What’s The Best Shipping Software For Your Retail Operations?

When I was first starting out, one of my first jobs was as a janitor and shipping clerk at Slavick's jewelers in Glendale, California. Depending on the item's value, the customer demand for speed, and where the product was going, my boss would tell me to ship it either uisng their retail operations software for UPS or I had to take it to the Post Office.

Even a small box could take a half hour to fill out the various forms and insurance.

The trouble with shipping is that no one wants to pay more than they have to and they want choices. But having a person in the shipping department decide whether to ship FedEx, UPS or DHL and whether it should be first delivery next day, next day or ground slows down shipping and the costs vary widely.

You can't afford your retail operations software to cost you more money than you need to when shipping your products across the country or across the world. Yet many retailers send everything through one specific carrier. If anything affects that carrier from too high a demand to weather, the customer's order can be delayed - even if it is in the same state. And that is a way to lose customer loyalty.

Those looking for better shipping options are IT Directors or Operations Warehouse Managers who are frustrated with existing shipping solutions, including:

• The need for integration between the back-end systems and the customer facing website. Software systems must talk to each other.
• Finding scalable software systems that grow with your business.
• Reducing manual labor and increasing automation, which means more speed and efficiency.
• Managing budgets around higher shipping costs.
• The need for support 24/7/365 from one source.
• Delivering a quick ROI to the boss.

But it’s not just those two who are looking at shipping options:

• Your CEO wants to create “Amazon-like” experiences, be able to mine the data, and grow the company and customer demand.
• Your CFO is examining the accounting for every expense and wants to cut costs.
• Your E-commerce Managers want more shipping options at cart level.
• Your customers are looking for shipping cost transparency in online shipping costs and tools to follow your shipping process.

Enter ProShip, an enterprise multi-carrier shipping software that automatically chooses the best options to get your orders on the truck faster. It’s a carrier-agnostic platform which means USPS, FedEx, DHL – virtually all of your shipping carriers and their services – are shopped to find the best rate possible for both domestic and international shipments.

Carolyn Wilson, Director of Marketing at ProShip, says it is the last shipping software you’ll need. “ProShip is designed to optimize and scale with any shipping environment. Some of our customers are seeing a 400% increase in orders per month or are doubling the number of distribution centers. ProShip fuels that retail growth, providing a true competitive advantage.”

With ProShip, you can ship from the store or distribution center that is closest to the final destination, which further speeds up the shipping process and boosts the customer experience.

Because ProShip integrates with any system – home-grown or other service provider, a retailer can locate shipments quickly and easily. Customers have online access to shipping details, which can minimize abandoned cart issues. That’s a big deal because shopping cart abandonment rates continue to rise. 

According to a variety of studies by Baymard the average rate of online cart abandonment is 68%. That means that only roughly 1 in every 3 customers actually finish the purchase. 

Let that sink in a bit.

Two thirds of online shoppers, once they put an item in their cart, abandon the purchase altogether.

All that work to get your product online with compelling stories and videos across multiple chanels of social media only has about a third of the chance to actually be purchased. So anything you can do to reduce friction increases your ability to get more out of your online store. Faster delivery and lower shipping costs are a good start.

By 2020, same-day delivery will drive up logistics costs as a percentage of revenue by 50%. Using shipping software that is smart enough to choose the best carrier at the cheapest rate, reduces shipping costs and speeds up throughput. ProShip states that a 30% reduction in shipping costs is common. 

ProShip can be cloud-based or on premises; from one workstation to enterprise-wide and is fully scalable. Mind you this is shipping software for Enterprise users who ship about 10,000 packages a month or more. One ProShip customer shipped a million packages a day, five days in a row during the 2017 peak season. 

See also, How Retailers Can Build E-commerce Without Impacting Store Operations

In Sum

It’s 2019, homegrown, manual retail operations software solutions are too much work. Today, the parcel shipment strategy for many retailing companies is reactionary and disconnected, so having the capabilities to optimize and consolidate parcel shipping are needed.

ProShip seems to have a way to wring more value out of your existing carriers, minimize cart abandonment and save money.

This post was sponsored by ProShip.