One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of selling more product is shipping, a feared part of the online purchasing process during the holiday season. It’s easy to fall to become disorganized during the busy holiday season, but it won’t reflect well on your brand and will turn what could have been loyal customers into one-time shoppers. Luckily if you prepare now and have a system in place you can easily avoid holiday shipping debacles.

1 – Offer a free shipping deal
Make it an exploding offer—or, if you can afford it without cutting heavily into revenues, offer it to all customers throughout the holidays. Shipping costs typically make up 5% or more of the total cost, a significant dent in profits. Still, over 46.5% of small to mid-sized businesses say that offering free shipping increases their profits.

2 - Extend the standard shipping deadline
Inform customers that standard shipping prices will go up on a day before they actually do, then announce an extension to the standard shipping deadline.

3 - Use a shipping aggregator for international sales
Shipping aggregators like Bongo consolidate your international products coming from different warehouses into a single, neat package. Merchants can simply ship to to the aggregators Domestic Facility, and the international shipping experts handle the rest.

4 - Stock up on shipping supplies
If you’re shipping products on your own, make sure you stock up on twice as many shipping resources as your projected sales. Being over-prepared is much better than being under-prepared because you can always use the excess materials for post-holiday shipping.

5 - Give customers the ability to track their purchases
Shipping through popular carriers and linking them to your backend CRM and email autoresponders makes it simple for customers to track their purchases.

6 - Showcase contact information prominently
Online merchants need to go the extra mile to make their customers feel safe and protected. You can put a customer’s mind at ease by displaying your contact information prominently in multiple locations on your site. Also consider listing your phone number and alternative email addresses in your auto-responder emails.

7 - Follow up on shipped orders
Through your order management system, track when shipped items are received and set autoresponders to send follow-up emails with links to feedback resources. Also consider jazzing up your holiday autoresponders with a seasonal images and sayings. It never hurts to spread the holiday cheer!

8 - Include physical promotions in shipped packages
Surprise your customer with a coupon! There’s nothing like the feeling of a coupon in your hand; send physical coupons with every order in hopes of inspiring a return customer. It also makes sure that your customer’s last impression of the purchase is a great one.

The above is an excerpt from 3dcart’s FREE eBook 12 Days of Online Shopping. Download yours today to automatically receive a $75 Google Adwords certificate & $100 Amazon Ad certificate and be entered to win one of 20 $100 Google Adwords certificate!

Image Credit: Drewski2112

Sometimes as a small business owner you can be so engrossed in day to day operations that you don’t have time to think about long term strategy. It is vital to strategize and think about your company’s future.

One of the many things you can do to help your bottom line is automate back office processes. By automating processes or setting procedures for how different scenarios are dealt with you can save time and money.

Say you are printing your orders for your warehouse staff who then pick, pack and ship the items. They now need to either pull up the order in your system or create a shipping label by copy and pasting or typing the name and address into your shipping software. You can eliminate a few steps of this process by creating a queue in system where all orders that are ready to ship will sit, when the warehouse staff is ready they can packing slip with a bar code which can be scanned into UPS or FedEx and automatically pull in the customers information. This can be accomplished by working with your shipping carrier to hook up your system and do a lookup by order number. You can get a cheap barcode scanner for $50 online or just type in the order number.

By no means is this an extensive bible on the subject, but just an example to help you start thinking about your business processes and what you can do to streamline them. The sky is the limit.

Be good to your customers and they will be good to you. Going the extra mile to make a customer happy can have great long term benefits.

Branding

Say your customer ordered the wrong item accidentally, even though you usually charge a restocking fee to recoup your costs of operation, what would happen is you waive that fee? Think of the small dollar loss as marketing dollars. When you make a customer happy, they want to talk about you. That’s the best kind of marketing.

Word Of Mouth

Now that your customer was impressed with your service, they will want to tell their friends about their shopping experience. If you can keep those friends happy, in no time you’ll have a domino effect of happiness.

CPA

A happy cutomer is the best customer. When your customer is satisfied with their purchase, next time they need something they will check with you. This will bring down your overall cost per acquisition.

Any article on the subject of Customer Service is not complete unless it mentions the king of wow: Zappos. Zappos went where no company went before, they worked hard and lost money short term, but that money was really money well spent. There are many consumers that will not shop elsewhere, they are Zappos customers for life. That’s the way it should be.

I’m sure that a $920,000,000 payout was good for Zappos too.