How to Optimize Your Online Vape Store Costs
Estimated 0 min read
Costs are a part of any business, regardless of whether you’re selling vape products or anything else.
Streamlining and optimizing your online vape store costs is a crucial step towards success. By learning how to cut costs for your online vape store, you’ll build a more profitable store and focus your attention on the things that add value to your business.
Cutting out unnecessary costs and streamlining your operations are a huge part of that.
Table Of Contents
- Ways to Cut Costs for Online Vape Shops
- Optimizing the Returns Process
- Audit Warehouse Operations
- Take Better Product Images
- Provide Product Reviews
- Shipping and Curbside Pickup
- Integrating Inventory Management
- Use Social Media As a Sales Tool
- Retain Existing Customers
- Choose Payment Options Wisely
- Conclusion
Ways to Cut Costs for Online Vape Shops
Having a profitable store is the only way you’ll make money from opening an online vape shop. Which, inevitably, means you need to make money off of the vape products you sell.
Buying them at the right price and selling them at a price that will attract customers and make you some revenue.
However, sometimes it can be very challenging to find wholesalers or factories that are willing to go as low as you need your product costs to be for you to make some money.
That’s why you need to look for ways to cut costs for your online vape store.
Doing things that allow you to carry the brands you want to move without having to go way above your customer’s budget is key to success. And the only way you can do this is by cutting costs that are unnecessary for you to make the sale.
Ensure you optimize your efforts where needed, rather than solely focusing on making the sale, which should remain paramount. These are some of the key ways to streamline your online vape store costs.
1. Optimizing the Returns Process
Every sale comes with the risk of the product being returned. You will never be able to eliminate the risk in its entirety, especially if you’re selling lots of products, but you can take steps to reduce it.
But why make an effort to do so?
According to Statista, the returns delivery costs in the U.S. could have scaled up to USD 550 Billion in 2020. The standard return rates for your average online store oscillate around the 20% mark.
These numbers give you a brief overview of why you should consider making an effort to reduce the customer return rate by optimizing the returns management process.
To do so we must first understand why customers return products:
- 20% return products due to damage
- 22% because the product does not match the online description
- 23% because they received a different item
This is not only frustrating, but it can have a severe impact on your business. A high customer return rate is terrible because it conditions the returned product for resale, hurts warehouse efficiency, and adds to your operation's returns shipping cost.
With vape products, resale conditioning is imminent because most products you’re selling are consumables or devices people place in their mouths. A particularly concerning feature for a return resale during the Covid-19 pandemic.
So, here’s what you can do to optimize your eCommerce return rates:
1. Identify and Address Bottlenecks
To streamline your eCommerce returns process, you must first review the logistics of the operation. Companies tend to put most of their effort into optimizing their delivery shipping process and leave the returns delivery process untampered. This can cause many bottlenecks that make your business costs spike.
Critical parts of the process include how easy it is for the customer to establish contact, how fast and knowledgeable your customer service agents are, how you track returns, how returns are received and organized physically, and how you are handling accounting for returned goods. Handling returned goods can be much more complicated than shipping and delivering sales.
2. Automate the Returns Management Process
Automating your eCommerce returns process can be a costly operation. Small online vape stores are not likely to be able to bear the cost of doing so.
On the positive side:
Small vape shops will not likely need to automate customer returns because they haven’t grown to the point where this is necessary. Smaller operations can handle returns with a few people efficiently.
Suppose your online vape store is receiving many returns. In that case, automatizing the returns management process makes sense because customers can initiate returns on their own, the risk of data input errors is reduced, returns can be tracked easily, and the overall process becomes much shorter.
3. Adjust the Returns Policy
Adjusting the returns policy doesn’t sound like something that answers how to reduce returns in e-Commerce. But it does.
Understanding the type of returns policy your customers are looking for will likely boost your sales in the first place. This adds to the revenue, which makes the costs of returns a lot more manageable in return.
