Set up your webshop for growth

Did you know that the retail e-commerce market sales worldwide account for about 8.1 trillion USD? And this number will only grow in the coming years. According to research, 26% of all retail sales will be done online. This trend did not go unnoticed by many retailers and shop owners:  in recent years we saw a boom in online webshops. With Covid lockdowns accelerating that number even faster. Since many shop owners did not yet make the digital transition and found themselves locked out of sales, they had to quickly implement an online shopping presence.

When starting an online web shop, shop owners can rely on a vast array of platforms that facilitate online shop creation. Tools like Shopify, Wix, and Magento, to name a few, allow shop owners to get started quickly by giving them a solid framework. Shop owners can then load their item metadata and start to sell. But despite the ease of these platforms, order fulfillment modules remain very rudimentary. Their back-office application is mostly a mixture of an overview of open orders with some basic confirmation functionality. Backoffice- or warehouse workers (depending on operation size), need to consolidate these orders, pick and pack them and prepare for shipping. However, for shop owners to stay on top of their operations, it is exactly this back office efficiency that will save them in operational and overhead costs. 

For the prolific shopper, it is easy to benchmark online shops and buy at the best value-for-money shops. Since online competition is fierce, shop owners need to constantly stay on top of their costs and safeguard their margins. Shops that fail to do so will see their margin squeezed and have a hard time offering products that are competitively priced. On top of that, many shoppers are expecting free delivery and preferably delivered the next day. Shops without the necessary controls will ultimately lose out in the long run. 

For shop owners, cost control in order fulfillment, shipping and overhead is the cornerstone of a successful business. Either they help themselves with the limited tools available or they go for sustainable growth, adopting an easy-to-use pick-and-pack system that seamlessly integrates with the online shop and facilitates the warehouse handling process. 

And Transmate’s parcel shipping module offers just that. Integrating with the main online shopping platforms, Transmate can capture sales orders, consolidate and automatically calculate an optimized boxing sequence to save on shipping costs. Transmate’s parcel shipping module connects live with the main parcel carriers and can calculate the best-fit carriers while benchmarking the costs, service, and lead time. 

Warehouse operators see a live overview of all open orders, together with a boxing proposal. With a simple click, they can print the shipping labels and place the parcel shipping booking with the parcel shippers. For larger organizations, the shipping module can even limit the choices for operators and select the best option based on business rules, further eliminating the error margin. 

Transmate can also tie in the ordering process itself, calculating the shipping costs on checkout using the boxing algorithms in the background. This allows quoting a competitive shipping price as it is taking the optimized cost based on the boxing configuration.

Linking with the parcel carriers, Transmate can send back shipping confirmations to the online shop or even to the customers directly. Transmate’s control tower overview can indicate which shipments are delayed and might need the shop owners' follow-up. Shipment actual delivery times are updated based on the carrier updates and KPIs are calculated in the background. Several embedded reports can be consulted on order status, performance and costs. 

Finally, Transmate’s invoice module allows the match of parcel invoices - yes these invoices can be complicated- and save time in invoice handling and administration. Several invoice audits can run to verify if all costs are according to the agreed-on costs and if demurrage or other additional charges are valid. 

After various implementations, ranging from custom webshops, Shopify, Magento, and others platforms, Transmate’s parcel shipping module and boxing calculation are embedded in the checkout process, the warehouse picking process, and the order fulfillment process. Shippers large and small are saving in parcel shipping costs and have streamlined their order fulfillment process using Tranmsate’s pick and pack functionality to quickly assemble all order items and ship them in the most efficient manner. Transmate is helping these shippers in saving on parcel shipping costs, by proposing optimized boxing solutions, placing the orders directly with the carriers, and generating the shipping labels.

If you are struggling with your online shop, get in touch with us! We can help you streamline your shipping process. We can help you reduce your shipping cost. We can help you with controlling parcel shipping invoices versus contracted costs. Do you want to know more? Get in touch with us!

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash