Shipping is more than just delivering a package to its location; it’s a key part of the customer’s experience which can make or break your eCommerce business. Fast, reliable, and cost-effective shipping helps build trust, increase repeat purchases, and boost customer satisfaction. But with the changing market, trends, evolving logistical solutions, and growing customer expectations, it is important to have a strong shipping strategy in 2025.
As an Indian eCommerce seller, you need to go through different factors like choosing the right courier partner, optimising warehousing, managing shipping costs, and selecting the best possible delivery options. Each decision changes your business’s efficiency, customer loyalty, and profits. This blog breaks down the important shipping practices that will help you streamline operations, and deliver a seamless experience to your buyers at a low or budget-friendly cost.
Important Factors to Consider Before Shipping
Efficient shipping starts with smart planning! So before you ship, make sure that you consider these crucial factors to ensure smooth, cost-effective deliveries, and an enhanced customer experience.
Product Size and Weight
The size and weight of your products directly impact the shipping costs, carrier selection, and packaging choices. Most couriers calculate charges based on actual weight or volumetric weight (size of the package). Use lightweight but sturdy packaging to avoid unnecessary costs, weigh and measure products accurately to get the right shipping rate, and check courier weight limits to avoid issues with heavy shipments.
Shipping Destinations and Coverage
Where your customers are located affects your shipping time and cost. Metro cities usually have faster deliveries with different courier options, whereas small towns and remote areas may take longer shipping times due to limited services. To further ensure smooth delivery:
- Always check pin code coverage before promising to ship
- Use multiple warehouses to store products closer to your customers
- If you are shipping internationally, be aware of customs rules and add any extra charges involved
Proper planning can help you deliver efficiently and avoid unexpected delays.
Choosing the Right Shipping Partner
Your shipping partner plays an important role in ensuring smooth and timely deliveries. The wrong choice can lead to higher costs, delays, and dissatisfied customers. To avoid this, you can compare courier options as per delivery speed, cost, and reliability. Choose a service which provides you with tracking features, allowing your customers to stay updated on their orders. Or you can use a multi-carrier shipping platform like Shiprocket as it provides you with access to multiple courier partners, helping you choose the best option for every shipment.
Warehousing and Inventory Management
According to a report, 34% of businesses have shipped an order late because they inadvertently sold a product that was not in stock. Efficient warehousing and inventory management ensure that your products are stored safely and shipped on time. A well-organised warehouse reduces delays, minimises errors, and improves overall shipping efficiency. Choose a warehouse location strategically to reduce transportation time and shipping costs. Here are some quick tips to optimise warehouse management:
- Organise inventory using SKUs and barcode systems for easy tracking.
- Store fast-moving products closer to the packaging station for quick processing.
- Automate order processing to minimise manual work and errors.
- Use demand forecasting to restock products efficiently and avoid shortages.
eCommerce Shipping Process Explained
Whether you’re starting your business from scratch, or running it successfully across multiple channels, your eCommerce shipping process must be straight. A smooth and efficient shipping process is important for customer’s satisfaction and business growth. It includes different steps from receiving an order to final delivery. Streamlining and planning each stage ensures faster shipping process with fewer errors and lower costs.
- Shipping Policy: How do you plan to address your customer queries related to shipping, without something to stick to? Exactly! That’s what you need a shipping policy for!
- A well-defined shipping policy sets clear expectations for your customers and helps you build trust in them. The shipping policy should outline shipping timelines, available delivery options, costs, and return policies.
- Shipping Rates: Mention whether you’re offering flat-rate shipping, free shipping, or threshold-based free shipping. It puts a clear picture of your business in front of the customer.
- Tip: If your shipping costs vary based on your customer’s purchase, it is wise to add a shipping rate calculator at the checkout.
- Delivery SLAs: Do you offer same-day delivery for your products? Mention it in your shipping policy page. Providing the information on how long you take to deliver your customer’s packages, is definitely something that will help them in proceeding with purchase from your store. This way they’ll know when to expect the product at their doorstep.
- Shipping Carriers: Customers want to know the couriers you use to ship products so that they know where to expect tracking messages in their inbox. Also, it gives them a sense of trust if they have heard of the courier partner before. Even though this is not completely necessary, you can choose to show it in your policy to boost confidence among customers
- International Shipping Guidelines: Be sure to divulge this information, if you offer international shipping to entice any potential customers.
