Streamlining the Shipping Process for Your Home Business

If your home business involves selling tangible items, shipping may be one of your biggest challenges. It's exciting to see your orders roll in, so don't let the wrapping and shipping process drain your energy and take valuable time away from drumming up more sales. Fortunately, you can streamline the labor-intensive shipping process, so review  these tips that work for home businesses of any size.

Prepare Items in Batches

Economies of scale are by far the biggest advantage that large companies may have over smaller ones. Not only is it less expensive to purchase products in bulk, but shipping is also more efficient when it's done all at once. Though you may not be shipping on a vast corporate scale, you can still profit from bulk order processing even before certain orders are verified.

If you've been in business for a while, you know which items are most popular with customers. If you've been selling 10 units of a certain item each week for more than a year, it's a pretty sure bet that the coming week brings 10 more orders for that item. Save time by pre-assembling the most popular orders in appropriate quantity. Make sure the packages are ready for pickup in advance, so all you need to do is apply the shipping label and contact your shipping service when the order comes in.

Designate Certain Days for Shipping

This batch approach to packing orders works even better if you designate certain days, or certain times of each day for order fulfillment. This may help you stay on track with your marketing, networking and sales efforts as you have a routine going on for the more mundane, yet necessary, aspects of running your business. If you're taking time away from creating and marketing, you are reducing the volume your small business can process, and you're missing out on all the fun of running your own store.

Try setting aside two days a week for order processing and fulfillment. If you've chosen Tuesday and Thursday for shipping days, for example, focus on the lead generation, marketing and expansion activities on the other days in a big way, but also make them a part of every day. So the end result is you are still on track to grow your business, expand your inventory, delight your customers, while you're able to ship in batches as time permits. 

Do Your Homework Early On

All that batch shipping can lead to sinking a day's work into tracking down shipping codes and researching postal regulations. This is made far more tedious if your business ships internationally. Every country has its own postal laws. and sometimes no two postal codes are fully compatible. While handling domestic shipping can be as easy as accessing the online USPS shipping calculator, you’ll likely need help to send packages to locations outside the United States. 

Here's a great example of where technology saves the day. Consider subscribing to an online shipping service or use the U.S. Postal Service's Click and Ship feature. It will help take the guesswork out of interpreting the translated postal regulations of countries all over the world, and simply print exactly the right label, at just the right price, in seconds.

You probably didn't go into business for yourself so you could spend endless hours packing and shipping things from the warehouse. That tends to happen, though, if your home business starts to expand while you're still wrapping every package by hand and applying postage. Try bundling your shipments in batches on designated shipping days, and don't be averse to investing in a good shipping service for navigating the world of postal regulations. By streamlining the small business shipping process, you free yourself to focus at last on the sort of work you always wanted to do.