Everyone purchases items online these days. While real life, brick and mortar stores are unlikely to be phased out anytime soon, ecommerce remains an option that is often cheaper than local stores for many people. Customers are even alright with shipping costs for two fifths of online purchases due the cheaper base price. Online retail transactions may even reach half of a trillion dollars by the year 2018. However, there are many different complications involved in the logistics of ecommerce and many variables to the logistics solutions.
Consumers have numerable options to choose from regarding their online shopping. You must make sure that your digital store front stands out from among the masses and appeals to any and all potential customers. Your process must be streamlined from marketing logistics to ecommerce order fulfillment to warehousing and distribution. A bad experience due to slow shipping or an unclear ordering process will lose you the potential value of repeat customers while a positive experience may even get you new customers through recommendations to friends and family on top of their repeat business. Both repeat customers and new customers are valuable to an online business.
Reaching the proper logistics solutions for your online business can be a harrowing process for some. One of the best ways to find the right logistics solutions is to listen to your consumer base. “The customer is always right.” More than fifty percent of users of online retail stores would prefer free or discounted shipping. Simply factoring the overhead cost of shipping and handling into the prices of all of your products and removing the extra line of shipping during check out may appease your shoppers. This may decrease your competitive nature of your pricing with your prices appearing higher than a competitors. You may be able to use a tagline involving your lack of shipping fees to entice web surfers into spending their money with you, though.
Being able to tout a reputation of a fast shipping process would be a high mark on your business among all the other options out there. Achieving this is a bit more complicated. You need to keep your warehouses well stocked with any given product you have available that a random customer may be interested in purchasing. An out of stock item will frustrate customers and may cause you to lose business. Strong lines of communication will also quicken the process of getting the order received to getting the product packaged to getting it out the door and on its way to your customers’ doorsteps.