Shipping is a crucial aspect of a business, especially for businesses in the Direct-to-Consumer or D2C space. Acing your e-commerce/D2C shipping and setting up the right strategies for all your shipping needs are among the crucial factors that impact your store’s profitability.

Shipping is the first point of physical contact with your customers when it comes to online purchases. Hence, it is important to provide your customers with a great shipping experience to keep them returning to your e-commerce website.

  • 50% of customers abandon their carts due to high shipping costs, taxes, and other fees
  • 74% of shoppers find free shipping very important while checking out 
  • 38% of shoppers do not shop from the same brand again due to a negative delivery experience 
  • 93% of online buyers are motivated to buy more products if free shipping options are available
  • 58% of consumers add more items to their cart to make themselves eligible for free shipping

Why is it important to get a shipping partner?

If you have an e-commerce business of considerable size, there’s a good chance that you may have an entire team dedicated to processing shipping queries internally. However, in most other cases, e-commerce businesses need to partner with a reliable partner to take care of their shipping needs. 

It’s important to choose the right shipping partner as this entity will be responsible for directly interacting with your customer. The interaction, of course, depends on the quality of the delivery, the speed and hygienic procedures followed during the delivery. 

The impact of returns on shipping

Whether you’re an e-commerce store that’s just starting out or if you’ve been in the industry for ages, there is one common problem that all business owners can relate to– and that is the problem of RTO.

RTO is when orders cannot be delivered and have to be shipped back to the warehouse. This puts a significant cost burden on e-commerce firms as they lose a lot of money in shipping it back and forth.

Here’s how D2C companies lose money in shipping these orders:

  • Forward & reverse logistics
  • Blocked Inventory (Items stuck in transit)
  • Physical quality check and re-packaging of returned items
  • Increased probability of damage to fragile items, and hence more money spent in shipping them
  • Operations cost in processing this order

We took time out to see the actual numbers of RTO orders and what their share was. Here’s what we found– in the case of CoD orders, the percentage of RTO orders can be as high as 40 percent!

This means that at least one out of three orders were failed orders and were returned. When one-third of your orders have the potential to damage your bottom line, rather than adding value to it, it’s no doubt that the situation is worrisome.

However, with the all-new Razorpay Thirdwatch, you can now detect fraudulent patterns before shipping the order and significantly bring down RTO rates. 

How can Thirdwatch help supercharge your e-commerce store?

With ThirdWatch, you can detect impulse purchases, non-deliverable addresses, irregular purchase patterns and suspicious orders that can signal a cancellation.

How do we do it? 

Thirdwatch’s AI software generates risk reasons across 200+ risk parameters & takes only 200 milliseconds for generating Green or Red flags using algorithms like:

  • Complete address profiling
  • Device fingerprinting
  • Diagnosing network effects (Detecting fraudsters from across e-commerce in India)
  • Profiling user behaviour
  • Anomaly detection
  • Auto order confirmation
  • Converting a CoD order to Prepaid

Choose from a variety of features and apps such as Order Confirmation, PrePay CoD, Address Correction and many more, and supercharge your e-commerce business like never before!

How to choose the right shipping partner

Choosing the right D2C shipping partner can be easy if you follow a few steps. Here are some handy tips that you can follow while choosing a shipping partner for your business:

Partnered with many different companies: As a small to mid-sized business in omnichannel retail, it can be a tedious process to integrate and maintain relations with multiple partners like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, etc. However, with an experienced shipping partner, you can maintain cordial relationships and do business with ease.

Centralised dashboard: A shipping partner will also be able to provide you with a comprehensive, centralized dashboard that will allow you to manage all your shipping in one place.

Customer experience: A great shipping experience is crucial to maintain a good experience with your customers. Shipping partners will help you zero in on the best channels to help deliver your product safely and efficiently to your customers.

Allow us to introduce you to Razorpay and Thirdwatch’s partner and a great recommendation for your business- Shyplite.

Shyplite is a 360-degree logistics automation and fulfilment platform that enables your business to manage logistics by providing a single-window shipping platform that is integrated with multiple carriers. 

With a single dashboard to facilitate your shipping operations, they help you reach 26000+ pin codes with India’s best courier partners at affordable rates to satisfy all your shipping needs. 

Why you should opt for Shyplite

Through Shyplite’s dashboard, you can select from leading carrier partners across India with just one account, and prevent the hassle of individual integrations & billing. 

With Shyplite’s automated suite, you can integrate with multiple carriers in one go and avail all their services. Also, you can save time by using the automated booking process and enjoy economical shipping costs as well.

  • With the unified dashboard, you can book shipments, create labels for all channels at lightning speeds, and the process of bulk processing becomes as easy as it can be.

Forget about juggling worries because they are integrated with 15+ carrier partners including FedEx, Delhivery, Bluedart, Ekart, Xpressbees, DTDC, Shadowfax, Wow Express, OnlineXpress, Aramex, DHL, Dunzo, WeFast, and many more!

It is a tedious task to keep a track of the order and whether it has reached the customer. So, through their dashboard, you can track all your shipments in one place without ever visiting different carrier websites. 

  • Use Shyplite to get access to special discounted freights, lower shipping costs, and increased margins that allow you to grow and explore e-retailing
  • Shyplite’s service-based algorithm automatically selects a carrier for you, that matches the rates for all your partner carriers. This allows you to stop wondering about which carrier to choose for your orders
  • Book reverse shipments for any order with a single click, where our dedicated reverse logistics partners will arrive at your customer’s doorstep to collect the particular shipment/package.

This enables you to have an efficient supply chain and a hassle-free experience regarding the return of any shipment/delivery. 

  • To reduce the burden of subscriptions and sign-ups, Shyplite works on a pay-as-you-go model, where monthly subscriptions or minimum shipment charges aren’t required. 
  • Since Shyplite also has integrations with various shopping carts, you can connect your store with our dashboard without any inconveniences, and we will also import all the orders from your store that you desire to ship as well.

To make business easier for you, here is the list of integrated stores that Shyplite has partnered with:

  • Amazon
  • Shopify
  • Woocommerce 
  • Magento
  • Opencart
  • Flipkart
  • Ecwid

But wait, there’s more! Shyplite is also partnered with the host of other popular platforms such as:

  • Unicommerce
  • Zoho Inventory
  • OMSGuru
  • Vinculum
  • Clickpost & many more

Getting back on track with Shyplite back-to-business

Ever since a nationwide lockdown was imposed on 24th March 2020 as a preventive measure to limit the spread of COVID-19, like all industries, the e-commerce sector was also greatly impacted. 

As the government had restricted the delivery of non-essential goods and only essential items could be delivered to the customers, the Shyplite team worked endlessly with their courier partners to prioritize deliveries of essential products.

Soon after the first phase of unlocking was announced by MHA, Shyplite was proactive in enabling sellers to identify pin codes as red, orange, or green zones. Today, we are now serving more than 26,000 pin codes across India for both essential & non-essential deliveries.

How to Get Started with Shyplite

You can get started with Shyplite with just a few easy steps and in very little time.

Step 1.  Register at Shyplite

Step 2.  Complete your KYC

Step 3.  Add funds to your account

Step 4.  Start Shipping!

What’s the best part, you ask us? If you sign up soon, you also avail up to 10% cashback!

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