Business Shipping Orders During The Pandemic

With the pandemic laying a significant impact on communities, retailers opt to keep their storefronts closed and consumers preferring staying at homes. This scenario has led to a surge in online orders and deliveries.

Although shipping carriers continue to operate, they have to deal with an immense amount of work, which may lead to delayed deliveries and other challenges. In such a scenario, it becomes more necessary than ever for businesses to pay attention to strategizing the shipping process.

In this article, we will discuss how to deal with the business shipping orders during the COVID-19.

Optimizing your shipping strategy

The first thing that you want here is to control the prices of shipping materials while making sure that packaging quality remains high. You can consider getting free packaging materials from some carriers. You will need to create an account on one of those carriers’ portals to gain access to free packaging materials. Shipping carriers to consider in this regard include USPS, UPS, and DHL Express.

Another way to control costs is to allow your customers to choose pricing options, such as free shipping or flat-rate shipping. If you want to offer free shipping, you may want to add shipping costs to the price of the product. In the case of flat-rate shipping, customers will have to pay a specific price depending on where they live.

Make sure to add weights to your products and packages. It will help you get accurate label prices. The benefit of this approach is that it saves you time when purchasing a label.

Getting products to your customers

COVID-19 has caused an overall halt in the worldwide supply chain. It has resulted in shipping delays. Most carriers have also made changes to their shipping services and policies.

While the services have resumed, an overall influx of orders has made it quite challenging for most carriers to meet deadlines. In such a scenario, businesses must pay attention to their in house procedures, such as creating shipping labels and making everything ready for scheduled pick-ups. Sure, you have to maintain a six-foot distance from the guy picking up your shipments.

Communicating with your customers

The best way to keep your customers happy in this situation is to communicate with them regularly. Let them know about any shipping delays through regular updates. You can consider promotional offers.

To communicate shipping delays, you can send an email providing tracking details of the shipment. You will have to mention the reason why the shipping got delayed.

If possible, share tracking details with your customers so that they would know the real-time location of their packages.

With everyone busy on social media while staying at home, you get an opportunity to use social platforms to communicate with your customers and audience. The most significant benefit of using social media to communicate is that it establishes person-to-person communication, which can instill brand loyalty in your customers.

For more information, you may want to discuss this with your packaging supplier.