Unlocking the secrets of successful Direct-to-Consumer businesses

Loyalty is a big word. Almost every business decision is inspired by the idea of building customer loyalty because it leads to repeat purchases, higher customer satisfaction, enhanced brand recognition, and increased revenues. 

In fact, 80 percent of your company’s future revenues will come from just 20 percent of your existing customers (yeah, yeah, the old but gold Pareto rule).

So now, more than ever, it is necessary for e-commerce stores to make customer loyalty at the heart of their strategy. Loyalty means building a strong bond with your customers, and this bond comes from experiencing multiple positive interactions with your brand. Keep in mind that consistency is key.

Having a great product and a beautiful e-commerce website isn’t enough anymore and since almost all the interactions happen online, building a loyal customer base is harder than ever and to do that you’ll need to put all your effort on a more concrete and physical factors (I’ll let you guess which ones it is): Logistics and shipping. 

In today’s article, we’ll explore how logistics can help you build a strong relationship with your customers and increase customer loyalty. For that we designed a list of important factor you’ll need to take into consideration:

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1. Shipping is a key factor for e-commerce:

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Shipping and logistics are a determining factor in the purchase decision of online shoppers, actually, almost half of the shoppers (46%) said that one of the key factors in the online buying decision is a convenient and personalized delivery service, according to a survey by Sorted. 

Understanding the importance of omnichannel logistics and shipping for your e-commerce success and focusing on providing the best delivery experience is the first step for building better and long-lasting relationships with your customers. 

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2. Forecasting is mandatory:

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One of the most frustrating things for customers is to select the product they look for to find it out of stock. To avoid that, you’ll need to master the art of supply and demand. So make sure to commit some time to regularly review your forecast and calculate your safety stock. 

Forecasting will help you anticipate future peaks in demand and be fully prepared in terms of supply and production.

Maintaining an accurate inventory is key to ensure success in your operations. For that, you can implement a livestock counter and activate alerts to notify you when an item reaches low numbers.

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3. Choose the right logistics provider:

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When it comes to managing your logistics, you can either do it in-house or outsource it to a logistics provider. If you opt for the latter option, make sure you choose the right one.

Customers don’t see a difference between the carrier delivering their order and the brand they buy from; for them, it is all the same shopping experience. This means your provider will be a direct reflection of your brand. Your partner’s employees will be the ones facing and interacting with customers when the product is delivered, and their contribution plays a huge part in your customers’ satisfaction.

Since cashiers, shop employees, and other crucial customer-facing roles are removed from the equation in e-commerce, it is important for digital-native brands to choose a provider that communicates the same message and values.

There are many factors to consider while choosing a logistics solution and having a partner that performs at the same standards as yours is crucial for your overall success.

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4. Transparency is a must-have:

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Loyalty begins with trust and to ensure trust, you’ll need to be 100 percent honest and transparent with your customers.

Customers nowadays think and compare offers before making their buying decisions. To do that, they need to know the exact price of the order (shipping included) before entering their payment details. 

To provide maximum transparency, make sure to clearly specify your different shipping options, expected dates for delivery, shipping costs and all the taxes associated with it, and return conditions. This will also allow a smooth checkout process and an increase in conversion rates.

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5. Offer different shipping options:

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Customers are all different. Some of them have already finished their fall’s shopping by June, while some others didn’t even buy a swimsuit for their next week’s holidays in Spain.  

As an e-commerce, you should be able to satisfy both types of customers. Those who perceive time as a luxury they can’t afford and those who have plenty of time (4 or 5 days, don't push it!!) to wait for their shipment to arrive. 

To satisfy them, you will have to offer different shipping options. There are many options to explore. You can provide express delivery for your impatient customers or (cheaper) standard delivery for the ones who aren’t in a rush. You can also opt for click and collect or in-store pickup.

