Shipping costs tend to be the biggest expense for apparel ecommerce brands regardless of size. This is especially true of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands that need to ship parcels to various locations across the country. In order to increase profit margins while still offering your customers competitive delivery rates and options, you need to be able to reduce the high costs of shipping your orders. After all, pricey shipping rates are one of the biggest factors contributing to cart abandonment in the online shopping industry. That means that these costs not only affect your customers’ experience but also your profit margins.
Ideally, you’ll want to decrease your shipping costs so that you can more easily entice your customers to complete their orders with options such as free shipping. This is one of the only ways that smaller apparel brands can compete with ecommerce giants such as Amazon. Unfortunately, you’re likely unable to offer free shipping if you’re left bearing the huge costs for shipping these items. Therefore, it’s essential for you to find ways to significantly reduce shipping costs if you want to have a profitable 2022.
One of the best ways that you can do this is to partner with a high-performance shipping carrier solution such as X Delivery™. We can help your apparel brand reduce shipping costs significantly so that you can have a truly successful 2022. Here are 5 ways to lower the overhead costs of shipping so that you can maintain your profit margins and meet customer expectations in the new year:
Select a Shipping Carrier with a Flat Rate or Zoneless Pricing Model
You’re probably used to a zoned pricing model that bases the delivery rate on how many geographic regions (or zones) the parcel passes through from the starting point (warehouse) to the end destination (customer). The more zones it crosses, the higher the rate. So, if your supplier warehouse is on one side of the country and your customer on the other, the shipping cost becomes rather pricey. This way of determining shipping costs is inefficient as it will increase your shipping costs.
Mitigate this problem by partnering with X Delivery to pay a flat rate based purely on weight regardless of where the package is being shipped. Flat-rate shipping helps you to anticipate your expenses and reduce your shipping costs. Plus, zoneless pricing makes it much easier for you to offer convenient shipping options for your customers, which will ensure that they follow through on their purchases. In other words, it’s the perfect way to increase ecommerce sales.
Use a Shipping API to Identify the Best Route
Determining the best route and shipping carrier for each individual order can be quite tricky. It requires in-depth knowledge of the routes as well as information about all the shipping carriers you use for deliveries. You would either need to have dedicated staff on hand to keep track of all this data or an intuitive software and system that manages it all for you.
The X Delivery open API lets you seamlessly integrate all of your software and manage it in one place. Our open API for shipping carrier optimization helps you get your operations, logistics, and customer service teams all on one page. X Delivery’s shipping API will automatically identify the best rate and shipping route using the best options for you. Basically, by implementing our shipping software and API technology, you reduce operational costs significantly because the fulfillment process is streamlined and functioning efficiently.
Streamline Fulfillment to Reduce Operational Costs
Apparel brands that send numerous orders per day can get weighed down with the sheer logistics of managing multiple warehouses, software tools, and marketplaces. Business resources and staff spend too much time and energy communicating with each individual service provider. Simply, it’s quite the challenge to synchronize so many moving parts. Even if you do get a handle on the fulfillment process, it can be tough to consolidate the data and make the right business decisions to increase your margins and optimize your marketing campaigns.
By using the available technology, namely our shipping software with API technology, you can greatly streamline the entire fulfillment process. We take care of every part of the process, from the moment the order is placed until it is delivered to your customer. As a result, you spend less money on the day-to-day operational costs associated with managing multiple shipping carriers, supplier warehouses, and personnel.
Optimize Packaging by Using Poly Mailers
Using the right packaging will determine whether the products arrive safely at your customer’s doorstep. And ensuring that they get their order in great condition will determine whether you secure a repeat customer, or not. By optimizing your packaging, you’re more likely to keep your customers happier. But better packaging doesn’t necessarily need to be more expensive or heavier. After all, we want to reduce shipping costs, not increase them as a result of heavy packaging materials.
The solution is poly mailers. These lightweight yet sturdy plastic bags are specifically designed for shipping products. They are thin, durable, have a self-sealing fold-over lip and some are even padded with bubble wrap for extra protection. Best of all, they don’t add much additional weight to packages, which keeps shipping costs down; especially when zoneless shipping calculates the cost based on weight instead of distance. Poly mailers take up less space than boxes and lower the dimensional weight of the parcel to help you reduce shipping costs while still delivering your customers’ orders safely.
Use Multiple Shipping Partners
Working with a single traditional shipping carrier may seem like the smartest and most affordable option, but it can actually cost you more. Most standard shipping carriers use a zone pricing model, have slow delivery times, and hit you with hidden fees or unexpected surcharges because of capacity restrictions. Each and every one of these limitations affects your bottom line as a retailer.
But by partnering with X Delivery and connecting to our parcel shipping software through the API, you have access to multiple shipping partners throughout the country. Not only does our shipping technology help you select the best shipping carrier for each individual order that gets placed, but it ensures you always have a backup carrier available to step in if need be. You get access to a nexus of delivery assets without needing to manage them all because our revolutionary system does it all for you. When you use X Delivery to leverage shipping options and have access to multiple carriers, you reduce shipping costs and increase your profit margins so you can reimagine delivery.
Save on Shipping in 2022
If you’re serious about saving money on shipping expenses in 2022, then X Delivery is the partner for you. Your apparel brand can make the most of the online shopping boom happening at the moment when your logistics is taken care of. Get started today by signing up to ship with X Delivery.