Shift4Shop eCommerce Blog | Shipping & Fulfillment (3)

When you’re running an eCommerce store, you want to scale your operations. After a certain point, though, you won't be able to efficiently fill orders on your own. It's simply too much work. The act of filling orders takes you and your employees away from what's most important - growing the business.

For that reason, many business owners outsource order fulfillment to a fulfillment company. Fulfillment companies take care of day-to-day tasks associated with shipping so you don't have to worry[...]

Dropshipping is a form of eCommerce fulfillment in which an online store doesn’t physically stock the items it sells on its website. Instead, the store’s merchandise goes directly from the wholesaler, supplier, or distributor to the final customer. In this process, the online merchant never comes in contact with the product, relying entirely on their dropshipping partner to fulfill the order.

Because of the way dropshipping works, it requires the distributor and the online merchant to have a[...]

The internet has changed so much about the way we consume products. All kinds of niches for products and services once impossible to find are now as easy to reach as a simple Google search. Thanks to various tools, software, and algorithms, customers can receive a more personalized shopping experience than in the physical world. Similarly, social media and other technologies greatly facilitate communication between business owners and their patrons. These are just a few out of many examples.

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In the perfect world of online ordering from the comfort of your home, one of the biggest concerns customers have is when they’ll get their order, and, with most stores, determining that delivery date can be a confusing mess at best. In order to remain competitive, online stores are offering more variety and speed with their shipping methods, but are leaving out one key factor: Estimated Delivery Dates. According to a checkout usability study done by Baymard Institute, users greatly prefer[...]

eCommerce businesses come in all shapes, sizes, and styles. Some online stores are humble one-person efforts, started and run by entrepreneurs for fun and profit. Others are larger endeavors with larger teams that offer services rather than products. The internet is home to so many different types of eCommerce sites that operate with just about any kind of business model you can name or conceive.

That includes dropshipping, an increasingly popular method for making money on the World Wide Web.[...]

In the ever-evolving and growing e-commerce industry (i.e., purchasing a product before you can touch it, try it on, test it out, etc.) returns are unavoidable--expected, even.

As traditional brick-and-mortar stores move operations to the world wide web at an astoundingly rapid rate, the online shopping habits of businesses and customers alike are taking shape before our eyes--namely, the perception of returns.

In a world where purchases can be made at the click of a mouse, lax return policies[...]

Dropshipping is becoming one of the most popular ways of doing business online. Ecommerce giants like Amazon, Walmart and Wayfair and small businesses alike utilize the dropship fulfillment model for their businesses. As more and more ecommerce businesses venture into the dropshipping realm, they find themselves needing a solution to streamline how they run their companies including how they automate the dropshipping side of their businesses.

The Dropshipping Fulfillment Model

To understand how[...]

Consumers have been making big changes in the way they shop over the past 20 years as e-commerce has grown and developed. Although e-commerce only makes up a little more than 10 percent of overall retail sales (according to the U.S. Census Bureau), it still amounted to more than $450 billion in 2017, and it is growing.

As an overall industry, retail itself has undergone significant changes in recent years, but those changes have impacted e-commerce (online retail) to a far greater degree.[...]

When you have crossed the bridge of validating your ideas, the next step is finding a supplier.

This may seem so easy - a simple Google search will show you a long list of people making what you want to sell.

However, it is more than finding anyone. Your supplier must fit your budget, product quality, and other needs that you may have. Even then, you don’t want to work with a fraudster.

This is where Alibaba comes in. This article gives a step-by-step guide on how Alibaba works for product[...]

Shipping carriers might not be dashing through the snow just yet. But if you want this holiday season to be merry and bright, you need to start thinking about your shipping workflow now.

Here are three ways to make your shipping and fulfillment process a thing of beauty before the holidays.

The holiday season is approaching, and 2018 is expected to be bigger than ever for ecommerce. Statista reports holiday ecommerce growth is projected to gain 15% this year. This means even more items being shipped between the peak months of November 2018 through most of January 2019.

To prepare for the holiday rush, UPS has hired 100,000 seasonal employees to handle the extra work, a sizable increase of 5.3% from last year. Rival shipping company, FedEx, says it’s hired 55,000 more workers, a[...]

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is an eCommerce business model that allows online sellers to send their inventory to an Amazon warehouse, where their products will be stored and shipped to customers by Amazon staff. FBA has become a very popular solution for eCommerce merchants of all sizes, whether or not they sell on Amazon or from their own online store — for which Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) provides the same benefits.

There are several ways a retailer can benefit from using FBA and MCF[...]

Dropshipping is the practice of selling products which are then shipped to the customer directly from the manufacturer, distributor, or supplier. Retailers who sell via dropshipping don't keep inventory in stock or purchase products beforehand to sell — instead, customer orders are sent to the supplier for fulfillment, with the seller collecting the difference between the product's sale price and its wholesale price, minus any fees.

Many eCommerce retailers find dropshipping extremely tempting.[...]

When you own an eCommerce company, one of the last things you’ll want to typically think about is logistics. Nowadays, however, the pressure is higher than ever to deliver (pun intended) the best experience to your customers throughout the purchasing process. One segment of this process in which many eCommerce companies can improve significantly is the shipping speed to their customers!

I’m sure you’ve been there before: you order a product you’re incredibly excited about. However, as time[...]

Dropshipping is a special niche of ecommerce. Though you still want the full feature kit and kaboodle, some features are much more important than others.

Online stores built on dropshipping models leverage these features to sell efficiently and with enough scale to make big profits on small margins.

Which features should you rely on to get your online store into good shape? Check out 4 indispensible dropshipping features below.

We all want something for free. And let’s be honest, one of the pain points of shopping online is having to pay a shipping fee to get your purchases delivered. For all the convenience that online shopping brings, consumers still balk at the cost of shipping (even when it’s a nominal fee).

According to FedEx: “73% of consumers want to see free shipping in checkout.”

Of course, when you offer free shipping, it means that you’ve got to tack on another added cost. Amazon sellers are aware of this[...]

When it comes to shipping, a few inches can make a truckload of difference to your bottom line.

Inadequate or poorly designed packaging may seem like a small thing, but there are three costly side effects:

• You are likely paying more for packaging than you should.
• You could be paying more for shipping than you should.
• Items that aren’t appropriately packed can get damaged in transit.

Whether you’re shipping 10 packages a day or 10,000, choosing the right packaging for your products is[...]

In the ecommerce world, you’re only as good as your partners. The importance of partnering with strong dropshippers can’t be understated.

Finding the right dropshipper can be a difficult process, especially for entrepreneurs who are new to the world of ecommerce. It takes a discerning eye to find the most trustworthy dropshippers. This requires countless hours of research and communication.

Doba helps solve this problem by aggregating vetted suppliers and manufacturers into a single database,[...]

On January 21, 2018, all USPS shipping services are experiencing a rate increase averaging at about 6% across the board. The price of First-Class Mail Forever Stamps is also rising by one cent to $0.50. You can read the official USPS announcement here.

This rate increase affects all USPS services including Priority Mail, Priority Mail Express, both weight-based and Flat Rate shipping, and all Commercial rates, however not all services are increasing by the same amount.

After these changes, you[...]

As consumers increasingly prefer to shop online, more companies are joining the e-commerce landscape. But more e-commerce growth also means greater competition. 

To keep customers coming back, many online retailers rely on free shipping. The strategy works: A whopping 9 out of 10 customers cite free shipping as their number one incentive to shop online more often, and 83% of customers will wait an additional two days for free shipping.

But how can your business compete with retail giants like [...]