Free shipping is also an option you must consider. According to Pitneybowes, 91% of customers leave when shipping isn’t free or fast enough and 79% prefer the shipping to be free rather than fast. So if you can afford it, make sure to offer it as it is a big boost for sales, marketing, and conversion rates.

Another highly important factor to implement is live-tracking. Giving your customers the opportunity to track and see at which stage their order is, is crucial for customer satisfaction. You can set an automatic tracking email to update your customers about their orders.

Remember, customers nowadays are self-centric and they expect you to provide the options that fit in with their lifestyle and needs. 

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_{Bigblue Tips
Simplify your checkout and skyrocket conversions! Bigblue's Pick Up Point app lets Shopify store owners integrate seamlessly with leading carriers like Mondial Relay. This means your customers can choose a convenient pickup point at checkout, leading to a smoother shopping experience and more satisfied customers. You can also always contact Bigblue to diversify your delivery method with our partnership of more thatn 20 European carriers.}

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6. Positively surprise your customers:

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To convince customers to buy again and again from your e-commerce, you’ll need to stand out (positively!) from the crowd. 

Think about a new customer who purchased at your store for the first time and just received their order, if everything went fine, they should already be satisfied. Surprising them with a discount voucher is an invaluable opportunity to upgrade their experience and make them think about their next purchase. 

You can add a thank you note (politeness is always better) or gifts like stickers, samples, etc. in your shipments and even if it seems insignificant, adding up all these small gestures will have an undeniable impact on the bond you build with each customer.

Another important trend you should focus on is personalization. Customers nowadays want their purchase to be unique (because they’re unique, aren’t they?). So being able to personalize your packages is an excellent opportunity to prove them that you care and to strengthen your relationship with them.

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7. Implement convenient returns processes:

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When a customer receives an order and isn’t 100 percent satisfied (or just changed their mind, after all, the customer is always right), they are likely to send it back. While returns aren’t an ideal thing for e-commerce, it is something that cannot be avoided. Thus, the only option that lies before you is to make these returns an opportunity to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

According to Invesp, 92% of consumers will buy something again if returns are easy. So easing their return experience will not only help you gather positive reviews but also boost your sales.

The first thing to do is definitely to optimize your products’ pages by including high-quality pictures and detailed descriptions that accurately represent the product. This will help you reduce your return rate. 

You also have to build an effective return policy and to make it easily accessible on your website. Make sure to give clear instructions on how returns should be done and don’t forget to highlight the different options that your customers can choose to make their return (along with transparency, flexibility is the cherry on top of the cake). 

Don’t forget to include the return label in the parcel, this will save your customers’ time and it will let them handle almost all the process without needing your assistance. 

In case they do need your assistance, you should also make your customer service available to answer their inquiries. 

Having a smooth and painless return process will increase the trust customers have with your brand and ensure repeat purchases in the future.

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8. Ensure a great followup:

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Follow up is a must-have if you want to get closer to your customers and show them that you care about them. A few days after the order delivery, send them an email to collect their feedback and gauge their satisfaction.

Keep strengthening the relationship with different emails that highlight your new products, promotions, relevant content, and stories related to your brand and your customer base.

Finally, in order to increase customer loyalty toward your brand, you’ll need first to build trust with your customers and constantly (consistency is key here) nurture the relationship through all the different actions we highlighted above. This will undeniably make you stand out from the crowd and will ensure success for your e-commerce brand. 

It’s frustrating when you think of a customer getting all the way to the shopping cart, only to lose out on the sale. The good news is that there are proven ways to reduce your cart abandonment rates without totally overhauling your e-commerce store. In this post, we’ll share 7 proven tips to reduce cart abandonment.

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Let’s face it, we all have been, at least once, frustrated to get a customer filling his cart with items, only for him to leave before completing the purchase. Unlike in the real world where customers just walk into your store, fill their shopping cart and go to the cashier to pay, in the world of e-commerce, customers get distracted more frequently, whether it is by the ads of one of your competitors, or by this video of a small dog playing football. I mean, it already happened to all of us, start our shopping on an e-commerce website, then find ourselves 3 hours later watching the 4th episode in a row of our favorite TV show (Rick and Morty, of course) and never return to that website again.

