Design Basics: 35 Items per Page

From time to time, we ask our featured merchants what best practices they use when it comes to design. 

Dana Allen, manager of the Good-Earth Store, takes her guiding principles from how she and her friends like to shop.

“I have a hard time with websites that make you click too much to find things," she says.  "I personally do not like clicking five times to get to the product I want.”

That's why Dana has increased the number of items on a page to 35 items so people don’t have to click from page to page to page.  “Back in the day when everyone had dial-up Internet, you didn’t want 35 items on a page.  Now that everyone is on high speed, it’s okay to list more products at once.”

Putting more items on one page has also helped the staff sell more of the items that generally fall at the end of a list.  “Before shoppers were never reaching Page 4, for instance, so the items on that page wouldn’t sell,” she says.  “Now that people can see all the items on one page, the products on the bottom are selling more.” 

To keep the clicking down, Dana also gets very specific in her categories, which she divides into items like “clay soap,” “lip balms,” and “terramin tablets,” as well as sub-categories, which she defines mostly by brand.   

Dana does some simple market research to make sure her design plan is working.  She asks both friends and clients for feedback on what about the site they like and don’t like. 

Are You Selling to the Facebook Crowd?

eCommerce advice sites often talk of the presence a web store needs to have on Facebook and Twitter, as well as the importance of a strong email marketing list. Although ProStores featured merchant Dana Allen of the Good-Earth Store has feeds on both social media sites, she concentrates on email marketing because of the type of clientele that buys Good-Earth Store's natural health products.  

"Our clientele tends to be older, and they're not as Facebook- and Twitter-savvy," she explains.  Good-Earth Store shoppers are much more active through emails, as opposed to social media sites.  "It's important to keep in mind the age and usage patterns of your shoppers," she advises.  Dana reaches her email readers by posting once a week, usually about a new product, sale or discount.  "When we first started, I sent a lot of emails, and people unsubscribed," she recalls.  "I recommend sending no more than one a week."

That's not to say Dana never uses social media sites.  "I'll introduce a new product on Facebook with a photo and a sale.  If something has been out of stock for awhile, I'll announce that it's back, and it sells quickly afterwards.  If I had a younger crowd, though, we’d have even more on Facebook and Twitter."

Your Best eCommerce Advice: Good-Earth Store

Starla Allen and her daughter Dana Allen own and run Good-Earth Store, which specializes in natural health products. They take pride in their unique products, expertise in the field, and stellar customer service, all of which have led to consistent business growth and a loyal clientele that offers repeat business and recommends new customers.  We asked Starla and Dana for the three pieces of advice they'd give to new eCommerce merchants.  Here are their top tips: 

 

1.  Do research on your product before you decide to sell it.  Know your stats.  Who’s selling it?  Can you be competitive with them?  Can you afford to sell that particular item for that particular amount?

2.  Close the gap between the brick-and-mortar shopping experience and shopping on a web store.  “Even though we don’t have a storefront, we want to make people feel like they’re walking into a shop,” says Dana.  Online, people can’t touch and feel your products.  Your pictures have to be perfect, and you must have comprehensive descriptions and make yourself accessible by phone or email." 

3.  Know your market.  And if you don’t know it, learn it.  “Our clientele is a bit older,” explains Dana.  “When I design our website, I’m not designing it for a 13-year-old market.”

 

Marketing Best Practices: The Perfect Keyword

Whether you’re optimizing for search engine optimization or buying AdWords, determining your best keywords is the foundation to eCommerce marketing success.  Here are a few ways to land on the perfect keyword:

Use Google 

Three Google tools can be instrumental in helping you find the best keywords for your product.

1.  Do a search for your product, and check the “Searches related to” list at the bottom of your search results.  For example, in a Google search for “kindle,” you’ll see “kindle 2,” "kindle books,” and “kindle fire.”

2.  Use the auto format in Google’s search window to get ideas for keywords you should be using.  For example, when you start typing in “kindle,” a list of alternate searches come up, including “kindle fire,” “kindle fire hd,” and “kindle paperwhite.”

3.  Use Google’s Keyword Tool and Search-based Keyword Tool.  You type in your word, and Google lists dozens of keyword ideas. 

