6 Tips to Manage Your WooCommerce Shipping Strategy

by Andi Croft

WooCommerce is one of the best online selling platforms today since it provides several options for order fulfillment and shipping.

After setting up your site and ensuring that your product listings reach their full potential, you have to tighten the process, ensuring that your products are sold and shipped in the best possible way so that customers will buy again and you’ll build a loyal customer base.

So, how do you make your WooCommerce shipping strategy more efficient?

In this post, we’ll walk you through six tips to manage your WooCommerce shipping strategy:

1. Enhance the Fulfillment Process

The first thing that you need to do is to enhance the fulfillment process. If you create a shipping strategy involving a fulfillment team, ensure you equip them so that you’re more in control of your customer’s expectations.

That way, they’ll be more equipped to handle special requests like various packaging and extended delivery times.

Moreover, all teams that handle the marketing to delivery should be kept in the know for enhanced operational efficiency. For instance, if you want an automated service on some level in your fulfillment process, you’ll gain accurate feedback on its efficiency from various channels.

2. Configure WooCommerce settings

Everything you need is already built into the platform if you’re offering local pickup, flat-rate shopping, and free shipping. Thus, you won’t need any other plugins or extensions.

In your dashboard, navigate to WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping, containing options for Shipping Zones. In a nutshell, a geographical location that you ship to is called a shipping zone. Usually, this is defined by countries, regions, states, and zip codes. Make sure that you set up shipping codes to define various rates based on your customers’ locations.

If you want to assign shipping methods on zones, make sure that you click the Add Shipping Method. Pick Free Shipping, Flare Rate, or Local Pickup, then pick the options and pricing for each.

3. Ensure Shipping Details are Easily Identifiable

One of the most common issues that many WooCommerce drop shippers face is that parcels get delayed, the fulfillment center sends the order to the wrong address, or the order gets lost during transit. These things can happen if you don’t have the right system that checks shipping details, especially when a repeated customer changes their shipping address.

One effective way to decrease the likelihood of incorrect shipping addresses is to give a shipping label to the fulfillment center as soon as the order is made.

Automatic order printing is a great way to ensure that the shipping address the customer gives when placing their order is attached to the packages that are shipped to them. Moreover having a contents like write articles can help others to identify the shipping details knowledgeably.

4. Determine and Calculate Shipping Costs

These days, nothing ever comes for free. Analyzing and strategizing your shipping process not merely cuts costs, it’s also treating the entire shipping process as an investment that you can recoup in boosting sales and having a better brand reputation. Check out the best WooCommerce checkout plug-ins here.

So, when it comes to calculating and determining the costs of shopping, you have to consider the following expenses to ensure the utmost customer satisfaction:

The cost of boxes, stickers, and tape
The cost of hiring people to pick, pack, and ship the item
Costs of sending a courier to pick up and deliver the package
Import and export costs in overseas shipping

5. Test Your Shipping Setup

Before making a new shipping configuration available to customers, you must thoroughly test it.

Here’s a checklist that you can follow before your launch:

Test the product from every shipping class for every shipping zone you’ve set up. Are the rates calculated properly on the cart and checkout pages?
Test different combinations of products and various cart sizes. Are the free shipping and discounts appropriately applied?
Review the whole checkout process. Is your site going to be integrated into a third-party tool? Is your shipping information properly synced?
If you track information to set up, are your tracking numbers attached to your customer emails, and are these available on the account pages?
If you’re using live rates, are the costs shown to your customer to match the carrier’s rates?
Are your shipping and return policies easy for customers to find on your site?
If you’re offering discounts and free shipping based on the order size, is that information shown to your site visitors?

If everything looks good on your end, it’s time to ship.

6. Categorize Into Shipping Classes

This one’s quite simple as soon as you’re done with your inventory. The platform allows you to categorize every item on your product listing into shipping classes. This is like a cluster of products that serves as a digital basket depending on the shipping costs they get.

That way, you can present the shipping costs on every product listing, guiding your customers on how much they must spend for the shipping once they decide to check out the item and purchase your product.

Conclusion

Shipping is an essential component of your ecommerce business since it could either make (or break!) it. Picking the right shipping strategy involves a lot of hard work and planning on your part.

Moreover, there’s no single WooCommerce shipping strategy out there. The key is to analyze your business and customers so that you can come up with the best one yet. Make sure you use these best practices to help you with the day-to-day management of your WooCommerce store. Good luck!

Andi Croft is a freelance writer interested in topics related to business, technology, and travel. She has a passion for meeting people from all walks of life and bringing along the latest tech to enhance her adventures.