But the most crucial step in adjusting your returns policy is to make it extremely clear. A straightforward returns policy keeps your customers happy and your relationship with them friendly.
4. Perfect Your Product Packaging
Because 20% of products are returned due to damage, it’s incredibly important to make sure that product packaging is made to protect the product, instead of solely focusing on making it as profitable as possible. This is especially important in a B2C business, where the customer has the ‘last say’.
Shipments in B2B businesses where a vape shop purchases directly from a factory overseas could be harmed further with this type of bulk packaging. In your case, all you need to do is make sure that you’re not purchasing packaging just because it’s cheaper but are also giving special attention to packaging quality.
2. Audit Warehouse Operations
Warehouse operations can be bypassed because they are made up of primarily invisible tasks. But once a warehouse operations process is not working well, you WILL see it reflected on your costs.
A faulty warehouse process will result in longer picking operations and dissatisfied customers. You want to audit warehouse processes frequently. If you operate a large warehouse with forklifts, you want to ensure that all personnel is adequately trained, wearing safety equipment, and licensed to work in a warehouse.
This step may also help you optimize your returns process.
You want to make sure that your warehouse personnel knows the returns process well. If there isn’t a proper returns warehousing process, you might encounter problems like lost inventory and misplaced items.
3. Take Better Product Images
Taking better product images ensures that your customers know what they’re purchasing. Of course, a product image alone does not cut it. It should be accompanied by an apparent product description that leaves no stones unturned.
A combination of both could help you reduce cart abandonment and potentially make more sales.
Taking better product images could be an investment that you’re not willing to make, especially in a business where you should be given product images by the brands you carry.
With better product images, you are more likely to reduce the customer return rate as well. Because you are ensuring your customer knows what they’re purchasing, you also ensure that they will not be disappointed at receiving something they weren’t expecting.
4. Provide Product Reviews
As online sales become more and more popular, most customers refer to online product reviews as validation sources. Product reviews could be done on your store and on the product itself. They can also be done by a professional reviewer (influencer) or by your day-to-day clients.
Either way, providing product reviews for online clients could represent a higher sales rate because it warrants customers know how the product works before receiving it.
5. Shipping and Curbside Pickup
Offering several shipping options can be a competitive advantage and one more way to avoid cart abandonment.
It can also be a way to streamline your sales processes and provide a free shipping option for your customers.
6. Integrating Inventory Management
Integrating inventory management allows you to know what you have or when you have it. It’s a way to make your inventory management operations more efficient by providing you with tools to anticipate costs and cash flow.
Not only that, but you can also view your sales trends and use them to take inventory decisions for the upcoming season. If you know what your audience is purchasing and have a clear understanding of their needs, it makes it likely that you’ll reduce costs on unnecessary products.
7. Use Social Media As a Sales Tool
It’s becoming increasingly popular to place a “shop now” button on social media posts.
While this doesn’t directly cut costs to your sales operation, it could give you sales that did not exist before. If you’re going to pay for a team of people to manage your social media accounts, you might as well make it a profitable venture.
8. Retain Existing Customers
Finding new customers is more challenging and more expensive than retaining old customers and making them loyal ones. While new customers are a good thing and you should strive for it, keeping loyal existing customers is less expensive and involves less effort.
The strategies you utilize to do this are various. Successful customer retention can be optimized with above-average customer service, offering deals and discounts your audience is interested in, and listening to customer feedback and applying it.
9. Choose Payment Options Wisely
As sales grow, your payment/transaction fees could grow with them depending on the payment outlet you use. Understanding what the prices are before offering specific payment options could reduce costs for your online vape shop.
Conclusion
Streamlining your business vape store costs is all about using the right tools, understanding your customer’s interests, and optimizing the processes that seem too expensive. As your business grows, prices will inevitably increase, but there are several ways to optimize your costs and streamline your online vape shop’s operational processes.