Incorporate Long Tail Keywords 

Long tail keywords are expanded phrases that are highly specific to a product.  For example, a web store that sells bridesmaid dresses could use long tail keywords like “strapless bridesmaid dresses” or “orange A-line bridesmaid dresses," rather than just “dresses” or “bridesmaid dresses.”   Coined by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, The Long Tail is a theory that says that the total sales of products in low demand can exceed that of bestsellers.  When applied to search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising, it means that web stores can often get more search engine hits through less popular, as opposed to major, keywords.

Long tail keywords are effective for small businesses because they target less competitive markets and help get you on the first page of searches.  They’re cheaper, which helps eCommerce merchants with limited advertising budgets.  No small business owner can compete with huge corporations that have the money to purchase high-ranking, competitive, and expensive, keywords. 

Another benefit of long tail keywords is that they have higher conversion rates, since visitors searching those words are usually further along in their buying decisions and know exactly what they’re looking for.

Walk the Line Between Broad and Specific Keywords  

While the former attracts customers early in their purchasing decision, the latter brings in customers who know exactly what they want to buy.  For example, if you sell auto parts and someone searches for 17-inch rims, they’re looking for that general size for that vehicle.  But if they’re looking for a 17-inch rim with a particular bolt pattern, they are sure of what they want and are more likely to purchase.        

Since long tail, more specific keywords are less expensive, purchase them first to maximize your daily budget.  As you see more traffic, broaden your keywords so people who are early in the purchase cycle will also find you.

One Letter can Make a Difference

The devil is in the details.  Are you using the right keyword or should you use its synonym or a different spelling?  For instance, one of our merchants sells hydroponic gardening systems, and he uses the more specific keyword “hydroponic” rather than “gardening.”  Even though there are a lot of people searching for “gardening,” it doesn’t mean they’re searching for hydroponics.   

His choice to use the adjective “hydroponic” as opposed to the noun (with the added “s”) is not an accident.  While doing research when he first opened his store, he noticed that “hydroponic” was a lot easier to rank on. 

In terms of your own search marketing, be sure to consider common misspellings, synonyms, or other forms of a certain word.  There are a lot of keyword typo generators online which can help you find common misspellings.  You can also check Google’s Keyword Tool for alternate word forms.

Find Your Three Keywords

One of our merchants swore by her simple strategy: Choose three keywords and optimize your whole business around them – every product you sell, every article you write, every post you put up on your site.  This strategy works best if you have a niche, limited product.      

How do you hone down your three words?  It can take a lot of trial and error.  Look at your Google AdWords to figure out what’s getting hits and what isn’t.  Then zero in on where you are turning up in searches and how you could move to Page 1.

Marketing Best Practices: Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Using PPC advertising, like Google AdWords, is not an exact science.  Things change all the time, and what works for one web store doesn’t necessarily work for another.  Here are a variety of strategies some of our most successful merchants have incorporated into their larger business plan.  

Target Your Product

Don’t run just one ad for your entire store.  Have a different ad for each brand or product line.  Moreover, hone your keywords based on what you’re trying to sell.  If you want to sell a certain item more than another, tailor your advertising campaign for that specific product.  For example, one of our merchants who sells bedding makes sure to put the words ‘bed sheets’ in all his keywords. It seems subtle, but there’s a big difference between someone looking for Egyptian cotton bed sheets and Egyptian cotton sheets (which could be construed as sheets of cotton fabric).

Determine Your Budget  

As the name implies, you pay per click.  You only get charged when an actual person lands on your website, so you can spend as little or as much as you want, whether it’s $1 or $100.  However, if you’re a small web store, try not to compete with the big corporations.  If you choose the most popular keywords, it could cost you thousands of dollars a month with not much return.  (More on that below.) 

Advertise at the Right Time  

Track what time of the day you’re getting the most hits, and advertise when people are awake and shopping.

Location, Location, Location. 

If you sell internationally, understand all your area markets.  For instance, one web store that sells in the U.S. and in Mexico and South America directs most of its AdWords to its Spanish-language web storefront.  Even though the store always appears at the top of Spanish Google organic search, the staff has noticed that Mexican and South American customers primarily click through using AdWords.  It's as if they trust the sponsored sites more. Customers in the U.S. and Canada are different—they come to the English storefront mostly through organic search. 

