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7 Ways To Improve International E-Commerce Usability October 8, 2008

Posted by mniring in Online Merchants, Sell to China, Shipping.
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Reposted from: Palmer Web Marketing

The following guest post comes courtesy of Linda Bustos from the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.

When you run an ecommerce website, you have the potential to sell products to people around the world — even from your own basement. But many online retailers expect to make international sales without doing all they should to help convert international shoppers. Here are a few ideas to help make the online shopping experience smooth for your international customers.

1. Have an International Shipping page

Sure, you could have it buried in an FAQ section, Help area or some other hard-to-find place — but why not make it easy for users to find International Shipping policies by making it its own link visible from every page on the site?

The footer menu is a common location for shipping information, as is the top right hand corner of your page. Conventions like this have conditioned online shoppers to check these areas for shipping information. If it’s not there, customers might just assume it’s not available. Placing this information in one of the two areas the customer is likely to look is a good idea. Placing it in both areas is even better.

Avoid hiding International Shipping information in the “Help” section. People can’t find it easily by scanning the page they are on, and some associate the word “Help” with technical assistance, not customer service.

2. Include Important Information on Shipping Page

Whenever possible, clearly state your:

– Return policies
– Telephone customer service hours of operation (and time zones)
– Estimated shipping times
– Order tracking availability

A list of all countries you ship to is also recommended. Remind customers that they may have to pay additional duties and taxes depending on where they live.

3. Make Your Shipping Policy Searchable

Make sure your international shipping page can be found using your site’s internal search engine. It’s a good idea to program your search engine to deliver this page for searches for “international,” “intl,” “international orders” and “international customers” too.

4. Show International Shipping Availability on Product Pages

You may carry some products that you can’t ship abroad even if you can ship most products. For example, certain health supplements are legal in some countries and illegal in others. It’s a courtesy to mention this before the customer gets to the checkout.

5. Convert Currencies, Weights and Measures on the Product Page

Most of us can’t convert centimeters to inches in our heads (clothing size charts, for example) or kilograms to pounds, let alone currencies that fluctuate daily. Providing conversion tools can increase conversions!

6. Estimate Shipping Costs on Your Product Pages

E-Commerce usability rockstars offer shipping cost tools right on product pages, which not only helps international customers but also locals. FedEx, UPS and USPS all provide API access for your web developer to make this happen. Offering the tool at the product page level also will reduce your rate of abandoned carts.

7. Send a Post-Sale Email

If you can segment your customer database by location, you can send targeted follow up emails to your international customers. For example, as the Canadian dollar rises more Canadians will shop online at US stores. Motivate your Canadian customers to visit you again by offering free shipping, discounts or other offers. Or, send an email from time to time asking how you can improve the shopping experience for international users. Even if they don’t respond, you send a powerful message that your business cares about foreign shoppers.

Of course, your own usability testing with international customers is the best way to learn about how your own site can be improved. There are even consultancies that offer international usability testing services. But these seven tips will give you a head start.

Shipping Cost Reduction Strategies September 15, 2008

Posted by mniring in Online Merchants, Shipping.
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By: Maxim Mironov

Reprinted from: http://www.optimalogica.com/

There are two most commonly used strategies to reduce shipping cost: negotiate volume discounts or shop around each time for the best price. While both strategies produce results, consolidation is the better one for rapidly growing online retailers.

Strategy 1. Consolidation
Do an assessment of your current shipping agreements. Are you shipping on your account? Using vendor`s accounts? Working with a freight forwarder? If you work with many partners – likely you are a small fish for each of them. Promise to become a big one, share your shipment statistics and ask carriers to make you a proposal.

Even small retailers can significantly improve their shipping discounts by just doing the math and discussing their business. Shippers love volume and growth. Demonstrate both and 8 out of 10 carriers will offer you better discounts.

I dealt with 70,000 products being shipped from anywhere in the US to anywhere. Consolidating shipments with 2 carriers for each delivery method – UPS and FedEx for small parcels, Roadway and BAX for LTL and Sun Delivery and Home Direct for White Glove orders – proved to be the best strategy. By doing so I justified better discounts yet kept some flexibility to chose better shipper for specific cases. After figuring out BAX had excessive damage rate in one of their terminals I promptly switched vendor to Roadway and prevented further issues.

The choice you are to make is do you want to ship on your own account or work with a freight forwarder. To set up your accounts you need to learn a bit about the transportation industry and negotiate a lot. Freight forwarders usually look at your data and make a prompt offer. In your case going with a freight forwarder may be a better decision, but none of the forwarders came close to the discount rates I negotiated myself.

Along with reducing shipping costs you make your fulfillment transparent. Vendor ships the order using your UPS account, specifies your Purchase Order in the Reference Field and, voula, you have ship confirmation, expected delivery date and actual shipping cost.

Third benefit is scalability. By putting your logistics on autopilot you simplify vendor setup process. With a system in place setting up a new vendor takes less than an hour.

For the reasons above I believe that consolidation is a better strategy for online retailers. Having said this I still think that in some cases shopping around is a great strategy.

Strategy 2. Shopping around
The underlying assumption of the strategy is that shippers have underutilized routes (true), are willing to deliver your shipment for pennies to increase utilization (true) and you can catch those deals (sometimes true).

Some companies prefer to maintain rate tables for multiple carriers in their system and run a rate comparison for each shipment internally. Others utilize services like FreightQuote. Both ways have significant maintenance cost. Either you need to constantly synchronize rate tables with the carriers or you need a person who would manually obtain quotes from the freight comparison websites.

A sweet spot for the Shopping Around strategy is single large shipments and exceptions. Let`s say you have a container coming from China, or one of the customers wants a delivery to a lonely rock around Hawaii. These cases are to rare to focus on during your discounts negotiation and your default rate will likely be suboptimal.

In conclusion, I want to restate my recommendation for online retailers to consolidate shipments. Along with lower shipping costs you will make customer happier by providing them with accurate information about their orders and simplify your cost reconciliation process.