By
Sarah Harris
Shipping is an important process, but it might need to be said out loud that it’s equally important to any other aspect of your business. No matter how excellent your products are, if they aren’t arriving to customers intact and quickly, no one will care about them.
It’s not enough just to collect shipment data; you need to know what to do with that data once you have it.
Will learning how to decode your shipping analytics make a difference and help you better serve customers? You bet it will! By finding areas to improve your shipping processes, you don’t just help your business run more smoothly but actively find ways to get packages to customers faster, with greater accuracy and less risk of damage.
What Is Shipment Analysis?
Being able to perform a shipping analysis in real time would have been impossible even as relatively recently as 20 years ago. With the advent of the internet, smartphones and tablets, along with powerful software that can monitor shipments and link devices, companies can now perform immediate shipping analyses.
A shipping analysis allows businesses to see where their deliveries are going, where they’ve already been, whether they arrived safely, what damage occurred (if any), whether customers have returned them and a slew of other important metrics.
Understanding Shipping Data and Analytics
Becoming familiar with your shipment data metrics gives you the opportunity to make positive changes to your business practices. Closely studying your shipment statistics will let you find problem areas and course-correct. Here are some typical terms you’ll need to know:
Destinations
It’s good to know the final destinations of your shipments, but different endpoints come with different costs. Shipping to a residence within a mile of a fulfillment center will understandably be far cheaper than delivery to an address 200 miles away.
Print Bind Ship has the ability to get a shipment on its way, anywhere in the world, within 24 hours and is intimately familiar with the associated costs of the various shipping zones. Additionally, our warehouses are strategically placed to minimize shipment times.
Product Weight
A 1-square-foot box containing a brick of lead will usually cost more to ship than a 5-square-foot box full of feathers. Carriers will have cost structures in place based on product weight, just as they do for size.
By using Print Bind Ship — because we have fulfillment centers around the world — heavy shipments to customers travel much smaller distances, saving you and your business time and money.
Total Orders
You can view the total number of orders you’ve shipped across custom time periods to see how busy or lax your shipments are during various times of the year. For instance, it’s likely you’ll see your orders pick up around the holidays.
By measuring total orders this way, you can see how much extra labor you’ll need and whether you need additional transportation at certain points.
Picking Accuracy
When a customer receives the wrong item in their package, it’s most likely because the order was incorrectly picked at the warehouse. Usually, this error is discovered when the customer makes a return.
Increasing your level of automation will help reduce this issue and increase customer satisfaction, though you can also rely on a third-party logistics (3PL) company like Print Bind Ship for your picking process. In doing so, you’ll have peace of mind in knowing that things are being handled properly.
Costs
Your shipping rates might be in line with industry standards, or they may be far too high. You won’t know for sure until you track your costs. By closely following this metric, you can determine whether it’s time to seek alternative shipping options to help save money or whether you can negotiate with your current carrier.
Parcel Tracking
Being able to see exactly where a package is in its shipment journey is a valuable communication tool for you and your customers. They want to know when their package is set to arrive, and you want to make sure it gets to them. If your carrier is less than reliable, parcel tracking can provide this information to you.
Delivery Times
Thanks to the immense popularity and use of Amazon Prime, people today expect shipping to be incredibly fast. If you want to satisfy customer needs through raw delivery speed, you need to measure how quickly you can get a package into their hands. Measuring the time spent at every point in a delivery cycle will also tell you whether any issues lie with you or your carrier.
Return Rates
No business wants to see returns, but they will inevitably happen. Understanding your company’s return rate can help you gauge whether customers are satisfied with your products, whether your products are getting damaged along the way or whether you have a picking problem at the warehouse. If you use Print Bind Ship for your fulfillment, we will handle all of your returns for you.
Optimizing Your Shipping Data
Even after you’ve gathered all the relevant shipping data and you know what you need to optimize, it can still be difficult to implement changes. Partnering with a 3PL like Print Bind Ship not only lets you see all the shipment statistics you want, but you’ll also get analysis from experts who can tell you what changes need to be made.
If you’re relying on Print Bind Ship for order fulfillment anyway, you can see what changes might need to be made in your product line and get useful info to tailor the customer experience.
Decoding Shipping Analytics Takes Expertise, So Trust Print Bind Ship
Shipping is incredibly simple in concept yet terrifyingly complex in reality. Every company wants the most accurate shipping data possible, but even more than that, they want shipping to go smoothly, and knowing how to decode your shipping analytics is a huge part of that.
That’s why so many companies around the world rely on Print Bind Ship.
As a full-service 3PL, we handle print-on-demand products, order fulfillment, picking, packing, kitting, deliveries and returns worldwide! No matter where you are and no matter who you serve, you can trust that Print Bind Ship will get your order out the door and on the way to the customer within 24 hours.
If you want to get useful data to improve your business and leave the nitty-gritty of shipping to someone else, call Print Bind Ship today!