Monitor and Analyze Your AdWords  

Marketing is expensive, so make sure you’re getting the most out of your money.  Even though something may have worked two or three months ago, it may not be working today.  Once a month or quarter, take a look at what keywords are generating traffic and adjust your strategy.  Which keywords aren’t working?  Do you need to add new ones?   What costs are you incurring?  When analyzing your strategy, don’t just measure clicks but, more importantly, conversions.  You could spend $1,000 advertising one product and not see a single conversion, and then we see a five percent conversion on another.  Paid search is a matter of determination and constant refinement. 

Be Patient

If someone clicks through, they may not buy the first time they visit your site, or the second, or the third.  Sometimes it takes multiple hits to get loyal customers.  Keep building on what you’re doing.  Even if it brings only a trickle of traffic, add that trickle to your pile, and then keep adding.  Sometimes it’s more a matter of fine-tuning an appropriate product or channel, as opposed to eliminating it.  Getting positive results could take some time. 

Don’t Neglect Free eCommerce Marketing 

You can’t rely on one marketing tool.  Big companies, like Microsoft, eBay, and Apple use a lot of different methods.  Focus on search engine optimization.  Use discussion boards, article marketing, and online forums.  Finally, word of mouth is priceless...and it’s free. 

Marketing Best Practices: Search Engine Optimization

Marketing and driving traffic is arguably the most important piece of your eCommerce strategy. If shoppers don’t know you exist, then it doesn’t matter how good your product is or how nice your store is.  In our next series of posts, we'll discuss a variety of online marketing techniques, starting with organic search.  

Search engine optimization is the foundation of any web store’s eCommerce strategy.  Not only is organic search free, but it’s also the first thing a web store should address when entering the eCommerce market.  Ranking high on search engines, especially Google, is of course the goal, and most merchants believe that they must appear on Page 1 on their main keyword searches if they want to be successful.   

Configure Your Catalog URLs

One of the most important SEO strategies is optimizing your URLs.  By using relevant, high-value keywords, you can improve the way each of your web store’s pages is indexed by search engines.

Write Meta Tags

Meta information is essentially your first level of contact with potential customers that are searching for relevant keywords.  

A few years ago, Google officially announced that it would no longer use meta keywords for search rankings. That’s because, in the past, key words were used to manipulate search engine results and, therefore, lost their ranking value among major search engines.                     

However, search engines like Google still place value on meta titles and descriptions.  A meta title is used to give each product page a unique title, which can be seen at the top bar of a web browser.  It is also used as the title on a search engine results page (SERP).  The meta description is a short description of the page or product.  Search engines sometimes use this description in the little snippet on a SERP.  Your title and description are a selling tool that will either motivate a user to click your link or not, so it is wise to use a descriptive title and a description that includes relevant words that a potential customer might search. 

With this in mind, be sure to write a meta title and description for products you add to your online store.  Meta keywords should be given the lowest priority.  

Set up a Google Sitemap

A Google sitemap is an index of all the pages in your site.  However, unlike your store’s built-in sitemap, the Google sitemap is specifically designed as a roadmap that’s used whenever the Google search bot crawls your site.  Setting up a Google sitemap will improve the way your store is indexed by its search engine, and help it find pages that might otherwise be overlooked.

Have Good Content

Good, relevant content helps raise your search rankings.  Write rich, descriptive content on your web store using relevant keywords.  Also go outside your store and write content about your product or industry on other websites, including blogs, Facebook and Twitter.  If you link the posts and articles back to your store, they raise your search rankings, which brings us to backlinks.

Garner Backlinks

Search engines place importance on the number of quality backlinks that point to your web store from other sites or directories.  But the key here is “quality.”  Quality links include those from respected and high quality web sites that have content related to your store.  If you link to a page that has nothing to do with your product, Google may downgrade your store if it thinks you’re spamming.  For instance, if you own a clothing store, a link to your site from a fashion blog could help you, while a link from a web site about automotive parts could hurt you.  It also helps if the backlink to your site has a quality anchor text as opposed to something generic like “Click Here.”    As one of our merchants said, “Backlinks are like boats on the Internet.  Build relationships with people and get them to link to you." 

