Webb's Office Equipment Inc

Your Business Tools Should Enable Choice

How we do business should be a response to our customers, the market, and the demands and rigor of our industry.

How we do business should not be dictated by the limitations of our tools.

The One Bad Decision That Kills A Lot of Other Choices:

“We will simplify our shipping by using only one shipper.”

No. Please no. I know we probably don’t actually know each other, but do this for me.

“But the shipper we are using now is the cheapest and we’ve never had any problems.”

I’m glad for you. But still no.

The Choices You Just Needlessly Murdered:

  1. A cheaper rate.

    The thing about shipping is that each courier has a different algorithm for turning LxWxHxW into their rate and it involves a lot of other factors. Which means, though your courier might be the least expensive 3-5 day carrier for anywhere in your City, they could be the most expensive 2-4 day carrier. They could be the cheapest for urban business deliveries but the most expensive for residential.

    Why, if given the choice, would you enter in the destination address and package dimensions and see only one rate when you could enter them (still only once) and see them all??? THIS IS WHAT A SHIPPING PLATFORM CAN DO FOR YOU.
  2. Rules.

    Some of us wear many hats in our respective businesses. If you clean the toilets and schedule all the shipments, you are probably solid on following company guidelines in terms of shipping.

    But as you grow (and that’s why we are here, yes?) or if you have staff that may be going through orders, picking, packing, and shipping, a shipping platform can also give you options for setting rules like “no next-day shipping fees, EVER” or “always next-day shipping.”

    Or, with consolidation functions, advising staff that an order that contains 2 widgets, a cog, and 3 womps, should be packed in carton R, which has the following dimensions, will weigh X and boom, here’s your rate.

    This is one area of business that IS safe to set and forget.
  3. Automatic Validation and Paperwork (a list in three verses)

    Is this address correct?
    Does Ships-A-Lot even go to that town?
    Did the customer get sent the correct tracking information?
    Yes. Yes. And yes.

    Late Reports
    Cost Reports
    History Reports
    . . . by customer . . . by courier . . . by date . . .

    AUTO
    MATIC
    CUSTOMS
    DOCS

Sorry about that. I suffer occasional poetry spasms. But these features are out there, in the world, waiting in a Shipping Platform for you. They can integrate into your eComm platform and eliminate a lot of manual work and a lot of pitfalls we can tumble into. It’s worth shopping around for!

If you’d like to jump into the other Best Practices sections, click here for Streamline or Choice. If you would like to take a further look into the type of product I’m referring to, click on over to Quadient Shipping Solutions. Relief awaits.

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