Medium and Large e-commerce businesses shipping more than 3,000 packages each month face many challenges managing both their complex operations and their large teams of employees. With their inventory being shipped out of multiple warehouses, and their employees using a variety of technologies and systems in their workflows, the inefficiencies can quickly add up.
“It varies from business to business how many warehouses they have, how many employees they have using their shipping software, and how well that shipping software integrates with their existing workflows,” said Gitika Jain, vice president, shipping portfolio at ShipAccel powered by Pitney Bowes.
“But all of those factors can make staying on top of shipping very complicated for e-commerce businesses that have thousands of customers and orders to handle every day.”
Even when integration issues and operational inefficiencies are negatively impacting large e-commerce businesses’ shipping efforts — making it difficult for them to control costs, for example, or meet customers’ speedy delivery expectations — they might be reluctant to switch shipping platforms, fearing downtime or other disruptions to their day-to-day workflows.
The right shipping solution, however, can reduce large e-commerce businesses’ day-to-day complexities and inefficiencies while also helping make their shipping efforts more streamlined, consistent, and cost-effective. ShipAccel can especially meet the needs of those larger ecommerce businesses that rely on high performance user interface or API shipping solutions.
Maintain better accuracy through integrations
Across their work with every carrier, out of every location they ship from, large e-commerce businesses need to know that their packages are arriving on time.
But relying on multiple platforms to manage customer, inventory, order, and shipment information — including tools like a warehouse management system, Inventory Management System and enterprise resource planning solution — means that large e-commerce business’ data lives in multiple disparate places.
Without the right integrations across systems, large e-commerce businesses can’t automate their data flows between systems, which is necessary for them to achieve clear visibility into what’s going on in their facilities and know how well their operations are serving their customers.
Integrating a large e-commerce business’ ERP, WMS, IMS with its shipping solution, for example, is crucial to ensuring that customer and order information is consistent and up-to-date across both shipping and sales channels. Without real-time data updates between the platforms, large e-commerce businesses risk working with inaccurate information — and making errors that lead to costly corrections.
Make smarter decisions informed by advanced analytics
With their shipping carriers, e-commerce platforms, and IT systems all integrated into the same solution, large e-commerce businesses can also gain deeper insights into how things like corrections, carrier choices, and performance differences among warehouses are affecting their costs.
With those insights, large e-commerce businesses can craft and implement strategies to optimize their costs — starting by identifying existing gaps and opportunities within their shipping processes.
“If one of a business’ warehouses is spending a ton of money shipping out inventory when the business has another warehouse that is quicker and cheaper to ship from, the business can uncover that data point through analytics,” Jain said. “Alternatively, if there’s a country or region the business is shipping to a lot, there may be an opportunity [they can uncover] to open up a warehouse there and save money.”
In fact, using advanced analytics in shipping can go so far as to help large e-commerce businesses make more efficient, cost-effective shipping decisions automatically. ShipAccel’s smart carrier selection tool, for example, enables businesses to automatically choose the “best carrier” for each package based on its service level and factors such as cost, speed, and route.
Implement automation with frictionless onboarding
The more that large e-commerce businesses automate their shipping processes, the more they can drive meaningful gains in efficiency and convenience. But businesses can’t afford to let incorporating automation introduce new complexities into their workflows.
ShipAccel’s advanced functionality allows businesses to easily implement preset automation rules, or apply multiple rules to a single order and configure the order of operations. Leveraging ShipAccel’s drag and drop tools and easy-to-use “if-then” logic, businesses can get onboarded quickly and implement rules-based shipping automation right away.
Effective customer support is crucial to ensuring that onboarding goes smoothly and users know how to use the system. ShipAccel, for example, sets large e-commerce businesses up with a dedicated professional services team to get them up-and-running swiftly, as well as with email and chat based assistance for ongoing support with both onboarding and day-to-day operations.
“Having a really solid support team to help our customers is important to keeping their trust, keeping them happy, and making sure that they are able to ship as quickly as possible, with very, very limited disruptions to their everyday shipping processes,” Jain said.
Conclusion
Ultimately, leaders of large e-commerce businesses who believe their current approach to shipping isn’t broken — and shouldn’t be fixed — are missing out on the benefits they can unlock with a modern, automated shipping solution.
Switching to a new shipping solution doesn’t have to mean accepting lengthy periods of downtime or other disruptions, either. Large e-commerce businesses that partner with ShipAccel start benefiting from the platform’s robust integrations (with over 80+ partners), advanced analytics, and easy-to-implement automation quickly, with trusted customer service and support.
“Having all of your different data points at your fingertips, being able to analyze and automate your operations, and having a seamless onboarding experience are important,” Jain said. “They make getting shipping right a lot easier.”