How to improve BFCM Shipping to support your marketing efforts for this Ecommerce Event
Just as with Halloween in recent years Australians have embraced yet another calendar event from America by establishing the online shopping events known as Black Friday and Cyber Monday (or BFCM). Every year Australians race to their screens to open emails on special offers and search down discounted items they are looking to purchase in time for Christmas.
Retailers aim to get their message in front of the competition; to gain eyeballs, convince online shoppers to purchase with them, and hopefully gain new customers. An important component of a successful BFCM that may be overlooked, is the need to streamline and automate the order fulfillment processes by centralising and connecting your online orders with the shipment process.
Shipping Platform
Having the right shipping platform to automate orders is the most important factor for supporting your marketing and online sales for BFCM by ensuring that orders are speedily processed and delivery is smooth. A multi carrier shipping platform does just that by allowing you to process all shipments via the one screen.
Ecommerce Connections
Further automation can be gained by connecting your shipping platform – one that offers access to a range of ecommerce carriers – to your online stores and marketplaces. This way you can scale up your business for peak shipping events such as BFCM, and the weeks leading up to Christmas, as well as the January sales.
Free Shipping
Free shipping is one of the ways that retailers can gain a competitive edge. The last thing they want is the sticker shock of a high freight bill added to the purchase. Absorbing some, or all of the shipping cost can be difficult, but one way to do that is to create an order value threshold; encouraging the customer to add an extra items to meet the threshold for obtaining free shipping.
A sophisticated shipping system should accurately estimate shipping costs, so that you can develop policies around shipping fees and help you become more competitive and reduce cart abandonment.
Live Shipping Rates
Live Shipping Rates at Checkout is crucial to provide transparency of costs and gain the customer’s confidence to complete the online order. Therefore once again you need a Shipping Platform that can support that.
Delivery Options
Another important way to reduce cart abandonment and gain a long-term customer is to offer a range of delivery options. Next Day and even Same Day options can be crucial to gain the sale. Offering both cheapest and fastest delivery options gives the customer control of how much your customers spend on shipping and delivery timeframes.
If you can also offer Hold for Pickup and Dropoff Locations you give customers even more control on deliveries. By allowing your customers to pick up from a preferred location, you are providing greater convenience and security for their order.
Dropoff Locations enhance your Returns Management so customers are satisfied that if the order is not what they expected, they know that they can easily Return the order.
Shipment Tracking
Centralised Tracking helps your customer service and sales team to proactively monitor deliveries. EAlerts allows customers to independently track their order delivery and improves peace of mind. This can be in the form of an SMS, branded email, (with your logo, colours etc), and embedded webpage. Having a sophisticated Shipment Tracking system will boost confidence in your BFCM customers and garner repeat buyers in the months moving forward.
Returns Management
A sophisticated Returns process with lots of options for how to return orders assists by removing hurdles and streamlining processes. Having a shipping platform that incorporates automated Returns Management will assist in that area. Stating the options and policies for returns helps some of your new BFCM gained customers to have the confidence to complete the purchase knowing that if they need to return the item it is a relatively quick and painless process.
Risk Mitigation
A multi-carrier shipping system improves risk mitigation in case your favoured carrier is unable to collect or ship. Being locked into one carrier system only risks your critical BFCM success. Having a shipping platform that can easily accommodate multiple carriers via API connections facilitates simple and quick shipping via multiple carriers should any unprecedented event interfere with your preferred carrier.
Conclusion
A sophisticated multi-carrier shipping platform can help you deal with scaling up your business during peak times such as BFCM and support your overall marketing efforts in making these ecommerce events a success. If you would like assistance with improving on the shipping processes you currently use to be BFCM ready please contact us and we will be happy to help.