Create Internal Links

In addition to external links, internal links are also significant.  If you have a paragraph on your web storefront’s home page, use descriptive keywords and link them to different store categories.  When creating them, make sure that they have relevant keywords in the anchor text. 

Internal links help visitors navigate through the web store, of course.  But they also let search engines know each page’s content within the context of the entire store.  If more links point to a certain page, search engines consider it more important.

Since search engines notice pages that have a greater number of incoming links, it’s best to create more hyperlinks to the pages where you want the most traffic.  But be careful not to overdo it.  If you write paragraphs that include an enormous number of links to every other page in your web store, search engines might consider it spam. 

Optimize Your Photos

Google can’t read photos, so many merchants concentrate on text in their web content.  But it doesn’t mean you should shy away from using strong images.  Try to keep things balanced.  Many stores get a lot of traffic from Google image search, so it’s nice to complement text with flash and photos. 

Since crawlers can't search the text within an image, it’s important that you make your images findable through image search and optimized for crawlers, while still providing an optimal page design for your customers.  Here’s how: 

1. Don’t label photos with a number.  Include descriptive alternative text (alt text) with images that are the main focus of your home page.  The text should provide a brief, but relevant, description of the image. 

2. Use keywords in the file name.

3. If you’re going to use anchor text to link to the image, make sure the text accurately describes the image.

4. Make sure the content surrounding the image is related to the descriptions you’ve used thus far for the alt text, file name and anchor text.

5. All of these values should contain short descriptions and not just a list of keywords.  When creating alt text, file names and anchor text, you should keep visitor readability in mind.

Incorporate Video

Also consider using video on your web store.  Videos could show, for instance, how to use your product.   If you link the videos to your branded YouTube channel, it can boost SEO since you now has incoming and outgoing links connected to major website.  As an added bonus, shoppers are more likely to revisit your store to learn from newly posted videos, and every return visit could lead to a sale. 

Set up Google Analytics

Track your SEO plan using Google Analytics, which provides detailed statistics about your website visitors, as well information about the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.  

How to Create a Successful Pricing Strategy

Having a sound pricing and promotions strategy is a key component of running a successful eCommerce storefront, but striking the perfect balance is tricky.  If your prices are too low, you may not be able to meet costs and stay afloat.  If your prices are too high, you risk losing a sale.  Strategies are different for every store, but most merchants start by answering these basic questions:

COST
What are the costs of running your business?  Be sure that you know your variable costs, like materials and shipping, and your fixed costs, like overheard.  And don’t forget to give yourself a salary.  You have to live on something.  Calculate your cost of goods, which is what you must cover for each item you sell.  Your product prices must cover your cost of goods and your overhead for you to make a profit. 

POSITIONING
Are you opening a discount store or a luxury shop?  What market you’re trying to attract determines a lot about your pricing.   If you have a discount store, then it’s important to have lower prices than your competitors since people are looking for the best deal when they come to your store.  With some products, you can get a good idea of pricing by checking Google Shopping.  If you sell a high-end product, it could actually hurt you if you price your items too low.  Luxury shoppers feel more comfortable paying for quality and often believe they get what they pay for. 

DEMAND
What is the demand for your product?   Do some market research to find out how much people want your item and how much they would pay for it.  Don’t worry if you don’t feel you have the means to hire a fancy market research company.  You can do a quick survey of people you know to see what they would pay for the product you’re carrying and then experiment with your pricing after your store goes live. 

Once you have a grasp of your cost, positioning and demand, you can consider the different methods people use to price:

COST-PLUS PRICING
With this method, set the price by adding a certain profit margin to the total of your cost of goods and fixed cost.  However, be sure to account for some variations in sales volume.  For instance, it’s smart to be able to miss your sales forecast by a factor of at least two and still be profitable.  

TARGET RETURN PRICING
Set your price to target a specific return-on-investment (ROI). 

VALUE-BASED PRICING
Price your product based on the value it creates for your customer.  If you sell an item that saves people $1000 a year, for instance, you could charge a few hundred dollars for it and people would probably pay it since they’d recoup their costs quickly.  At the end of the day, however, shoppers will only pay what they this is fair.  If your product only costs $10 to make but it has a $500 value, people will probably have a hard time paying that much for it.
    You can also offer other value to your customer for shopping with you, like excellent customer service, an easy return policy or free shipping.  Price is not a shopper’s only consideration, so make clear with them why they should buy with you besides price.

