Some of us love products that are customized to our liking. In many instances, those products are unavailable locally, so you have to get them from a seller in a distant land that can even be overseas.
In this case, the product cannot be delivered by mail or parcel but through shipping. Some sellers can offer a free sample kit for their custom products as a way of attracting customers.
However, they can encounter a lot of challenges while shipping them, which can make it difficult to ferry the products. Below are a few solutions to the challenges you can encounter while shipping custom products.
- Lowering Shipping Costs.
One of the most significant challenges encountered while shipping custom products is the high ferrying fees. Shipping costs can be any businessperson’s nightmare. It can lead you to spend a lot of money which could otherwise be used for other purposes.
Assuming the client is supposed to cater for the fee, they may be pushed away by the high ferrying fees, especially if the custom products are for personal use, not for sale. So, as the seller, you need to find ways to reduce these charges. Here are a few suggestions.
Compare prices between carriers. Each carrier offers different services from the rest, and the quality of the services provided varies from one carrier to the next. Things that can affect the prices include provision of equipment for handling special custom products such as glasses, flowers and others.
Also, the duration of the shipping can significantly influence the price. Price shopping can help you land into a carrier that offers affordable ferrying costs with reasonable shipping duration such that your customer will not have to wait a lot of time before the products they paid for are delivered. This will lower shipping costs and thus reduce unnecessary costs for you and your customer.
Use carrier-provided packaging if possible. If the carrier you are working with provides packaging materials for transportation, then it is a great deal for you. Packaging materials obviously cost you money while designing them or buying new ones to package the customized products for your clients. Finding ways not to use your own can be very beneficial in reducing shipping costs in the long run. You can take advantage of carriers who utilize their packaging while shipping the products.
Flat Rate Shipping. Most carriers would allow you to pay a fixed rate for products depending on the destination. This is referred to as flat rate shipping, and you can as well use it to your advantage.
Assuming your website gets a lot of orders from people of a particular location, you can use this flat rate shipping to cut the costs. This is possible because you will pay a specific fee for all the products shipped to a particular destination. And in most cases, this cost will be lower compared to if you were to ship the products each on its own.
Add local delivery to your fulfillment lineup. Including local delivery to your fulfillment lineup will help you cut costs. When using local delivery, you will not pay for a fulfillment service or third-party carrier since the goods are delivered to a specific location at once.
Outsource to a third-party logistics provider,3PL. A third-party logistics provider will warehouse your goods till they reach a particular destination with nothing like an out-of-box encounter. You can delegate your goods to one warehouse or several of them.
Outsourcing your goods while ferrying them can help reduce shipping costs and ensure that experts handle the goods. Read more here https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/tips-for-fast-and-easy-shipping/
- Safely Packaging Your Products for Freight Shipping.
You may be shipping the custom products for a long distance, and you will often be confused about how to pack your products to prevent them from being damaged while being transported. Therefore, to avoid these, you have to do proper packaging.
The method of packaging products for shipment is not the same as mail or parcel delivery. There are guidelines for packaging to ensure that your goods arrive safely at the required destination. You need to check with your carrier for those guidelines since they differ from one carrier to the next. Below are a few tips on how you should pack your goods to prevent them from being damaged.
Choose a durable packaging material. It is essential to use materials that can bear loads of other products stuck on top of them. New boxes filled with the products and sealed can be a good packaging material. If the goods don’t fill the box, you can add materials that you no longer use on top of it to ensure that it is filled to the top to prevent collapse.
Use a proper pallet. It would be best to use pallets made of wood or plastic while shipping, and they should be sturdy enough to bear the pressure of being lifted and hauled. Also, it’s essential to note that the product’s mass is not supposed to surpass the bearing limit of the pallets. Click here for more tips.
Conclusion.
The most common challenges sellers and buyers encounter while shipping custom products are the high shipping costs and goods being destroyed while ferrying. I hope the solutions to these problems discussed above will help you overcome these challenges. Damaged goods while being transported will lead to losses on the sellers’ side since the buyer can ask for a refund. Therefore, to avoid incurring such unnecessary costs, refer to point two above, and you will be on the safe side.
