Ecommerce shipping made simple

As your ecommerce business grows, you’ll need to find new ways to keep up with the increasing number of orders and speeding up the shipping process, especially if you’re selling across multiple channels. Shipping software is a key tool that can speed up fulfilling and dispatching orders, as well as reducing the number of mistakes made when you’re sending out orders.

Shipping software will be able to import all your orders from various selling platforms such as eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento. You can then create and print shipping labels in bulk for various couriers, such as Royal Mail, DPD, MyHermes and ParcelForce. Your sales channels will also be updated with the tracking details automatically.

We take a look at the different features of ecommerce shipping software, the problems that it can help you solve and how it will help you grow your business.

Why is ecommerce shipping software important?

Quick dispatch times are important for all ecommerce businesses to build a good relationship with your customers and meet their delivery expectations. Marketplaces especially will keep track of how long you take to dispatch your orders, and the number that arrive late, which will affect your seller metrics and can impact where your products appear in search results.

Not only do you need to offer a quick dispatch time to stay on top in these competitive marketplaces, but eBay and Amazon also set requirements for how quickly you need to send out your products.

eBay expects sellers to dispatch no more than 9% of transactions late and up to a maximum of seven transactions over three months. To get the benefits of being an eBay Top Rated Seller you need to be able to offer one-day dispatch and make sure less than 4% of transactions are dispatched late (five transactions maximum). Amazon sellers are expected to maintain a late dispatch rate of less than 4%, otherwise, you risk your account being suspended temporarily or permanently.

Shipping software will enable you to speed up your dispatch process, and ship orders more quickly as your ecommerce business grows so that you can stay on top of your seller metrics for eBay and Amazon and meet customers’ expectations on your own website.

Automate shipping tasks

Shipping software will be able to automate the basic shipping tasks that can be time consuming, tedious and prone to mistakes. You’ll be able to import all of your orders with the name and address that the customer has provided, which minimises the risk of spelling errors that could end up costing you money. All of the order information is then ready for you to select your shipping service and print shipping labels.

Bulk print shipping labels

Printing hundreds of shipping labels at once will speed up your dispatch times and enable you to handle much larger volumes of orders. The quicker you dispatch your orders the more competitive you can be on eBay and Amazon.

Printing order paperwork

It’s not just shipping labels that you need for each of your ecommerce orders, there’s also invoices, packing slips, job sheets and customs forms. Shipping software will be able to produce and print out the required paperwork for all of your orders. If you’re sending orders abroad you’ll be able to complete and print CN22 and CN23 forms. Having the relevant packing slips and job sheets for your orders will reduce the number of mistakes when you’re packing up orders as well as speeding up the shipping process.

Merging orders

When customers buy multiple items from your online shop you can often save time and money by dispatching those orders together. However, this can cause problems if you have to manually search for orders going to the same address. Shipping software will be able to automatically merge orders going to the same address, making sure you don’t miss an opportunity to combine postage and save money.

Updating your sales channels

For all of your ecommerce channels, you will need to let your customers know that their orders have been dispatched. This is even more important if you sell on eBay and Amazon - you need to mark orders as dispatched to meet their seller standards, and add tracking details so that you can prove your item has been delivered if a buyer claims that it didn’t arrive.

Once you’ve printed your shipping labels, you can mark items as dispatched and this will automatically be updated on your ecommerce platforms with any tracking details as well. This will save you time spent going to each sales channel and marking orders as dispatched, and will also reduce the risk that you forget to do it all together.

Find out more about how ecommerce shipping software such as Zenstores can speed up your shipping process here.