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The good news is, there are proven strategies to reduce cart abandonment and checkout drops. In this article, we’re gonna discuss the main reasons behind these behaviors and provide practical solutions to implement in order to reduce your cart abandonment and checkout drops.

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But before we get started, let’s go through the basics and define the terms for those who may not know them.

• Shopping cart abandonment: When a customer adds an item to his shopping cart but leaves the e-commerce store before completing the purchase. ‍
• Checkout process: The process of buying the products after a customer puts them in his shopping cart. It includes several steps: filling in the shipping information, payment information, confirming the order and the payment.‍
• Checkout drop: When a customer leaves your website during the checkout process. 
  

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According to Statista, in 2018, 7 out of 10 shopping carts were abandoned, it's huge. Decreasing your cart abandonment rate can have a big impact on your bottom line and to do it, you’ll need first to understand the reasons behind it:

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As you can see in the graph above from Baymard’s study on cart abandonment, the main reasons behind these drops are related to:

• Extra costs (shipping, fees, taxes) that made the total cost either too high or unclear for the customer.
• The customer experience in itself with a complicated checkout process, a mandatory account creation or unclear return policies. 
• The payment, whether it is a lack of methods or a lack of trust.
  

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According to a study made by Business Insider, another reason for abandoning shopping carts is, customers aren’t ready to purchase as they were are browsing to compare final prices with other e-commerce websites or just wanted to save the cart for later.   

With that in mind, we can assume that it’s almost impossible to cut down your abandonment rate entirely as some people will inevitably leave before crossing the line and making a purchase. However, it’s definitely not impossible to address some of the issues stated above and thus improve your conversion rates. For that, in the next part of the article, we’ll be looking at 7 optimisation ways:

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1. Offer Free Shipping:

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As you’ve seen it above, shipping is the major reason for cart abandonment. I mean there’s nothing more frustrating than expecting to pay one price, then only to find at the end that you’ll have to pay outrageous shipping costs. In a study conducted by Invesp about the influence of free shipping in the online buying decision, orders with free shipping average around 30% higher in value and 93% of online customers are encouraged to buy more products if free shipping is available. So offering free shipping does not only help you decrease your cart abandonment rate but also increase your average order value.

You can also use it as a powerful marketing option to differentiate yourself from your competition but (yes, there’s always a but) free doesn’t mean free of cost. You’ll still need to pay for the logistics provider to get your products delivered to your customers.

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In the case offering free shipping is not profitable for your business, there are still many good ways to implement it. Offering it only when a certain threshold is reached for the order is one way out many others. Amazon, for example, uses the $25 as the threshold. Don’t set any random price, make sure that the amount you choose covers the shipping costs. 

Knowing that 9 out of 10 consumers say free shipping is the number 1 incentive to shop online more, showcasing it on your home page can help you convert more leads into customers as soon as they enter your website. Clarifying your shipping costs upfront will definitely help you build trust with your visitors. Daniel Wellington, for example, advertises it prominently on its homepage:

^{If you want to know more, check our article about the 4 best shipping strategies for an e-commerce website.}

2. Implement a single page checkout:

One of the best ways to reduce shopping cart abandonment and checkout drops is to eliminate all the unnecessary pages during the checkout process. 

As we’ve seen it above, one of the main reasons for customers leaving your website is, the checkout process is either too long or complicated. (customers don’t want to go through 5 or 6 different pages to complete their purchase) 

Providing a single page checkout gives customers an incentive to complete the transaction by having all the required fields on the same page and thus making simpler and faster. It also gives fewer reasons for your visitors to leave the page and skip off to another tab. 