- Delivery Exceptions: Delivery exceptions must be highlighted in your policy pages to establish transparency. For example, if you don’t ship to specific areas, mention it in the policy.
Packaging and Branding for Better Shipping
Once your shipping options are straight, the next element of the fulfillment process that you must focus on is the packaging and marketing. Whether you realise it or not, your packaging plays a huge role in determining your shipping costs.
As the eCommerce industry grows more and more with each passing day, packaging and shipping have moved from being the mere tools of order fulfillment to one of the biggest factors responsible for customer satisfaction. Your packaging can be a huge selling factor for your brand. And if you go by the saying, the first impression is the last impression, you’ve got one more reason to pay attention to your product’s packaging.
However, if you’ve been neglecting it, it might be one of the reasons for your inflated shipping costs.
Choosing the Right Packaging Materials
Selecting the right packaging material is important to ensure your product is safe during transportation. Make sure you are using sturdy, corrugated boxes for fragile items, tamper-proof poly bags for lightweight products, and eco-friendly packaging options to attract environment-conscious buyers.
Follow a Uniform Packaging Process
Maintaining consistency in packaging can help you streamline operations and make sure that you look professional. Try to use standardised packaging for different product categories and label packages correctly for easy tracking and identification.
Best Packaging Practices
Following the best packaging practices can help you prevent damages, reduce returns, and improve your customers satisfaction. Here are the best packaging practices you must look out for:
- Use bubble wraps for safekeeping delicate products.
- For business products, use boxes or envelopes
- Easy fold mailers or side loaders can be used to pack books etc.
- If shipping lightweight non-fragile products like socks, you can use poly mailers.
- Avoid oversized packaging to reduce shipping costs.
- Seal packages properly to avoid any damage during transportation
- For branded packaging, use ribbons, personalised notes, craft papers, and more.
Shiprocket’s Packaging Solutions
Shiprocket Packaging offers high-quality and affordable packaging materials customised for your eCommerce shipping. It has a wide range of packaging solutions like boxes, tapes, and polybags which are durable and cost-effective materials to ensure product safety. Shiprocket makes the packaging available for bulk purchases which can help your business save on packaging costs.
How to Choose the Best Shipping Carrier
One of the final steps of the eCommerce shipping process, where you must pay attention is choosing the right carriers for your business. The right carrier can help you improve your customers satisfaction and boost your businesses reputation. Here’s what you must consider-
- Calculate shipping costs: Unless you get an estimate of your shipping costs, how will you put your best efforts in minimising it? For this reason, consider all the important elements that are contributing to your shipping cost. These include:
- Package weight
- Size of your package
- Origin Pin Code
- Destination Pin Code
- Insurance (If you’re offering)
Once you’ve listed down all these parameters, you can enter them in a rate calculator tool to know your shipping costs.
An ideal rate calculator tool must also be able to provide you with a comparison of rates by different courier partners. It will help you in minimising your shipping costs by handing over your parcel to the lowest cost partner.
- Use the Courier recommendation Engine: Alternatively, if you have a hard time finding the right courier partner for your company, you can also use a courier recommendation engine that will find the right partner for your products (like Shiprocket). All you require to do is provide the tool with your shipping priority, whether you want to ship with the cheapest partner or the top-rated.
- Calculate your margins: Pricing your product for the customer requires a number of factors to be taken into consideration. But if you need to be successful in the world of eCommerce, keeping an eye on profits must never be neglected. And shipping contributes to a significant chunk of your business costs, which is why you must always include them in your product pricing.
- Tip: Represent all your costs in a tabular format when finalising your pricing. It is because until you actually list all your costs, you may be surprised by how quickly little charges add up.
Conclusion
Shipping can undoubtedly be a challenge for eCommerce sellers. And these challenges are bound to be unique concerning the nature of your business. To overcome these, you’ll need to work hard by adopting different practices and keeping a check on what’s working for your business. Just like many aspects of your business that take time in the building, tweaking, and working your way to customer satisfaction through shipping will require your patience but will ultimately pay off.
Ready to take your shipping game to the next level? Start implementing these strategies today and streamline your logistics for smoother, faster, and cost-effective deliveries!
