Ian
It is tough to make ends meet when you
are a struggling small business owner. You wouldn’t dare to dream of
shipping profitably. Right?
It is a common mistake to let your
shipping costs take a beating to win the customer goodwill and trust.
A shocking number of small businesses offer outrageously low shipping
cost giving their competitors a run for their money. But did you know
that you could make your shipping carriers work for you? Here are the
top 3 tips to stay on top of your game:
1. Negotiate the best rate with your
shipping carrier.
When your business is in a fledgling
stage, it is possible to be swayed by the published discount offered
by the shipping carrier. To get the best deal, confer and compare
the rates offered by multiple carriers. If you are a high volume
shipping company, you have a good chance of receiving a great
discount rate. Work closely with your account manager to ensure that
you are getting the best price.
2. Audit your invoices regularly.
Fluctuating fuel prices, drives the
shipping carriers to increase the surcharges and packaging prices
from time to time. To keep track of all the change and then
following up is a quite a feat in itself. A shipping audit provider
like Late Shipment could could easily integrate your invoices to
their system and automatically detect all the discrepancies. These
discrepancies are then disputed with shipping carrier so as to
receive the refunds for all the wrongly invoiced items. We also
provide exhaustive reports that could be used for consolidation of
all your weekly invoices at one place.
3. Retrieve refunds for service
failures.
Imagine this scenario : You have
shipped 6 packages to your customer promising him next day delivery.
The package does not reach him the next day. The customer requests
the package to be shipped by another carrier. So you put in your
money to ship it to him using the carrier of his choice. The result
:
- You have lost the initial
shipping cost.
- You failed to keep up the
promise to your customer.
- You have exceeded your
shipping budget by sending the same package again.
You are desperate to find the silver
lining. Amazingly, you could retrieve refunds for all the packages
that were delayed. All the major shipping carrier like FedEx, UPS
and DHL offer full money back whenever the packages are delayed even
by a second. However, the process of submitting request and
receiving refunds is not straight forward. When you sign up with
LateShipment.com, your packages are continuously tracked and refunds
are automatically added to your account with almost zilch effort
from you.
You have refined the content for your
social media page, replied to a persistent customer, brainstormed a
new add-on for your product and reconciled the operational expenses
of your company. When it comes to saving your shipping cost, simply
sign up with LateShipment and count your refunds. It is simple, smart
and secure!