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An important thing to keep in mind when designing your single page checkout is to de-clutter it as much as possible. Try to limit the amount of information you ask, use smart forms and leverage Google’s autofill to make it easier for users to check out. 

Also, make sure to remove on the checkout page all the links, ads and navigations that don’t support your end goal of converting the visitor into a customer. This will reduce the number of attractions that he has and thus boost your conversion rates.

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According to an experiment run by Invesp, in some cases, a single-page checkout is better than a multi-page, while in other cases multi-page converted better. When it comes to high priced products, the multi-page process performed better while single-page checkouts converted better when the average order value was low. So try to A/B test, and see which one is better for your business.

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In case, you opt for a multi-page checkout, make sure to include a progress indicator on the pages. This will reassure visitors regarding the time they’re going to spend on your website. It also makes the process clearer and easier to understand. 

You can also track during which stage of the checkout process your customers leave your website. This will help you determine where the leaky spots are in your funnel and thus take the necessary actions to boost your conversions. 

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^{TIP: Include the remember me button, so that your customers won’t have to fill all their information (if they want, of course) next time they purchase from your website.}

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3. Enable guest checkout:

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Asking your customers to mandatory create an account before completing the checkout process is definitely one of the most frustrating things for them (I am not surprised to see it ranked as the second biggest reason for cart abandonment). Filling the form, confirming an email address, and then returning to the checkout page is a lot to ask of a customer who may like your products but doesn’t necessarily want to build a relationship with you (and receive an email with your amazing offers every 2 or 3 days).

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In his article about enabling guest checkouts, Jared M. Spool tells the story of when one shopper told them that he was not there to enter into a relationship, but he just wanted to buy something. Deleting the mandatory sign up (by changing only one button) helped him increase a retailer’s site annual revenues by $300 million.

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Removing the mandatory sign-up will make the process easier for your customers and thus boost your sales and conversion rates. You might miss some of the data that every e-commerce wants, but if you offer a smooth experience, these customers are more likely to come back in the future.

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<sup>TIP: You can still integrate the option for signing up in some other stages:

- Ask users if they wanna sign up after completing their purchase on the ‘Thank You’ page (we hope you’ve got one).
- Allow users to sign up directly with their social media accounts.</sup>

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4. Offer secured payment:

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After all the stories that happened lately with websites losing their customers' private information (yes, I'm talking about you Target), people are increasingly worried about their payment and personal data privacy.

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Showing your visitors that your site and their information is secure can help you build trust and this will be a big push for them to shop on your website. The easiest way is:

• Have a valid SSL Certificate. If it’s out of date, your customers will be warned by their browser that the connection is not secure.
• Show security and trust badges for online payment.
  

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According to the Baymard Institute, here are the most trusted SSL and trust seals:

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Don’t forget to provide different payment methods depending on your customers. You can also use online payment services such as Paypal or Google Pay

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5. Provide clear communication and 24/7 customer support:

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Your customers will inevitably have questions during their journey on your website, thus providing clear and easily accessible information about your processes is crucial. 

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A great way to do so is by designing a well-organized FAQ and help centers. You’ll need to make sure it is visible and easy to access for your customers in case they have a question regarding your products or your processes. Knowing that unclear information about return and shipping processes are one of the top reasons for cart abandonment, you’ll need to clearly highlight and showcase your return policy and shipping details (time, cost, methods, etc).

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In order to offer 24/7 support, you can integrate a live chat, as 53% of customers prefer to use online chat before calling a company for support. It is an effective way for hesitant customers who are about to checkout. It also provides a better solution to email, which is too slow, and phone calls, which get in the way of the checkout process. Botmind, for example, is a hybrid chatbot solution that can automate 40% of your chat support.

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^{If you want to know more about customer service, don't hesitate to check our last article on the best helpdesks and customer support tools.}

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6. Optimise navigation and shopping cart experience:

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In order to reduce your checkout drops and cart abandonment rate, you’ll also have to optimise your shopping cart experience (logical, right?). 

