The 5 best e-commerce logistics tips for your Christmas Business
Christmas is just around the corner! It's the most important time of the year for most online shops and markets! Here is a lot to consider to ensure that your Christmas business runs smoothly and that there are no bottlenecks or loss of sales.
As a logistics expert, we're here to help preparing your online shop for Christmas in the best possible way. We have worked out our 5 best logistics tips for you!
- Personnel situation around Christmas
- Logistics, warehouses and supply chains
- Automate your logistics
- Give your customers more ordering options
- Get feedback from your customers
1. Personnel situation
- Who takes care of the IT and monitors your webshop and the daily incoming orders?
- How many employees are involved in sales and how many handle operations?
- What if one of these key people is absent due to illness? Are there several allrounders in your company who can perform different tasks? Are they trained well?
These are all questions that need to be addressed long before the big Christmas peak hits. Look around for employees in good time - because recruitment takes a lot of time!
Start looking for suitable people in the summer who can support your company at peak times starting in October or November. This way you make sure that there will be no emergency situation that could cause a significant loss of sales!
2. Logistics, warehouses and supply chains
- To keep your Christmas business running well, a seamless supply chain is of utmost importance.
Keep regular contact with your suppliers and inquire about the current state of affairs in order to be able to react quickly to any issues or delays. Have a contingency plan with alternative strategies that you can switch to in such cases.
In addition, you should always keep an eye on your stock level and plan ahead how much of which assortment would be useful at what moment.
Your warehouse should be well stocked, but not completely full. The average should be a little over 80%, which you can possibly push even further in the run-up to Christmas. If you have already outsourced your e-commerce logistics, we advise you to check with your fulfillment partner well in advance about renting additional warehouse space - in case you expect a larger order volume, for example, or when demand might increase significantly in a short while.
Focus your inventory on those items you want to push with advertising and reduce the proportion of goods in the warehouse that normally sell less well. In this way, you optimize the storage space - i.e. the costs - and at the same time simplify the processing of your orders.
3. Automate your logistics
Many webshop operators are still responsible for their entire e-commerce logistics in-house. This creates a lot of work, which devours resources and causes additional costs.
The larger your company becomes, the more complicated it is to deliver to all customers as quickly as usual and as they were used to. In addition, there is the warehouse management, the implementation of special requests - such as a Christmas gift wrapping - and the ongoing coordination with shipping partners and carriers (e.g. the post office, DHL, DPD, etc.).
Depending on your product type, the organization of returns is also not to be neglected! Especially after Christmas, many well-intentioned gift ideas go back to the sender and sometimes cause a lot of logistical effort. Professional fulfillment centers can take care of these tedious processes for you, or make them much easier, so that you can better concentrate on your core business
- Fulfillment partners like LOGSTA can help you with this.
We specialize in handling e-commerce logistics and offer flexible services for companies of all sizes. Our fulfillment centers take care of all steps of your logistics and ensure significantly increased efficiency in parcel shipping. From connecting your online store system to storage, packaging and shipping.
4. Give your customers more order options
Numerous analyses show that customers prefer online stores that provide them with more order options.
This prevents you from losing a quarter of all orders on average! A decisive factor here: 60% of users choose their online store according to whether it offers their preferred shipping option and payment method! Therefore, make sure that you offer a wider range of order options in your webshop so that no one drops out shortly before the end of the order process.
A few common examples:
- Some people like to order their Christmas gifts at the last minute and accept higher costs - for express shipping, for example.
- Others do not like to order on the Internet for environmental reasons, but absolutely want to give their loved ones exactly your handmade product. They would be happy with the possibility of climate-neutral shipping.
- Likewise, there are many customers who are hardly ever at home and would like to pick up their packages themselves from a pick-up station.
Get advice from your fulfillment provider on what shipping options are possible and make them available in your web store.
In addition, Amazon has made it socially acceptable: if additional shipping options aren't possible for your business for various reasons, at least consider making deliveries free. This is a key factor that will make online shoppers choose you and your shop!
Discover our detailed guide about the Peak Season and learn more about how you can improve your online shop - both technically and in terms of content.
5. Get feedback from your customers
Last but not definitely not least:
Actively ask for feedback from your customers!
This is a real goldmine that many companies often don't take seriously enough, or shy away from because they don't want to risk negative reviews on Google and social media. Yet it is one of the most important means of finding errors and learning from them in the future.
What's the best way to do this? Try to answer all reviews, comments and emails as quickly as possible and try to find a solution. Mistakes happen - if they are solved quickly, it shows your customers that you care and that they can trust your store.
- Make it easy to give feedback! If you don't already do it, we highly recommend asking your customers for their feedback by email. It may be that some people were not satisfied with the process, but don't want to bother sharing their negative experience.
- Set up email automations that are sent a certain time after the order is placed and solicit reviews from your customers in a direct way.
- This way you will not only find the most common reasons, such as late deliveries or faulty package contents which are usually reflected in the returns anyway, but also many other very specific problems that you might not even know about. The most popular applications to set up email automations through your website are Mailchimp, Active Campaign and Mailerlite.
Several webshop systems like Shopify or WooCommerce already offer plugins to schedule and automatically send emails to customers.
Together with your e-commerce logistician, you can adjust various settings and improve customer satisfaction in the long term! Especially at Christmas, this is essential to build trust and drive your business forward in the long term.
- Do you have any questions or would you like to automate your logistics? Just write to us, we'll take care of it.
Sources
Page: 19 e-commerce statistics you can use to guide your marketing strategy
URL: https://sleeknote.com
Page: E-commerce in the festive season: Why online retailers need to do more during the COVID Christmas period
URL: https://www.finextra.com
Page: Shopify App Store
URL: https://apps.shopify.com
Page: Active Campaign
URL: https://www.activecampaign.com
Page: mailchimp
URL: https://mailchimp.com
Page: Mailerlite
URL: https://www.mailerlite.com
Image sources:
Quivo / Logsta © 2023
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