Shipping Strategies for Vape Shops: How To Optimize Shipping
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One of the biggest challenges of running an e-commerce vape shop is figuring out how to charge for shipping and handling. There are many approaches to creating a shipping strategy, and there are often many ways to improve this strategy.
In today’s blog, we talk about some strategies that you could incorporate into your already existing shipping system or the best approaches if you haven’t set a shipping strategy yet. By the end, we hope to leave you with some great advice on how you can optimize shipping strategies for vape shops.
Table of Contents:
- The Importance Of Implementing A Proper Shipping Strategy
- What Can Affect Your Shipping Strategy?
- Make Communication With Your Customers Your Number One Priority
- Incorporate A Return Shipping Policy That Is Fair For Your Customers And Cost-Efficient For Your Online Store
- Conclusion
The Importance Of Implementing A Proper Shipping Strategy
Believe it or not, your shipping strategy is an important part of your online vape shop. It is estimated that 94% of consumers said shipping plays an important part in their online shipping experience, which means customers are looking for cheaper options and the best shipping. What’s more, if the delivery experience fails to meet the customer’s expectations, 84% of customers said they were unlikely to shop with the same company/brand.
Creating an effective eCommerce shipping system or ecommerce shipping strategy is crucial if vape shops want to win customers online and grow their business. That’s why learning how to optimize your shipping strategy is so essential. In the following sections, we’ll go over a few key aspects we believe you need to examine to optimize your shipping strategy.
What Can Affect Your Shipping Strategy?
Two of the most important things affecting your shipping strategy are costs and the profit margin you hope to make. These two factors can make or break a good shipping strategy, which is why we’ll explore each in detail.
Costs
There are essentially three costs you need to consider when creating or optimizing an already established shipping strategy for vape shops: the weight and size of your packages, packing and packing materials, and the human resource you will use to fulfill and send these packages. Let’s begin with the weight and size of the packages.
The weight and size of the packages you send will have the biggest impact on your shipping strategy. Since we are in the vape business, where e-liquids and devices all come in relatively small boxes, one approach you could take to optimize your shipping strategy is to go by a location-based system, where the only thing that matters is the location where the items are being shipped, since most items have the same dimensions.
However, if you are a distributor or wholesale vendor, the dimensions of your packages can vary, and for that, you’ll need to contact carriers directly to see the rates they offer. The important thing here to optimize your strategy is that you are able to get the most accurate of dimensions as possible so the rates can be exact and you won’t spend a penny extra.
Another cost that can affect your shipping strategy is the packing materials. In the vape business, you will be shipping many small glass bottles; making sure they are secure and will arrive safely is a huge priority; in order to optimize your shipping strategy, you need to learn which materials will be more cost-efficient and if they need extra padding. Depending on the carrier you use, they might also provide free shipping materials, so look for this perk when choosing a courier.
Finally, and the most important thing that can affect your shipping strategy is the human resources you plan on using to fulfill orders. If you are starting at the very least, you’ll need two teams, a fulfillment team, and a customer service team, to deal with returns and shipping problems. The fulfillment team will make sure to package products and make sure they are picked up and delivered to the courier. You can optimize this process by using software that automatically creates labels, which will free up time.
Margins
Perhaps the most important thing that can affect your shipping strategy is the profit margin you hope to make. Shipping is directly tied to your profit, and how you choose to pay for shipping can determine the price you sell your vape products for.
For example, if it costs $7 to obtain a bottle of vape juice, $7 to ship it, and $4 to package it, the vape juice bottle would cost you $18 before any profit.
If you hope to have a profit margin of 50%, you would have to sell the vape juice bottle for $27. Now you don’t have to list the vape juice bottle for $27; you could sell it for $20 and add the $7 later at the time of checkout as shipping costs. But the number of bottles ordered varies and destinations, so the cost of packaging and shipping won’t always be the same. There’s also free shipping, but this would eat a large portion of your profits margin. So how can you optimize your shipping strategy so you’re able to earn a decent profit margin? Well, it depends on the strategy you choose.
