In the Spotlight: Shipping Weight Management

Processing hundreds or thousands of shipments every day means even the smallest inefficiency in your shipping process can stack up unnecessary costs. Changing how you allocate and ship parcels according to their weight can be revolutionary.

One of the most popular and effective ways of improving costs, despatch speed and your customer’s delivery experience is to control how shipment weight is distributed, what It’s printed with and how it should be processed at the despatch point.

Here’s some tried and tested examples built into Shipster:

Weighing in: Scales or Product Data

Let’s start with where your parcel weight comes from. The rest of this article shares various ways you can process shipments according to their weight. At your packing bench at the moment of despatch, Shipster can take weights from connected digital scales, the order’s product(s) data or a manual input. From there, you can have automatic shipping rules dictating what service the shipment should go on, how, when and what with.

Shipster can process shipping rules and command using the following:

- Total order weight (from scales or product data)
- Total number of items
- Number of large and small items
- Item or product types

Parcel Splitting

If an order is inefficient to ship as one large shipment or mailing bag, you can use automatic rules triggering a “split parcel” function. The parcel splitting can be completely automatic e.g. 2KG shipments go into 2 parcels and 3KG shipments go into 3 parcels, or, for a little more human decision making, a pop-up box can allow the user to click a button saying how many parcels they want.

It’s sometimes more cost-effective and convenient to the end-customer to send multiple smaller parcels than arrange for one large parcel delivery.

Auto-Select Courier According to Weight or Size

Oversize shipments usually require some form of extra handling and the level of service varies from courier to courier. You may have a preferred courier for shipments that meet a certain size, weight or product type criteria.

Different Documentation

There are dozens of reasons why heavy parcels might need different documentation to your smaller ones. Items marked up as “large”, “XL”, “Oversize”, or over “x KG” can have additional or different versions of documents printed with them, e.g. different customer return instructions.

Customer Collection

If your customers have selected to pick-up a large order, these orders can have the delivery automatically changed to the relevant store address. We also suggested printing an additional label for warehouse staff printed with “FOR COLLECTION”.

The Right Packaging

Shipping parcels in the best size packaging can make all the difference. For example, items labelled “letter-sized” or “small” could ship via large letter-sized boxes which can be significantly more cost-effective than slightly larger boxes.

Override

Give yourself the option of overriding data at the point of despatch. This is key in cases where a product range has incorrect data or you decide to re-classify an individual parcel’s size or weight for a unique scenario.