How to Improve Labor Productivity through Next-Gen Shipping Software

For eCommerce sellers, time is money. This is especially true for sellers consistently shipping a large quantity of orders. Handling menial tasks manually during your shipping and fulfillment workflows could mean the difference between your orders being sent out to ship the same day or even days later.

If you want to thrive in the hyper-competitive world of eCommerce, you cannot afford to conduct your businesses the old-school way. In fact, 65% of online shoppers expect retailers to offer 2-3 day delivery. Customers want their orders quickly, which can’t happen if your parcels are taking too long to put together and ship.

In this article, we give an overview of the challenges growing e-commerce businesses face and what they can do to improve their organization's productivity.

Challenges of labor-intensive manual shipping software

• Manual rate-shopping for multiple carriers, eats away precious productive time

If you’re a seller fulfilling hundreds to thousands of orders per day, you likely have integrated your carrier accounts directly into your tech stack. However, choosing the optimal shipping service level from the right carrier for each order can be impossible to achieve at this volume through manual rate shopping. Having members of your fulfillment team assigned to this task will not only take them more time than they have, but will likely still end up falling short of choosing the optimal service level for each order.

Not only will rate shopping take a chunk out of your fulfillment team’s time, but maintaining those carrier account integrations, adhering to carrier compliance standards, and adjusting to technical changes made by the carriers will take away time from your developers and software engineers. Rather than those employees working on projects aimed at increasing revenue, they’re stuck doing routine maintenance.

• Sellers pay higher than the cheapest rate possible, diluting margins

When you have to compare rates manually, you often don’t have the bandwidth to compare rates across all possible options. This means your sample size is not representative of the most affordable option and you end up leaving more money on the table. Fulfillment staff cannot possibly compare rates for all carriers manually, and end up paying higher than the cheapest rate possible. An important aspect to note about rate shopping is that each single parcel can have different prices assessed from each carrier when shipping to the same location and with similar service levels. This is why it's important to rate shop for every parcel. E-commerce businesses that have a single carrier account to avoid rate shopping and speed up this process may also be missing out on potential discounts with other carriers.

• Manual technology processes low orders per day, leading to unhappy customers

Ultimately, sellers can't keep up with their demand, leading to the dreaded- unsatisfied customers. Getting this part of the customer journey right will be important for retaining and maximizing your current customer base. In fact, 72% of customers satisfied with the delivery service will increase their purchase levels with the brand by 12%. Manual rate-shopping and label printing can drastically increase the processing time for each order. When you spend so much time sorting out these orders, it becomes difficult to cater to your expected demand, especially if you’re a high-volume vendor.

Sellers cannot afford to spend time resolving these teething issues that can be resolved with the right technology. Sellers need a highly sophisticated shipping software that can help solve all these issues and achieve accelerated growth.

Let’s see how you can benefit from the right shipping software.

How Next generation shipping software can boost your team’s productivity

• Claim back your time with faster rate shopping and bulk label printing

High-volume merchants need next-generation shipping software that helps them streamline their rate shopping and label printing process through fast and centralized rate shopping. With a tool like Shippo’s API, you don’t need to take time to cycle through each carrier account trying to look for the best rate. Instead, rates from the nation’s top carriers and your additional carrier accounts can all be found and compared easily within one place. With bulk label printing, you’re also able to purchase shipping labels for large amounts of orders with a single click and with manifests you’re able to put all those orders on a single label so that carriers can spend less time scanning and more time shipping.

With a single integration to a multi-carrier shipping software like Shippo, you’re also able to win back time for your developer and software engineer teams. Carrier relationships and technical maintenance are all handled by a third party, allowing your own teams to dedicate their time to revenue-generating projects.

• Improve margins by selecting lowest cost labels

With next-generation shipping software, you can considerably reduce your shipping costs. For example, with Shippo you’re able to access pre-negotiated discount rates from the nation’s leading carriers and also integrate your own carrier accounts into one singular platform. From there you’re able to set defaults to select the lowest-cost shipping option, ensuring you’re able to save the most money possible on shipping labels.

• Delight customers with faster shipping by generating higher labels/minute vs traditional software

Using lightning-fast shipping software will allow you to process more orders per day and ensure that every order is fulfilled. By getting your parcels in the carriers' hands faster, you’ll be able to get those parcels to your end customers sooner which can turn into a higher rate of repeat purchases. You’ll want to make sure the shipping API you choose is built with a modern tech stack and is actively improving so that your business can consistently maximize shipping speeds without sacrificing reliability.

In a nutshell, next-generation shipping software can help boost your productivity, improve margins, and save time to achieve accelerated growth.

From a cursory glance, it may look like shipping software is one of many tools that assist your business, but when you dive into all the pain points it can solve you realize that the impact is much bigger.

To learn more about what intelligent next-gen shipping software can do and how it can help your fulfillment team, talk to a shipping expert today.

‍This guest post was contributed by Cahoot and written by Manish Chowdhary. Cahoot is the world’s first peer-to-peer order fulfillment network where merchants collaborate to increase their sales and margins by offering profitable one-day and two-day free shipping to customers nationwide. Manish’s specialties include e-commerce strategy, business methods innovation, supply chain and logistics optimization, and he holds 10 U.S. patents for his inventions.