The holidays mean increased sales, and increased sales can mean increased shipping costs, especially for small e-commerce entrepreneurs who can quickly get flooded by a rising tide of orders.
My own e-commerce operation isn't large enough to have an executive in charge of packing and shipping. In fact, keeping track of shipping costs is pretty much up to me. And I've been amazed at how expensive it is to pack stuff up and ship it out.
We're paying $25-plus for a giant-size bag of plastic peanuts, we just bought a shredding machine to make packing materials from newspapers and we spend what seems like a fortune on boxes of every size, tape, brown shipping paper, labels, black marking pens, addressing software, "fragile" stickers, you name it. The list just goes on and on.
Don't forget the labor involved. We now have one employee who helps out and we still do a lot of the work ourselves.
That's why I have to laugh when customers think we can just "combine shipping" and it won't cost us anything extra.
Your mileage may vary, as they say, but as our business picked up, we came to rely more and more on the good old United States Postal Service to deliver our orders. For our small orchid business, we found them to be cheaper -- at least for most things. We use UPS and FedEx, too, but not nearly as much.
We live in a small town, we load outgoing packages in a beat-up van and we drive over to the Post Office every day. Over time we got to know our local postal clerks - Glenn, Adam, Donna, Tracy, Tim and Rick - and they in turn started pointing us to all the free shipping stuff available from the government.
It's a long list, and we found that some of the items were things for which we had been paying money to various vendors, ranging from box companies to Office Depot.
For example, the USPS will send you free boxes in a variety of sizes for use with Express Mail and Priority Mail. Our business, Sun Coast Orchids, uses Priority Mail extensively, and by signing up to get free stuff delivered to us, we saved a few dollars and then some.
The Post Office doesn't have every size box, but they do have 7 x 7 x 6 and 12 x 12 x 8, as well as other sizes better suited for videos and books. There are also mailing tubes, tape for packages, Priority Mail stickers, and a variety of envelopes. Most of these things are shipped to you in multiples of 10 or 25.
You can get pre-printed address labels, too. In fact, once you have a customer number, you can arrange for regular shipments of the items that you use frequently. And it's all free.
If you're familiar with the expression: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you," then you'll understand that it's not as intuitive to find this stuff on the USPS site as it could be. So just click here to see what's available that might help out your business.
The free Priority Mail boxes are available here.
Of course you have to set up an account, and for some silly reason we actually had to fax our first order in. But the USPS was pretty quick in getting our order out -- within six days -- so it's not too late for you to get some items for your holiday shipping.
The Post Office even offers free Web tools that can be integrated into your Web site and allow your customers to calculate rates, track packages and confirm delivery. Yes, the Post Office even has an API!
Our results with the Post Office have generally been good, although now and again something inexplicably gets lost. On more than one occasion, a customer has told us their package never arrived.
We either ship a replacement item or issue a refund. And almost invariably three or four weeks later the item will be returned to us with no explanation of why it went astray. During the holiday season we are paying an extra 45 cents per package for delivery confirmation, which provides a tracking number.
But when we want serious and reliable tracking on a shipment, we use FedEx or UPS. And when we want fast delivery, we use FedEx - mostly because their office is closer to our greenhouse.
I'm sure someone out there has FedEx horror stories to tell, but our experience has been first rate. We once shipped an orchid out on Friday afternoon about 4:30 from Florida and it was hand-delivered to our customer in Brooklyn, N.Y. before 10 a.m. the next day. Of course, it cost about $70, but in this case the customer cheerfully paid.
FedEx Express also offers a range of free shipping supplies if your packages go that way. Again, you must have an account. Absent an account, you can see a picture of what they have to offer, including some boxes, but there is no access to the online catalog. You can save 10 percent on FedEx Express services with an online account, however.
UPS makes it easy to buy shipping supplies, including UPS boxes, and some things are free, including UPS Next Day Air Boxes and UPS 2nd Day Air Boxes. They also offer an easy reorder function. Again, you need to create an account. UPS also has a whole area devoted to e-commerce that includes online tools.
No doubt both FedEx and UPS, used on a regular basis, provide reliable service and a decent value. We just found the Post Office to be a better option for most of our shipping needs and my advice would be to pick one service that best serves your needs and stick with it.
Packing and shipping is not a glamour e-commerce subject like the latest site redesign or online ad campaign, but for those of us out here in the trenches, it's absolutely vital.
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