With online purchases at their peak, businesses must ensure that every aspect of their holiday campaigns is in place — from marketing to fulfillment. Early preparation is more important than ever. When it comes to these promotions, your shop must have all the logistics worked out before taking the next step.
The back-end processes for every business might not seem as glamorous as designing a web page or other marketing strategies, but that’s where companies can separate themselves from their competitors. Offering a unique experience to consumers is what makes a business stand out.
Holiday Fulfillment
The holiday season is the highlight of every year, with people making more online purchases than ever. It presents a significant opportunity for businesses but requires enough preparations for the inflow of orders.
You need a great website, marketing strategy, social platforms, and other innovative practices to keep consumers engaged. But, it would help if you also had back-end logistics to leave a lasting impact on your consumers.
Streamlining your Delivery Channels
Satisfying your clients’ orders follows after managing your inventory. But, the holiday season makes the fulfillment process more complex than normal and non-seasonal days. So, how can you streamline your delivery channels during this time?
Outsource Employees
Many businesses get a heavy bulk of orders during the fourth quarter. If you happen to be hands-on in fulfilling the shipping process, you might need to consider adding an extra workforce. These can be a small team consisting of freelancers.
Most companies call these employees seasonal workers. They hire these employees with a contractual position that ends after the holidays. Instead of devoting time and energy to packing and shipping an unprecedented number of orders alone, having an extra set of hands will help prevent delays.
All you need to do is to create forecasting data, have a plan in place, and discuss the fulfillment procedures, deadlines, and cutoffs.
Packaging
It’s not only about completing orders or providing gift-wrapping services over the holidays. You should always strive to please your consumers as a brand and consider that the unpacking experience might even act as a simple organic marketing accomplishment.
While many businesses see personalized wrapping as an additional expense to be avoided, savvy firms see it as an opportunity to promote themselves and create loyal consumers.
Shipping Software
Using a shipment program makes it easier to get deliveries out the doorway, especially during peak season. Printing several tags at once cuts back on the time it needs to process your orders. So, instead of entering individual order’s shipping information separately to print a label, you can group transactions into a small batch and generate all the labels at once.
The selection procedure is further sped up by recording shipping labels and pickup lists for the purchases. Shipping software also makes it simpler to keep track of orders from various distribution channels simultaneously.
Choose Shipping Providers
Shipping timelines could turn intimidating or unrealistic, especially for small and starting companies. Meeting deliveries at the same pace as major enterprises is a real challenge. It’s heartbreaking to see your customers walk away just because you don’t offer a similar quality of fulfillment timeline to retail giants.
So, many entrepreneurs take leverage from ground shipping. In doing so, they can save up costs from expensive shipping done by air. Hiring drivers can help boost the delivery process. But, a partnership with an experienced auto mechanic is also important. They are the ones in charge of repairing the cargo vehicle in case of roadside emergencies.
Manage Returns
While the holidays draw to a close and you begin to feel like you can finally relax, the returns might start to pour in. Because returns are not a desirable result for consumers or merchants, you might not think about returns as a method to grow your company. However, knowing that a store provides a quick return process is a huge selling factor for many customers.
There is an unavoidable flood of returns shortly after the holidays, due to several reasons. Some are customers who don’t want their gifts, others are for goods that don’t satisfy, and some items were dented in transport, with a host of other reasons.
Many shops offer the standard 30-day return policy. Others offer extended warranties as a method to prolong the return time, even if it may cause some items to miss their return windows.
Making preparations for the holiday bustle requires extensive preparation, research, and additional effort. Setting a schedule for purchasing supplies and inventory, as well as scaling up your warehouse staff, requires a deal of time and resources. Nonetheless, all it takes is a good holiday shipment plan that can help you through the busiest season of the year and boost sales.
Meta title: Streamlining Your E-Commerce Delivery Channels for the Holidays
meta desc: If you want to have a successful peak season, it’s important to look at your company’s holiday preparations from the right perspective, particularly in the order fulfillment area. Read on to get some tips and ideas.
