/Insights/How ShipperHQ and Codal solve shipping pains for eCommerce merchants

HowShipperHQandCodalsolveshippingpainsforeCommercemerchants

Mar 9, 2023

7 min. read

To build the most intelligent, cost-efficient eCommerce solutions possible for our clients, Codal partners with industry leading technology providers like ShipperHQ.

To build the most intelligent, cost-efficient eCommerce solutions possible for our clients, Codal partners with industry leading technology providers like ShipperHQ .

When it comes to eCommerce shipping, many merchants are struggling to meet the demand of today’s consumers—dealing with outdated legacy systems that are too complex and expensive.

Here’s a quick glance at the current state of eCommerce shipping:

63% of online shoppers will abandon their cart due to high shipping fees.

The average cost to fulfill an online purchase is 70% of the merchant’s average order value.

38% of consumers will cancel their order if the delivery takes longer than a week, and 15% will cancel if it takes between four to five days.

Luckily, implementing ShipperHQ can help solve the above challenges.

“Buyers have been conditioned to expect fast and free shipping, but we know that shipping isn’t ever ‘free’ for the merchant, and ‘fast’ is relative or impossible for some goods and destinations. It’s a race to the bottom for cost and to the front for speed and convenience. A merchant’s success hinges on customer experience and satisfaction. That decision to buy or fly happens very often at checkout and is highly influenced by shipping cost, options, convenience and timeliness.”

- Tristan Oker, Agency Channel Sales Manager at ShipperHQ

What is ShipperHQ and how does it work?

Offering a robust suite of built-in features and functionality, ShipperHQ is a no-code platform that integrates directly with the merchant’s eCommerce solution, allowing them to quickly and easily set up customized shipping rules, based on the unique buyer expectations and technical requirements of their business.

In our experience, we’ve learned that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to eCommerce shipping strategies. As the owner of an online store, you may want to provide free shipping for some items but not for others, special rates for certain customers, discounts for bundled purchases, and so on. Once these rules have been set up on your ShipperHQ dashboard, the rest is automated—allowing you save significant time, money, and resources on shipping related tasks.

When a customer purchases a product from your business online, ShipperHQ automatically finds the best negotiated shipping rate from multiple carriers, then bakes that into the final price at checkout. In addition to product type, recipient address, and your business’ pre-set rules, the algorithm chooses a carrier and calculates the cost for each order based on industry standards and regulations. For example, different shipping rules must be applied for residential versus commercial deliveries, some products—such as alcoholic beverages—can’t be shipped to certain regions, only certain carriers can handle hazardous material, and so on.

We’ll talk more about the benefits of ShipperHQ a little later. But first, let’s go back to the earlier days of eCommerce to see how the landscape has changed, and why tools like ShipperHQ are so important for today’s online merchants.

The evolution of eCommerce shipping

Just a few years ago, merchants could cover the cost of shipping for online purchases without significantly impacting their bottom line. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and eCommerce sales increased by $244.2 billion in a single year, the demand for shipping skyrocketed—and carriers like FedEx, UPS, and USPS had to onboard a deluge of new people and resources to keep up. As shipping demand increased, so did shipping rates, causing eCommerce companies to rethink their tools and processes for fulfilling orders.

And let’s not forget to discuss Amazon, which currently owns a 45% share of the US eCommerce market. When Amazon built its own carrier service, they were able to offer fast, streamlined fulfillment to merchants, cutting long-established carriers like UPS out of the equation.

Simply put, the eCommerce landscape has changed. The competition is greater, the cost of shipping is higher, and consumer expectations are stricter. As an online retailer in today’s world, maintaining a competitive edge requires a complex shipping strategy that supports low rates, speedy delivery, flexible pick-up/ drop-off options, gifting and group order functionality, and more.

Benefits of ShipperHQ

“ShipperHQ is a swiss army knife of solutions for delivering the best customer experience and ultimately increasing conversions. It allows merchants to offer fast and free shipping when and where it is possible, pickup options when convenient, and delivery dates in checkout that give customers assurance and visibility on when their order will arrive. That flexibility and accuracy provides each customer the best shipping options and experience possible for each cart, resulting in higher conversions—not to mention the cost savings from no longer undercharging for shipping or lost sales to competition.”