Make sure to provide easy access to your shopping cart, also allow smooth navigation between cart and store because the easier you make it for your customers, the more likely they’re to checkout. 

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So first, make sure that the shopping cart is always visible on every page of your website. The easier you make it for your customers, the more likely they’re to go all the way through checkout. Try to eliminate all friction by integrating your shopping cart as a pop-up page that would show without having to go back and forth (the only back you want, is the one in “come back”).

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Then, offer customers the chance to buy immediately or continue shopping so that whenever your customer lands on a product page, he can purchase the product directly or add the product to the cart and continue shopping. Also, allow the users to update the quantity of items during the checkout process without having to delete the whole selection.

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Finally, use persistent shopping carts so that your visitors can find the selection from their previous abandoned cart. This will help them gain time and pick up from where they left off next time. 

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7. Reach out to your customers:

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Some abandonment can not be prevented but some can be converted with a little push. You can use retargeting through Facebook’s Pixel by adding a tag on your website and use it to track visitors who don’t make it till the finish line and attract them back to your website.

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You can also opt for recovery emails to remind them about the abandoned items. This should be done a few hours after the visitors leaves your site and a good way to make it effective can be to share a coupon code or offer other incentives such as gifts and free shipping.

In case you have all the data on your customer, such as a phone number, you can reach out to them directly by a call. This will show that you care about them and thus build trust. It will help you understand the reasons why they abandoned their cart and how can you help them. This personal outreach can be a real opportunity to build a long-lasting relationship.

There are many ways to reduce your cart abandonment rate and checkout drops. Some of the strategies we mentioned above might take more effort than others but they’re all worth trying. Make sure to test all of them to see which one works best for your e-commerce. This will already give you a good base to optimise your conversation rates and thus boost your sales.

In today’s busy and competitive ecosystem, it became harder and harder to gain visibility among the millions of brands that are putting enormous marketing efforts to attract the attention of customers. However, it is still possible to stand out from the crowd and one way to do so is content marketing.

As we’ve seen in our previous article, content marketing is the must-have marketing approach nowadays. It costs 62% less than traditional marketing but still generates 3 times the amount of leads. It is more enjoyable and it generates more traffic and leads. 

It also significantly increases conversion rates. Actually, an e-commerce that implements content marketing sees its conversion rates increase 6 times more than those who don’t. 

Yes, I know what you’re telling yourself, now that you see and know all the benefits of content marketing, you definitely have to invest in it but you don’t know which type of content to focus on. Don’t worry we got you covered.

In this article, we’ll talk about the different types of content you can use to skyrocket your e-commerce revenues and build a strong community of followers around your brand but before we go further, let’s talk about some important notions.

One of the most important things to remember is that no marketing (whether it is content or other forms of marketing) is effective if you don’t define and understand your target customers. 

So first make sure to clearly understand who your customers are in order to effectively speak their language and provide the content they seek and they’re attracted to. Remember if you don’t know your customers, how will you know that your content actually educates them and solves their problems?

When it comes to e-commerce customers, they usually look for entertaining or educative content. Their decision-making process can be very short and is often based on emotional factors. They tend to prefer content that is short, fun, visual, and shareable. 

Understanding your customers’ interests and behaviors gives you the opportunity to tailor your message and to focus your efforts on specific types of content that will deliver real results. So to help you out, we’ve put together this list of 6 content types.

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1. Blog articles

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That’s the first thing that pops to almost everyone when hearing content marketing and while it is the most popular form of content when it comes to B2B companies, it is often neglected by e-commerce stores and B2C companies. 

Blog posts are a great way to answer your consumers’ questions and provide insights when talking about complex topics, in addition to that, it helps you showcase your expertise and position yourself as a leader in your industry since you’ll be covering topics and addressing questions that are related to your niche. 

