options to get it right the first time, checkout this post: 6 Steps To Setting Up An Online Business Today.

—End of collaborative post—

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