Category: Shipping

As an eBay seller, you are probably wondering if moving to a third party software like SKULabs makes sense and how it can benefit you meet your shipping needs.

When you started using eBay’s platform it felt easy enough to use. The volume may have been lower and with everything in the same interface didn’t seem complicated. Familiarity is always hard to move away from, but finding a better platform is what every growing business has to do at some point or another.

Starting Up with eBay

Whether it’s a garage, a basement or even an extra room turned into a home office, the small business starts as a one person or family affair. Keeping it simple is the name of the game. Having a one stop do it all platform on your eBay seller’s account feels adequate. At this stage, you can even take advantage of some of the promotions they offer on supplies and others. Like most sales channels, they provide you with the basic shipping functions as long as your provide them with the product and package information to get all the orders to your customers.

As with most sales channels, their strength lies in the selling tools. However, there are more factors involved after the customer pays for the order and a single mistake can lead to decreased sales. You must keep into account these other variables such as delivery time, accuracy and workflows which become more difficult as the business grows. These are often too much to handle for just one person or small team. Now you need more tools to handle this new chapter. Your high sales brought you success, but also other challenges. Suddenly more staff, complaints, orders and returns seem big for your usual fulfillment you are accustomed to.

Enter SKULabs

Success shouldn’t equate to harder management. SKULabs can provide you with all the features you will need to make this transition from “home to a warehouse” as easy as possible. It is time to handle what might seem too complex and make it simple. An automated workflow will speed up your process. Unlike eBay, you will be able to verify the correct item goes to the right customer. Whether it’s a seasoned fulfillment manager or a fresh hire, the software guides best practices and your company policy. Our shipping audits will allow you to be confident on your fulfillment process regardless of your workflow.

Your shipping and fulfillment process will also improve the more you ship due to memorization. Proper verification and management of every step in the process will help you keep up with your new growth.

SKULabs provides the ability to scan verify your barcodes on the way out the door for ultimate accuracy. Having this function can give you the piece of mind that your staff is sending the right item to the customer. Barcode scanning will let you scan your items, kits and bins. You will also have the ability to create your own in case some products do not have one. Everything with the goal in mind of 100% accuracy. So give SKULabs a shot and watch your workflow and shipping improve drastically.

Has your business already outgrown fulfilling your orders through the BigCommerce’s platform? Looking for a more efficient way to ship your BC orders? Here is how to know if you are ready to move to next stage with a bigger more robust shipping software and how SKULabs can get you there.

BigCommerce Shipping

BigCommerce is great for light fulfillment allowing you to input weights, dimensions, and purchase shipping labels from USPS, FedEx and UPS through their in-app platform.

You also feel secure that BigCommerce is your one stop solution for all the needs of a small business and seems simple enough to get your packages out the door.

But while it gets the job done at first, BigCommerce describes their shipping function as basic. As your business grows, so does the personnel working on shipping – you need to streamline your process rapidly and automate it as much as possible. The good news is that BigCommerce integrates with other WMS/IMS software platforms for larger shipping needs.

That’s Where SKULabs Comes In

However, there are a few advantages to having SKULabs in charge of your shipping:

• Print more that one label at a time.
• Get better shipping rates with cubic discounts
• More shipping carriers, means more shipping options.
• Customizable workflow for your business.
• Ability to verify the right product goes out and mistakes are minimized.
• The more you ship, the faster you ship with built-in shipment memorization

SKULabs can help you fulfill those orders faster, more efficiently and also with as little mistakes as possible. Because you have more options, you have more control. And this doesn’t even take into account reporting. By shipping with SKULabs, you can keep track of your shipments through reporting. This way your work and employees have a smooth fulfillment process regardless of how big the operation is. Happy shipping!

Fulfilling ecommerce orders has never been a more demanding task. Not only are there more shoppers ordering online than ever, but buyers have come to expand faster and cheaper shipping over time. Orders must be shipped as soon after they were placed as humanly possible in order to satisfy your customers and keep them coming back for more.

The problem is that your day-to-day focus isn’t on getting your orders out the door — at least, it shouldn’t be. Fast-growing brands can’t afford to spend all of their available hours on shipping orders. You need to be working on growing your business, not just satisfying existing sales. So how can you automate the work that goes into daily order fulfillment?

The simple answer is to mimic what’s already being automated in your operation. Let’s take payment processing as an example: the whole pipeline of card verification, charging, address validation, and customer notification is (most likely) handled by your shopping cart or marketplace. This is an incredibly valuable innovation we’ve enjoyed over the last few years, and it’s made possible by a few simple tenants of automation: memorization, automation, and calculation. Let’s apply those same concepts to automating your order fulfillment decisions.

Continue reading “Automating Decisions in Order Fulfillment”

Mark your calendars, sellers: Prime Day is just around the corner. With over 100 million paying members globally, Amazon Prime is a surefire sales accelerator. But not every merchant finds Amazon’s fulfillment service ideal, either due to the extra cost or the nature of their products. Fortunately, Amazon has a relatively new alternative for reaching Prime members without sending inventory to Amazon’s fulfillment centers: Seller Fulfilled Prime.

Continue reading “Start Shipping with Seller Fulfilled Prime”

Postage rate increases happen every year, much to the displeasure of online retailers. Postage is a large part of the costs of doing business in the ecommerce world, so inflation of that cost is rarely welcomed. Of course, the costs are justified: fuel, salaries, and administrative overhead increase every year, as is the nature of those things. But what can you, an ecommerce retailer, due to survive the 2017 postage rate increases? Let’s take a look at the changes and what we can do about them:

Continue reading “How to Survive the 2017 Postage Rate Increases”