PENETRATION PRICING
This happens when a product is priced especially low to gain market share and garner new customers.  Once a store has a clientele, the price increases. 

PSYCHOLOGICAL PRICING  
A lot of pricing is about perception.  If you market your store as a bargain basement,  it’s best to have the lowest prices around.  It’s even a good idea to offer a price-match with your competitors so that you guarantee customers the absolute lowest prices.  Many customers won’t take you up on the offer so you won’t lose much profit, but it goes a long way in instilling confidence.  On the flip side, if your store is about high quality, your prices should probably be higher than the competition. 
    Keep in mind that from a psychological point of view, there are certain prices that sell more than others.  For example, people are drawn to prices under $100, $20 or $5.  Prices like $19.99, as opposed to $20, are also more attractive.  

OTHER PRICING
Other types of pricing include product bundle pricing, where merchants combine multiple products into one package, like gift baskets.  Sellers can use product bundle pricing to move old stock and less popular items by combining them with more popular, high demand items.   Another variation of this pricing is product line pricing, when merchants give different prices for a range of products and the pricing reflects what the consumer perceives as fair over that range.  For instance, if you sell magazines, one magazine may be a certain price, but if you buy a year’s subscription the price per magazine drops.
    Through optional product pricing, merchants attempt to increase an order by offering options on a purchase (like monogramming).  Captive product pricing occurs when a shopper buys an item that requires a specific accessory to operate, like an inkjet printer that uses ink cartridges or an espresso machine that requires proprietary coffee pods .  The merchant can clear a good profit margin and garner repeat sales on the cartridges or the pods because their customers have no other choice but to buy them.

Pricing is a challenging balance, but the bottom line is that generally you shouldn’t charge lower than your costs or higher than what customers consider fair.  That seems like common sense, but many eCommerce merchants don’t consider this guiding principle. They either underestimate their costs or overestimate what people will pay.  If the balance isn’t working, you may have to rethink your strategies.  Either cut costs, lower prices, or change your product positioning so that you can justify a higher price.    

Drop Shipping Basics

eCommerce merchants are often doing what they can to cut costs and increase sales opportunities.  For many, that means relying more and more on drop shipping.  

Through drop shipping, retailers don’t have to purchase inventory upfront.  When a customer orders, they pass the order information to the wholesaler, who then ships directly to the customer.  They then make their regular profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price.  Since they can keep fewer items in stock, drop shipping also helps merchants relieve inventory management.  It’s also a great way to supplement your store’s existing inventory. 

Even though you make a smaller profit of margin, drop shipping helps you get your web store off the ground quickly with low risk, little overhead, and no need for storage space.  

How do I Find a Vendor?

• Start by listing the product categories you want to include in your web store and then used Google to search wholesalers in each category. 
• Contact the wholesalers and do your due diligence.  If a supplier takes too long to respond or garnered negative reviews, rule them out.  There’s a lot you have to be careful about when drop shipping, like suppliers making late shipments or not taking returns. 
• When negotiating, the rule of thumb for drop shipping is that you want to aim for a 30 percent profit margin.  (Inventory stores often shoot for a 50 to 60 percent margin.) 
• Check out ProStores add-on tools Doba and Inventory Source to source product.  Both sites give users access to hundreds of wholesale distributors who drop ship.  You can browse products, choose what you want to sell, and then upload them to your online storefront.  Both services also have tools that automate listings, so you can “push” products to your stores with just a few clicks.  Then, when customers order something, the wholesaler ships the item directly - no fuss, no muss.  Products can also be cheaper than those that come straight from the supplier, since Doba can negotiate in bulk.  You can try both for free.
• Avoid using less reputable third-party companies that offer to find drop shippers for a fee.  Sometimes their drop shippers are from countries you wouldn’t want to work with, and they often charge you $500 for access to their list when you can find the same or better drop shippers on Google.  Doing it yourself may take you an extra hour, but it saves you a lot of money.

How Many Products Should I Carry?

Since you don't have to keep an inventory, there is obviously more flexibility in the number of products your web store carries.  Some merchants recommend carrying as many products as possible in the beginning as long as they mesh well with your theme and mission.   You have no idea what people will buy until you put it up there.  Sometimes you’ll be pleasantly surprised--people may purchase items you'd least expect.

