Traditionally, all stores have much more sales and orders on holidays when people start buying presents for their friends and families, as well as foods for holiday dinners and decorations for their homes.
Due to such volume of customers, the store owners often have some shipping-related problems. It is possible to Ship products without problems on holidays if your work is properly arranged.
Christmas and New Year are wonderful holidays full of light and joy which make many people believe that they can change their lives by simply making a wish at midnight. In order to share in this excitement with your customers, you can use bright and beautiful GoMage themes for Magento ® and broaden your range of goods. But what will please your customers most is receiving their purchases as fast as possible.
How To Meet Holiday Shipping Deadlines During The Holidays
The main rule is to never postpone something for tomorrow if you can do that today. This is a very bad habit that may negatively influence your business and your life in general. You must understand that the faster you send the purchase to a customer the more pleased they will be with your store’s service.
Try to always process the orders immediately after the transaction has been made. This will be very useful even if you cannot estimate a precise quantity of orders on the days before holidays. Also, you should be prepared for the approaching rush.
Make sure to inform your customers about the store working hours on holidays. It would be nice to place a banner with corresponding text on your site. Email notifications are also quite efficient and you may include there a slight hint for customers to get ready for coming holidays in advance.
Contact your shipping service beforehand. It is very often that shipping companies delay the delivery due to the increased volume of orders, even if you send the package in time. Try to develop the most convenient schedule for yourself, your customers and shipping companies. This especially concerns online stores which work with free shipping services.
For example, known Chinese sites Aliexpress and TaoBao set the approximate delivery date within 20-40 days on average, but on holidays such as Christmas, New Year and Chinese New Year they have so many orders that shipping companies do not cope with delivering them in time. As a result, some customers have to wait for their orders for several months. In order to avoid such a situation you should make all necessary arrangements with the paid shipping companies, they are much more accurate and have less load than free services.
Always answer customers’ emails. On holidays customers expect fast delivery and seamless refunds which is absolutely normal. But if you have no possibility to deliver the package in time for some reason, inform the customer about that. If a customer has written you an email to express their dissatisfaction answer it in appropriate manner and precisely explain the situation.
Another very useful piece of advice would be to wrap the items much more carefully than usual. Shipping companies experience heavy pressure on the days before holidays while on other days they work on a standard schedule. As a result of that we often get overloaded transport chambers and too many parcels to be delivered, so some of them may get damaged. If you are about to send fragile cargo – do not save money on its wrapping, it should at least have several layers of protection.
It is also very important to insure your cargo. When there are a lot of packages to be delivered there is always a possibility of their loss or damage. Make sure each of your packages is insured against theft, damage and other misfortunes. If you wish to include the insurance cost into customers’ payment summaries, inform your customers about that on your site.
If you follow the above recommendations you will not have any worries related to shipping products on holidays. Please ask your questions in comments or send them directly to our email, and GoMage experts will do their best to answer you as soon as possible.
