Selling online and shipping go hand in hand. If those two hands are slapping each other like siblings in the back seat of a Honda Civic on a 3-day road trip, you are making it harder on yourself than it needs to be.

If you don’t have a shipping platform yet, make sure you invest in one that checks the boxes below. If you do have one already, it’s time to check out all of the options and functions – you might be pleasantly surprised or you might want to find a better option.

Best Practices for Streamlining eComm and Shipping

1. Get a shipping platform that merges all of your orders (from all of your online platforms and your storefront ) into one place.
   
   The life-changing magic?
   + log in once and see all of your orders (never miss an order because “did I already check my US Shopify Account or was that Quebec?”)
   
2. Add those dimensions to your products!!
   
   Nothing will kill your mojo or the mojo of your order fulfillment staff faster than having to LxWxH x Weight every one of your products as the orders come in. Knuckle under and do the data entry. Even if it’s hours of work, it will save you more than it costs you. Guaranteed.
   
   NOTE: if you use a platform like Shopify that only lets you put in the size but not the weight of your product and packaging, look for a cross-reference feature in your shipping platform. All couriers need the weight to calculate cost so make sure one or the other of your tools can auto-populate all of those dimensions.
   
3. Make sure your shipping platform can combine multi-item orders into a single package and a single shipment.
   
   Cheers to those shopping-spree customers on your site! Don’t let a bunch of manual labour stop you from celebrating!
   
   There are shipping platforms out of there that will play Tetris for you, tell you which box to combine the order into and have all of your weight and shipping rates calculated for you. Cheers to that! (and if you’re too young to know what Tetris is, bless your heart – but Google it. It’s a solid reference).
   
4. Make sure your shipping platform is SCALABLE.
   
   If you secretly dread being busier, having door crasher sales, and taking on a new product because of the headaches that shipping will cause, the above steps are DEFINITELY going to help with your growth.
   
   But you also want a shipping system that can grow with you. Look for features like:
   + unlimited number of couriers – this will allow you to rate shop regardless of your daily/weekly/monthly volume
   + surcharge applications that allow you to bring in revenue on shipping by % or by $ and can be applied by location, order size, or shipping window
   + 24hr support – so that your tools always work the same hours as you do!
   

eCommerce and Shipping need to work in harmony. I hope you’ve found this a valuable use of 3 minutes. If you’d like to take a look at the other two chapters of this post, feel free to jump to REPORTS or CHOICES.

If you would like to take a step closer to finding eComm/Shipping harmony, here is a product that I think could really help: Quadient Shipping Solutions.