The following are three of the most popular shipping options/strategies for vape shops:
- Live Rates: Live rates are real-life shipping calculations that sync with your site to offer exact rates depending on the weight, destination, and size of the package. In order to implement this shipping strategy, you’ll need to partner up with a courier that can offer shipping options in real-time and can update these prices on your website at the time of checkout. The advantage of this is that the courier might offer different shipping options depending on the courier’s resources, meaning they could have the item shipped overnight or at a standard shipping speed. This lets you charge what you want for products, and your customers pay the exact shipping cost.
- Table Rates: Table rates work differently. They are a set of rules that vary the price of shipping based on the final destination, order totals, or the number of items purchased, among other factors. For example, a table rate could be based on the location of your warehouse. If your warehouse is in the state of New York, all shipping orders inside the state could be free but would increase in price the further away they become. Another rule you could set is only to offer free shipping if the order exceeds more than $40 dollars. Or set a rule that increases shipping cost depending on the weight of the order. With table rates, you set the rules.
- Flat Rates: Flat rates are exactly what they sound like; you charge the same amount no matter the size or weight of the order. Suffice to say; this is not recommended for wholesale vendors whose orders vary in price and weight. This shipping strategy is easiest to set up, and it’s perfect for vape shops that mainly sell vape juices that don’t vary in weight and size.
To optimize your shipping strategy, you should take a closer look at each approach listed above to see which one is the most profitable. It should also be said that a combination of each approach could also be used, and this might be the best way to generate a healthy profit margin.
Make Communication With Your Customers Your Number One Priority
Another must-have in order to optimize your shipping strategy is to make communication with your customers the number one priority. Not only should they be able to see where their packages are in each stage of the journey, but you should maintain communication with your customers via text or email, letting them know at all times where their product is and when it has arrived.
It’s also pivotal that you make this communication a two-way street, meaning that you need to hear from your customers to know exactly where you’re falling behind and where you exceed. To do this, you should be able to follow up with customers after they receive their products to ask them about their experience with your shipping strategy. This can be done via surveys, questionnaires, or a simple rating system.
Incorporate A Return Shipping Strategy That Is Fair For Your Customers And Cost-Efficient For Your Online Store
Finally, in order for your shipping strategy to reach its full potential, you need a return shipping strategy that won’t eat into your margins and will also be fair for your customers. The first order of business should be to set up a return merchandise authorization system (RMA). A good RMA will allow you to cut man-hours and costs by automating the returns process, and this will help you save on costs.
With a good RMA, you will be able to:
- Let customers initiate a returns process via computer
- Automatically send pre-paid labels to customers
- Track your returns
- Relisting approved items back into stock
- And see how returns are affecting profit margins
There are plenty of apps and plugins that you can use to set up an RMA to your eCommerce store or platform. But be sure to test drive them before committing to use an RMA app to see how they work and if they fit your needs.
After installing your RMA, you need to create a return shipping strategy that will be fair for both you and your customers. While there is no one size fits approach to choosing your return shipping strategy, a strategy that works for vape shops that are just starting out is to offer flat-rate return shipping.
While you could offer free shipping on all returns, this will eat away at your margins, and this is not ideal for new vape shops or vape shops in general. This is why a flat rate return shipping strategy is often the best strategy for vape shops since the customer pays a portion of the return shipping, and the cost of shipping will almost always be the same due to vape devices and vape juice bottles having similar dimensions, you’ll have a strategy that will allow you to remain profitable.
However, with a flat-rate return shipping strategy, where the customers and the vape shop share the cost of the return shipping, you want to make sure that the customer knows they’ll be responsible for this cost, and you’ll need to be upfront about this on your return policy which should be clearly displayed on several key areas of your website, and should be communicated with your customer before the return process begins, usually via email.
Conclusion
As you can see from packing all the to your return shipping strategy, there are many ways in which you can optimize your shipping program, and while shipping strategies will vary from vape shop to vape shop, we hope that you can use some of this advice to better the shipping processes in your ecommerce vape shop.