Then look at your analytics.  How many visitors clicked on a certain product?  How many people never searched for it in the history of your web store?  If no one has, something could be wrong with your image or description, or shoppers just aren’t interested in buying it.  

Drop Ship for Others

If you manufacture products for your web store, consider becoming a drop shipper for another company.  If you find a good partner, it could be an additional revenue stream.    

Creative Promotions

Most successful merchants do promotions on their eCommerce storefront to attract customers and increase conversion.   And with Prostores promotion features, you can easily set up coupon codes, buy-one-get-one free specials, and other discounts and events.

Creating the right promotions strategy can take some creativity.  Here are a few ideas that other merchants have found successful:

• Create a storewide sale or put a whole category on sale.  Try various types of promotions like discounts on multiple-item purchases, percentage off of certain amount of purchase, or a percentage off the whole store.   
• For holidays, like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas, offer digital gift certificates to last-minute shoppers.  
• Ask customers to fill out a survey to receive a discount.  Featured web store Bubble & Bee Organic calls its promotion “$6 Off for 6 Questions.” Not only does the staff get valuable customer feedback, it also gets customers buying more. 
• Create a 7-day “progressional” sale.  Offer a 30-percent discount during the sale’s first day, 25-percent off on the second, and so forth for a whole week.  “We did this during Christmas and gave us a record amount of sales,” says Stephanie Greenwood of Bubble & Bee Organic.
• Offer a variety of specials in one day.  On Black Friday, featured merchant Dog is Good ran four different specials starting as soon as midnight.  "We offered a special and then changed it at 6am, and continued this throughout the day, just as department stores do," says owner Jon Kurtz.  "At times, we just lowered the cost of a product and kept that price up all day."
• Offer discounts to people who agree to subscribe to your newsletter subscribers or follow you on Facebook or Twitter.  Likewise, give your existing fans an incentive to get their friends to follow you. Wildfire, North Social and Offerpop offer apps that can help you organize these types of online drives.  Use those same email and social media marketing outlets to advertise sales and hot clearance items.  
• Offer a free gift with purchase.  Consider this old retail trick that brick and mortar stores often use.  For browsing online shoppers, a free gift might encourage them to choose your store if they’ll get a bit more for their money.  You may even be able to incorporate this at little or no cost, especially if your vendors are used to doing promotions and agree to supply the free merchandise.  George Daisey of EgyptianCottonBedSheets.com says his most successful promotion is a “get a free set of towels” campaign.  “One thing I’ve noticed is if you give people a discount code, they don’t use it because they actually have to do something to get the discount,” he says.  “But if you automatically give them something free, they really like it.”
• Create a Deal of the Day.  Some merchants ask their shoppers to subscribe to an email where they deeply discount one product a day.  Be sure to send the email at a time that your shoppers have enough time to open it and still participate in the sale. 
• Offer free shipping to make sure customers shop with you, whether it’s for any purchase or for a purchase over a certain amount.  A study by PayPal and comScore found that a large percentage of online shoppers – 46 percent - say high shipping charges were a “very important reason” for abandoning carts. 
• Give customers a discount if they subscribe with you.  Some cosmetics web stores, for instance, have an auto refill program offering 20 percent off refills, which means subscribers get every sixth purchase free.  Customers choose how often their shipments arrive and can cancel at any time.  It’s a win-win: Subscribers don’t have to think about replenishing daily-use products, and they get discounts on staples they’re going to buy anyway. 
• Whenever you hold a sale or promotion, always display the regular price and the sale price so people see that they’re getting a good deal.  Shoppers are more likely to purchase when they know they’re saving money. 
• Be savvy about hot products.  Put popular, hard-to-get products on sale to attract shoppers.  Get rid of your low inventory items by displaying an inventory count, like “only three left in stock,” so people feel they need to purchase right away to get the discount.

Not all promotions work equally for all merchants.  Figure out what promotions work best for you in terms of attracting customers.  Some merchants believe 20 percent is a good call to action because 10 percent is not quite enough to get people buying. Others run buy-one-get-one-free or Dollar Day specials.  One merchant swears that his most effective promotion is $4 off any purchase over $16.99. Experiment with different ideas and track all your promotions so that you know which ones give you the most sales and profits.  

