Magento Shipping Tips – Getting Customers’ Orders to Them!
You have worked hard to get a new customer to your website and even harder to clinch a sale once they have arrived. But a bad shipping experience can quickly undo all that good work. Unexpected delays or a lack of communication can mean your customer’s experience quickly turns from positive to negative.
As many as 90% of customers cite the shipping experience as integral to their experience with an online store and even more cite Magento returns as an obstacle.
This article offers some Magento shipping tips to focus on marketing and growing your business and not handling shipping disputes and other issues.
Get shipping prices right.
For many customers, the only acceptable price for shipping is free. At the same time, the same day or the next day is becoming an expectation rather than a bonus. So how can eCommerce companies juggle the seemingly impossible task of providing a good service for free but still retaining some margin in the sale?
A simple way to start is to offer free shipping but add a small amount to your item price to help offset it. Although this will mean your products may show as slightly more expensive when customers search, this will be offset by the advantage of free shipping. From the customer perspective, this avoids calculating item price and shipping cost – what they see is what they pay.
Even if you need to charge some postage fees for some larger items or longer-distance orders, be clear about this in your item description. Burying this information deep on your website in a shipping policy is perfectly legal. Still, it will not make for the best customer experience if perceived hidden costs emerge at the checkout stage. Surprises like this are one of the top reasons for abandoned carts – and are easily avoided.
The simple advice is to be open about the total price of each item, including shipping. This approach is statistically proven to convert into sales.
Get your Magento store optimized.
Getting your Magento store optimized is as important as a shop getting its window display set up perfectly. If your back-end processes are not running perfectly, your shipping has no chance of working without problems.
It is also important to test your setup. In the same way that a shop owner needs to stand outside and look in at their window display, you need to test your store and checkout process to ensure what your customer sees is what you want them to. Check all your products and prices, especially if you have a different shipping policy for out-of-state or international delivery.
Have a backup plan
Magento stores are extremely reliable, but it is still good to have a backup of all your customers’ data. If the site is down or unable to access your records, you will still have a copy of all your order history and shipping information.
Take one big backup of all your data and then configure the settings to back up all incremental orders. Keep your backup stored in a secure cloud platform to ensure that you are compliant with data protection laws but that you can access it easily if needed.
Use the right Magento shipping software
You’re also going to want to have the right tools in place to ship from Magento. That means having the right Magento shipping software powering your fulfillment. Take a look at ReadyShipper X while you’re at it — you won’t a faster, more nimble and easier to use solution.