Blogging gives you an invaluable opportunity to rank higher in search engines and thus drive significant traffic to your website. Depending on what type of brand. If you are a popsocket brand, your customer might look for the word "popsocket", but if you are a shoes’ brand, your target customer might not look for "shoes"but rather to an exact brand name like Nike. 

It also helps to build backlinks (get cited) from other websites and blogs and thus increase your domain’s authority.

You can use blogging in many ways, for example, you can write product-focused articles, checklist or even storytelling about your brand and your customers. You can also repurpose it into small types of content such as infographics or videos.

Beardbrand is the perfect example of e-commerce that used blogging to grow their business. Eric Bandholz, the founder of Beardbrand, quit his job as a financial advisor at a bank because of the pressure to conform. Soon after he left, he started his blog dedicated to beards, beard styling, and beard products. Soon he saw the demand rising and his educative posts getting more and more visits, he then decided to launch his e-commerce.

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Over the years, Beardbrand kept investing in content and made it a core aspect of their marketing strategy. Content is so important for the company that, it’s the first thing you’ll see when you enter their website’s homepage. 

Today, the brand generates 500k visits per month and 65,10% of their traffic comes from search. 97,68% of the traffic generated comes from organic search and the brand actually ranks for 2746 keywords (HUUUGE!)

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This means that Beardbrand generates around 320k visits per month only through organic search. Their most famous article, How to Grow a Thick Beard Fast: The Only Guide You’ll Need almost reached 200k visits.

So if you’re still thinking that blog articles aren’t made for B2C and e-commerce brands, you might want to reconsider it. 

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2. Video

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It’s impossible to talk about content types without mentioning video. Video has become a powerful content marketing medium. After all, it provides a big amount of information in a small amount of time compared to blogs and texts. That’s why nowadays it plays a big role in the success of brands’ marketing efforts. 

In 2019, video accounts for 80% of all internet traffic (HUGE!) and videos on Facebook are watched for about 100 million hours each day. So if you’re an e-commerce and you want to invest in content marketing, video is definitely something you should prioritize. 

There are different ways to use videos. You can add it to your product page to help your customers get a better idea of what they’re buying since 96% of today’s consumers find videos helpful when purchasing online. 

Video is also a great way to create an emotional bond with your customers by using storytelling about your brand, your products, and your customers. 

Another interesting stat, actually, “how-to” videos are growing by 70% year by year and this is an invaluable opportunity to attract new people with tutorials and step by step instructions on how to use or assemble your products.

To illustrate that, we’ll continue with our previous example of Beardbrand (yes, you got it right, I am trying to fix my beardless problems). The brand use video as one of its main marketing focus. They publish 1 video every 2 or 3 days on their Youtube channel. 

The great thing about them is that they map their content for each stage of their customers’ journey, from the top to the bottom of the funnel.

This helps them drive 83,18% of their social traffic from Youtube which represents almost 60k visitors per month coming only from Youtube.

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They also embed their videos in their blog posts which makes their content more interactive and leads them to rank higher in search engines. 

Knowing that people are 95% more likely to remember a call to action after watching a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text format, it is a necessity to implement video on your content marketing strategy.

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3. Infographics

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By combining the eye catching side of visuals with the informative nature of texts, infographics became one of the most effective and valuable type of content marketing. It is easily accessible and simple to read.

Infographics summarize valuable information and present those in a clear and visual way. This helps to easily assimilate huge amounts of information with small efforts and in a short time. All of this makes infographics the most sharable type of content on social media.

Infographics have many benefits such as easily catching your targeted audience’s attention. It gives you the opportunity to make your content go viral and since they’re easily embeddable, you can get many backlinks to your website. 

You can also use infographics to repurpose other types of content such as blogs, studies, and videos to produce shorter content that is more likely to get shared.

The perfect example to illustrate the usage of infographics is what Guinness are doing. They are marketing their beers (drink with moderation guys!) through different infographics that tell the story of the company and at the same time, describes perfectly their product. 