- Tristan Oker, Agency Channel Sales Manager at ShipperHQ

When working with clients that need to modernize a rigid legacy shipping system, Codal recommends ShipperHQ for these reasons:

Competitive rates speedy delivery: Based on the type of product, the recipient’s address, and a long list of other internal and external rules, ShipperHQ’s algorithm finds the carrier option with the lowest cost and fastest delivery. The total price, delivery date, and carrier details are then auto-populated for the customer at checkout—with no manual intervention required.

Dimensional packing: When shipping large, heavy, or bulky products, merchants often struggle to receive an accurate rate, causing them to either over or undercharge their customers. ShipperHQ solves for this by automatically determining the optimal packing configuration, based on the item’s dimensional weight.

In-store pickup: Customers like having the option to save money by picking up their delivery at a local retail location or warehouse, and they don’t like having deliveries sit on their doorstep while they’re away—which is why the buy online/ pick up in store (BOPIS) trend is here to stay. ShipperHQ provides the tools necessary to get BOPIS up and running quickly for eCommerce sites.

Insights transparency: ShipperHQ provides fulfillment details for every order, breaking down the costs of the shipping carrier, method, packing, and any additional fees. Merchants can then use this data to adjust their shipping logic and ultimately save time and money over time.

Seamless integrations: With a number of pre-built integrations and APIs, ShipperHQ can connect to the most widely used eCommerce platforms, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and WooCommerce.

Pairing advanced shipping technology with modern UX/UI design

In the Discovery stage of Codal’s eCommerce transformation projects, we gain a full understanding of the client’s shipping logic, then work with ShipperHQ to streamline the entire process. For some clients, it’s as simple as setting up the dashboard, entering their custom shipping rules, and letting ShipperHQ’s algorithm do the rest. But for online stores with complex customer experience requirements, we’re tasked with designing a UX/UI that allows brands—and their customers—to get the most out of what ShipperHQ has to offer.

The perfect example to point to here is a retail site with gifting and group ordering functionality—something that Codal has a lot of experience with. For example, when redesigning the eCommerce site for Garrett Popcorn, our team built a calendar feature that allows customers to select future delivery dates for gift items. This involved utilizing ShipperHQ’s API to send future order data from the client’s BigCommerce storefront to ShipperHQ, so the order could be fulfilled at the right time, for the best negotiated rate.

We also designed a checkout flow that supports large group orders, so that customers can send multiple items to multiple recipients in different locations—all under a single order. In this case, we had to make sure that every individual delivery in the group could get the best rate, and that the total shipping cost could be calculated and displayed automatically for the customer.

By working with ShipperHQ, we were able to design the ideal checkout and post-checkout experience for Garrett Popcorn—and bring that design to life with zero compromises. You can learn more about our eCommerce transformation for Garrett Popcorn here .

Make eCommerce more cost efficient for your business

Codal plans and executes eCommerce strategies for enterprise brands, helping them improve the customer experience, drive internal efficiencies, and maximize growth. To achieve this for our clients, we partner with industry leading technology providers like ShipperHQ.

Our designers and engineers have a deep technical understanding of how ShipperHQ—and other technologies like BigCommerce—work, allowing us to build modern digital ecosystems that scale. Not only do we help our clients select the right tools, we also help them maximize the ROI of those tools through superior eCommerce design, development, testing, and maintenance .

The Codal team has fully embraced ShipperHQ as a tool to help merchants win at checkout. The best demonstration of this technical know-how was shown when we had a very tight timeline to meet for an enterprise merchant right before the holiday rush. We had 3 days to get the merchant set up with live rates and accurate delivery dates. The Codal team rallied and worked closely with the ShipperHQ team to get this project off the ground and live within 72 hours. This led to an increase in conversion rates and a reduction in shipping costs right before their busiest season."

- Tristan Oker, Agency Channel Sales Manager at ShipperHQ

Topic

Unified commerce

Strategy

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