How to Streamline Fulfilment by Automating Shipping with Shipping Rules
Delivering orders accurately and on time can turn first-time buyers into loyal customers, while shipping errors can lead to lost revenue and damaged customer relationships.
Using a Delivery Experience platform, such as Zenstores, can help growing ecommerce brands craft excellent delivery experiences that delight every customer. Zenstores supports you in exceeding your customer delivery expectations at scale, creating delivery experiences proven to foster long-lasting customer relationships.
One way to get your ecommerce business ready for scale is to automate shipping and fulfilment processes. With Zenstores, you can implement a powerful Shipping Rules engine, to build automated shipping workflows that are unique to your ecommerce business.
Read on to discover how growing ecommerce brands are using Shipping Rules to automate their shipping and fulfilment processes.
What are Shipping Rules?
Shipping Rules take manual processes that your fulfilment team do every day to get orders picked and packed, and turn them into automated workflows. Shipping Rules in Zenstores can take almost any order data point and then leverage this to perform a fulfilment or shipping action.
Typically, Shipping Rules are made up of three components:
When: An event or predetermined time that your Shipping Rule should run.
If: The conditions that initiate your Shipping Rule.
Then: The action(s) you want your Shipping Rule to perform.
How can Shipping Rules and automation benefit my ecommerce business?
Here’s how Shipping Rules can help you automate your shipping and fulfilment, and transform your ecommerce business:
- Save time: Automate routine shipping and fulfilment tasks like order processing and service selection, enabling your business to handle more orders without overwhelming your team.
- Save money: Utilise Shipping Rules so that the most cost-effective shipping service is selected for every order.
- Reduce errors: Ensure accuracy and consistency in order fulfilment, cutting down on costly mistakes like shipping delays or incorrect deliveries.
- Scale confidently: With automated processes in place, your business can grow smoothly and confidently.
- Increase customer satisfaction: Improve top level ecommerce metrics, such as number of customer delivery promises met, positive reviews attained, customer LTV.
What are some example Shipping Rules?
No two ecommerce businesses are the same, so your automated shipping workflows need to be tailored to fit your unique fulfilment set up.
To get you thinking, though, here are a handful of example Shipping Rules that we often suggest when businesses start shipping from Zenstores.
Save money with accurate weights
If you ship with a carrier that requires accurate booking weights, for example Royal Mail, you’ll know that inputting your order weights accurately is key to ensuring you’re booking the correct shipping service and getting the best value for money.
When: A new order is placed.
If: The order is under 0.75kg, contains a SKU that matches my t-shirt product category and delivery date is above 1 day from today.
Then: Select Royal Mail and use the service STL 1st Class Large Letter.
By implementing this Shipping Rule, you can ensure you’re always selecting the correct shipping service and avoid paying for a larger (and more expensive) shipping service than needed.
Meet customer delivery promises every time
In this example, my business offers next day delivery up until 4 pm. To achieve this customer delivery promise, I need to make sure that orders placed up until this deadline, where the customer has selected Next Day, are picked and packed ready for courier collection at 5pm.
When: At 16:01 pm
If: There are orders in my “New” list that have the shipping service “Next day”.
Then: Apply the flag “🚨 Urgent”, and move them into our In-Progress list.
Meeting customer expectations is crucial, especially when a customer has paid extra for a faster delivery service.
To ensure you're delivering on that promise, creating a Shipping Rule that notifies your packing team there are applicable orders ensures these orders will be picked and packed on-time. Ensuring you meet your customer delivery promise — enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing customer loyalty.
Reduce costly refunds with reliable shipping for fragile orders
Handling fragile items can be tricky, especially when you’re managing a mix of fragile and non-fragile products. Sometimes, you’ll accidentally ship your fragile items with the wrong service, leading to an unhappy customer, expensive refunds and replacements.
In this example, I will create a Shipping Rule to reliably assign the correct shipping to fragile orders:
When: An order imports
If: If any product in the order has a SKU that is in my SKU category “Fragile products”
Then: Select the carrier APC Overnight, and select the service APC Fragile
Get your warehouse team working more efficiently
Meeting customer delivery promises is key to running a successful ecommerce business, and to achieve this requires a warehouse that is running efficiently and cost-effectively.
To ensure the fulfilment team in my business is working efficiently, I want to assign the picking and packing of certain products to individual packing stations.
To achieve this, I have created this Shipping Rule:
When: A new order imports into Zenstores.
If: The product SKU contains “PRO-”
Then: Assign order to Packing station 1.
Correctly allocate orders to be shipped across warehouse locations
If your business fulfils orders across multiple locations, or if you use a 3PL for some of your orders, you can utilise Shipping Rules to ensure only the orders that can be picked and packed in the location that each Zenstores account is running in are shown in the order list.
When: An order is placed
If: Any product in the order is in product location “Warehouse B” or “3PL”
Then: Move order to Closed.
This Shipping Rule ensures the team in this warehouse location are not wasting time trying to pack orders that contain products they do not have access to.
Meet delivery promises while selecting the most effective shipping service
Making sure your ecommerce business is meeting your customer delivery promises - the estimated delivery date (EDD) that you provide on your website, can influence a huge number of key metrics. From increasing conversion rate on your website through to LTV.
But doing so, while keeping shipping costs down is a tough challenge.
A Shipping Rule like the one below enables your business to meet your customer delivery promise, while choosing one of the most cost-effective shipping methods.
When: An order is placed
If: The customer has selected a shipping service with a delivery date more than two days from today.
Then: Select carrier Evri and shipping service 48-Hour.
Handle scaling order volumes with product based rules
For this example, I’m going to reference a real world example of how a business shipping from Zenstores utilised a Shipping Rule to handle an incredibly successful promotion.
Nutrition Geeks, an ecommerce brand known for its high-quality supplements are used to shipping tens of thousands of orders a week, but when they sponsored athletes at Wimbledon, they saw a huge increase in order volumes for their bundles.
To simplify picking and packing these bundles, Nutrition Geeks utilised Shipping Rules to first segment these orders away from their standard orders. This meant some members of their fulfilment team could focus on building these bundles.
Then once they were ready, they ran a Shipping Rule, so all of the shipping labels for these orders could be generated in one batch.
When: An order is moved to In-Progress
If: The order contains product SKU “WIM-PROMO” or if the product title contains “Wimbledon”
Then: Apply shipping carrier Royal Mail and select shipping service Tracked 24.
With a volley of orders pouring in, by using Shipping Rules to target these orders and automate their processes, Nutrition Geeks aced fulfilment, ensuring smooth and timely deliveries for every order.
Ready to start using Shipping Rules?
Hopefully, these use cases have inspired you to get started with Shipping Rules and streamline your shipping and fulfilment processes with automation.
By automating repetitive shipping and fulfilment tasks and ensuring the right services are applied to each order, you can cut costs, boost efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction.