9 Ways to Cut Shipping Expenses with your Shipping Rules

Shipster can be a great tool for cutting down your shipping expenses. Through our numerous shipping rules you can fully customise your Shipster to save you the most money when packing and shipping parcels. Here are 9 of the most common rules our clients use to reduce expenditure.

1) Automate decisions - In general, the more shipping rules you have, the more that the decision-making process when packing orders is automated. This decreases the chance of human error and means your warehouse can ship orders quicker with no extra workers. Shipster’s ability to save you time is what makes it most cost-effective

2) Heavy/Bulky Items - For most couriers, the heavier or larger a parcel is, the more it costs to post. We can write shipping rules that select a service based on the weight or dimension of an order which ensures it is sent in the most affordable way.

3) Customs Documents - For packages going to countries that need airway bills or CN22s, these documents can be automatically printed and filled in. As well as ensuring these documents are printed when necessary, the information is more likely to be correct which helps you and your customers avoid fines or extra charges at borders. For some couriers, customs information can be sent electronically instead which also saves money on printing costs.

4) Delivery Cost vs Item Cost - Often you may not want to choose an expensive delivery option that is tracked or insured if it would be more affordable to replace or refund the items instead. Similarly to the heavy/bulky rule, you can map rules to only choose more expensive shipping options when the order’s price is over a certain value. This ensures you aren’t paying extra for unnecessary enhancements.

5) Split into Multiple Parcels - Sometimes it is more cost effective to split a large order into multiple parcels sent separately than one big one. This rule triggers a pop up, either for every order or based on certain conditions, asking the packer how many parcels the order should be split into. The weight is then split accordingly. This is especially helpful when integrating with couriers that have restrictive weight limits per parcel.

6) Destination - Choose to also vary the courier and service selection based on the destination country of each package. Often the courier that can give you the best deal for your domestic orders may not be the cheapest option for your international ones. This is one of the most popular methods used to cut shipping expenses with most of our clients utilising this rule.

7) Weekends - A great way to cut your shipping expenses is by having different rules enabled on weekends when delivery is more likely to function differently. For example, often a next day service is more likely to be more expensive or slower on a weekend day (especially Sunday). You could instead add a rule to send orders on more economical service, or simply turn off certain days so any orders process will not be scheduled for despatch until the next enabled day.

8) Packaging Selection – Clever use of shipping rules can also help you cut the cost of packaging by enabling our packaging selection pop up. After scanning items, this pop up asks the packer what packaging type is most appropriate (such as large letter vs small parcel). This allows the decision about packaging to be made when the packer knows for sure what will be appropriate. As well as reducing the likelihood that packaging will be too big which is a waste of money, it also means unexpectedly small orders will be sent on a more affordable service.

9) Address Correction - Through shipping rules, Shipster can automatically fix common address mistakes and ensure postcodes or country codes are formatted correctly. This is especially useful in the case of shipping to islands that have their own country codes despite being in the territory of another country (such as Jersey). By reducing address mistakes, your parcels are less likely to get ‘returned to sender’, thus saving you money.