3 Reasons Why E-Commerce Businesses Should Be Using Manifests

Despite being a crucial part of the e-commerce experience, shipping sometimes proves tedious for online retailers. Whether comparing rates across carriers or selecting the right service levels, if there aren’t efficiencies built into your workflows, you can end up spending a lot of time and effort on manual tasks. One example is with carrier label scanning — if you’re a current or aspiring high-volume shipper, printing labels and scanning packages one-by-one can take up a lot of time, and isn’t always accepted by carriers across the board after a certain threshold.

The time-saving solution, fortunately, comes in the form of manifests.

Manifests are a one-page document with a single barcode that carriers can scan to accept several packages at the same time, without the need to scan each package one-by-one. In other words, they’re a total game-changer for anyone shipping at least five packages at a time.

Here’s the top reasons why you should start manifesting today:

Save Time With Manifests

Manifests lessen the time spent with the carrier representative by producing a single document that lets them accept all your packages in one fell swoop. This gives you more time back to address business needs that might require more focused attention.

Streamline Your Processes

Whether you’re manifesting for five packages or 500 packages, adopting these documents into your end-to-end fulfillment workflow creates a more efficient routine. By cutting down on extra busywork, manifests help you optimize operations and ensure your business is a well-operated, seamless machine. 

Grow Your Business

By streamlining your process and saving time, you’ll be able to fulfill more orders in less time, and ultimately grow and scale your business more efficiently. And as we mentioned earlier, some carriers require manifests when accepting packages. By including these one-and-done documents in your fulfillment workflow, you’ll open your e-commerce business up to a larger network of potential carriers to find the best options for your specific needs.

Using Manifests On Shippo

We at Shippo understand the importance of driving efficiencies and saving time for your e-commerce business, which is why manifests are so important to all Shippo customers. Some quick facts about how to use them with Shippo:

• You can only create a manifest on the same calendar date as the shipping labels created.
• You can create multiple manifests in one day, and the labels grouped within the manifests will not be repeated.
• A USPS manifest is called  a SCAN Form and has a cutoff time of 10 p.m. PT.
• Shippo supports manifests for USPS, Canada Post, Purolator, Australia Post, Newgistics, Asendia US, and DHL eCommerce.

Ready to start manifesting? Sign up for your free Shippo account, and if you’re already a Shippo customer, simply head to your Shipments page to get started. You can also check out our help center for additional information and tips.