Shipping can make a side hustle a full-time hassle, but the right tools and techniques can open it up.
Grow Your Business, Not Your Inbox
Stay informed and join our daily newsletter now!
February 9, 2021 3 min read
Disclosure: Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you’ll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, Entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners.
It’s never been easier to launch a side hustle or a small business online. Building websites, snapping beautiful product shots, launching your social media campaigns, targeting your ads, even listing on major websites — it’s all gotten a lot easier. At least until you get to shipping. Here are some pitfalls new e-commerce businesses run into, and how Shippo helps them keep them growing.
It keeps you on pace with orders. It’s easy to tell when you need to upgrade your shipping system: When your orders start outpacing your fulfillment, you need to upgrade. Yet as orders pile up, it can feel impossible to upgrade; who has the time?
Shippo is designed to get you off that treadmill, with shipping software for e-commerce businesses, to automate their whole shipping process.
It helps you manage and scale your sales channels. To maximize your exposure and availability, you’ll want to sell anywhere you can list. Shopify, eBay, Amazon, your own website, and a host of others all have their own software, setup, and tracking, which means you either need to prune the channels you use, or just hope you never miss an order.
Shippo solves this problem by automatically integrating with your sales channels and funneling all your online orders into one place. There’s no coding required, either, so you can just focus on delivering your product line.
It helps you get the lowest rates. Every e-commerce business remembers its first order. In 2018, U.S. retailers alone brought in $147 billion from online orders. Yet this comes with its own problem; how do you find the best shipping that customers will accept?
Shippo gives you real-time rate comparisons so you can offer the best possible rate at the right time for the right customer, especially important with the holidays on the horizon. Plus, Shippo’s the only shipping software to provide deeply discounted rates for all major shipping providers, such as USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL. It also helps you connect to more than 50 global, regional, and last-minute carriers too.
It automates tracking updates. The ability to track any package, anywhere, at any time is a mixed blessing for growing businesses. On the one hand, it makes resolving shipping concerns and finding where a package dropped out of the chain easier than ever. On the other, it means customers have high expectations for these tools to “just work” and resolutions to happen smoothly and easily.
Shippo’s designed to give customers all the information they could possibly need including detailed shipping information, and up-to-date arrival times, And it’s all standardized, so you can use multiple carriers and systems without changing your user experience.
It makes returns easy. E-commerce organizations can expect to spend a lot of time on returns. Shippo’s own data has found that 30 percent of all products ordered online are returned, which means you’ve got to figure out how to get your products back cheaply and easily.
This is why Shippo has automated the returns process. It’s designed to power fast, flexible returns that you can customize, whether you want to include a return label in the box, send returns somewhere else to be processed, or put your customer service team in charge of them.
No matter what scale you’re working at, fulfilling orders is the only way to keep a business thriving. Shippo is free to use and designed to be easy to use, so you can keep your business growing.