Shipping Time and Money Savers

This month we’re focusing on inventory and order fulfillment, and shipping of course is a big part of that process.  When it comes to customer service, the typical rules apply: ship within 24 hours; don’t charge a handling fee; and send a tracking number the same day you ship.  To save money and time on the backend, try some of these shipping tips:      

Shop around for a shipper
For some merchants, US Postal Service (USPS) offers the most cost savings, while others use UPS or FedEx, so you should consider all your options.  Check out a regional carrier like OnTrac.  If you offer multiple shipping providers, determine which ones your customers are using the most. If few shoppers are using a certain service, removing it might save you some money.
    USPS is often the cheapest carrier when you’re shipping two pounds or less.  And remember, priority mail ships at a flat rate, so no matter how heavy your items, you can ship whatever can fit in one box for one price. 
    Shopping around for the best shipping price can also help you improve your customer service.  For instance, if customers pick a certain shipping speed, and you can give them an upgraded service for the same price they paid, they’ll appreciate the speedy delivery.

Try a hybrid shipping option
Hybrid shipping services, like FedEx SmartPost, use private companies like FedEx, UPS and DHL for most of the shipping distance and then partners with the USPS who makes the final delivery.  If you’re shipping to residential customers, these services can help you decrease surcharges and save up to 50 percent compared to traditional ground shipments. 

Save Time and Money, Ship Online

Save on postage when you use the US Postal Service’s online services.  Not only do you save money, but you also save time.  Just order free Priority Mail and Express Mail supplies from USPS.com, and they’ll be delivered right to your door.  You can create labels, pay postage by credit card, and even purchase insurance online.  Then let the USPS know your packages are ready, and your mail carrier will pick them up.  Afterwards you can easily view your shipping history. 

Print Once with PayPal Multiorder Shipping

Print up to 50 domestic USPS shipping labels at one time, complete with postage, right from your PayPal account.  You pay postage costs, but the service is free.  If you also use the USPS SCAN form, postal employees can scan the bar codes for every package in your shipment at once.  You and your customers are then able to use USPS' Track & Confirm tool to verify that a package was actually sent.  

Consider an online service for domestic mail
If you need a more robust shipping system, an online service like DYMO Endicia or Pitney Bowes can help make your back-end more efficient and cost-effective.  Endicia  lets you print postage-paid labels for all domestic mail classes, including Priority Mail, Media Mail, and Parcel Post.  It offers a slew of features like discounted electronic delivery and signature confirmation, address verification, pre-filled custom forms, optional service fee payment for certified and registered mail, bulk acceptance scans, UPS WorldShip and FedEx Ship Manager Links, and weight and zone-based service mapping.  One especially cool feature is Stealth Postage.  It allows you to hide postage amounts from your shipping labels so you can protect your shipping and handling profit margins and avoid customer complaints about shipping charges. 

Use multicarrier online shipping software
Incorporate software like ShipWorks and ShipRush into your store to help you streamline your process and save time.   ShipWorks, for example, downloads your orders and makes it easy to create shipping labels, print invoices, and manage customer communications.  It automatically emails your customers tracking numbers when you ship and updates the online status of your orders.  Reports help you cull data, like how much you've made or lost on shipping costs.  It even maintains an order and shipping history of all your customers so that you can quickly view how much a particular shopper has spent at your store.  ShipWorks has integrated support for FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, Endicia, and Stamps.com.  And multiple computers can use it on one network. Depending on your volume, ShipWorks ranges from $14.95 to $49.95 a month. 

Ship smart internationally
Again, check out all your options.  USPS is often the best option for international shipments, especially for packages that are four pounds or less.  Duties are also less costly for USPS packages than shipments with other companies.  DYMO Endicia allows you to ship USPS First Class online, the least expensive way to ship internationally.  Although you can print Express Mail International, Priority Mail International, and Global Express Guaranteed labels using USPS.com, you can't use the USPS website to print international First Class labels. 
    When using FedEx, compare FedEx Ground and FedEx International Economy.  Shipping company InXpress also offers a hybrid solution that’s ideal for smaller web stores that ship a lot of international or air packages.