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4. Images

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As we’ve mentioned above, visual content is becoming more and more important especially when it comes to e-commerce. An image is worth a thousand words and I'm in a good position to tell you what it is to write a thousand words!

So whether it is on your website, your blog, your product pages, or on social media, including images is mandatory to attract the attention of your customers. So for that, you’ll need to use images that support your messages, embrace your brand identity, and connect with your audience.

Including images in your content has many benefits. It helps you break up text and make it easier to scan. It also lets your customers have a better understanding of what you’re selling. Content that includes images is more shareable and gets 87% more engagement.

With the rise of social media platforms focusing on visuals such as Snapchat, Pinterest, and Instagram, it became crucial for e-commerce brands to focus their content marketing efforts on these platforms. Actually, it’s estimated that 60% of Instagram users have discovered a new product via this platform.

So if you want to grow your brand awareness and to constantly stay in touch with your audience, investing in these visual social media platforms is a must.

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Daniel Wellington, for example, is one of the first e-commerce brands that invested in Instagram and this helped them grow from a small e-commerce store to a multimillion-dollar company. Their core marketing focus is on Instagram, where the brand has almost 5 million followers, 6k posts on their page, and more than 2.200.000 posts with the hashtag #DanielWellington. 

The strategy they used is what we know today as influencers marketing. They were one of the first brands to spot the opportunity and take full advantage of it. 

Their content doesn’t only focus on the product and its features but focuses more on storytelling. 

They, for example, publish content that aligns with the lifestyle of their audience. 

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They also showcase customers’ stories and thus encourage their customers to share their experiences and post pictures with their products. (I mean who doesn’t want to feature in a channel with 6 million followers)

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So if you’re an e-commerce, especially the ones in the fashion industry, focusing on these visual-focused platforms is crucial to driving growth and brand awareness.

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5. User-Generated Content

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UCG (User-Generated Content) is one of the most important types of content nowadays, mainly since customers trust other customers more than brands. So if you’re an e-commerce brand, focusing your content marketing efforts on UCG is crucial to build trust and reinforce your relationship with your customers.

The good thing with UCG is that your audience does pretty much all the work for you since they’re the one creating the content, whether it is reviews or pictures or videos.

This will help you save time and money while sometimes even boosting your SEO. It helps you build brand awareness and support your lead generation strategy.

At the same time, it helps you get audience insights and feedback. It is more reliable for customers as the content is generated by other customers (which they trust more than you). All of this leads to gaining more traffic and increasing conversion rates. 

There are many ways of using UCG. It can be product ratings and reviews shared directly on your website or through other websites and blogs. This will increase the backlinks your website receives and thus increase your domain authority and rank higher in search engines.

UCG also goes together with social media. You can, for example, create a special hashtag for your campaigns and lead your customers to share content with the hashtag. You can also launch contests and challenges on the various platforms. 

To illustrate that, we’ll take a look back at our previous example: Daniel Wellington. The brand uses UCG perfectly to boost their content marketing strategy. 

Daniel Wellington executed UCG so efficiently that the hashtag # DanielWellington was used in more than 2.200.000 posts.

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6. Interactive content

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Interactive content is used to engage your audience through participation. So rather than just reading or watching, your audience actually interacts with you in different ways. To put it simply: it’s a conversation, where you don’t have to actively participate. 

Interactive content can take many forms: surveys, polls, calculators, quizzes, or assessments. 

With its different and unique nature, interactive content helps you distinguish yourself from your competitors. It attracts people and encourages them to spend more time on your website. It drives a lot of engagement and sharing on social media. 

Depending on your e-commerce activity, you can provide different types of interactive content. The most important is to keep it unique and valuable for your audience.

The best example to illustrate it, is … is … (drum roll) is Beardbrand (yes, once again). 

If you’ve visited their website earlier, you have surely noticed the quiz they have on their homepage since it’s the first thing you see on their website.

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The great thing about it is not only that it's interactive but it's also an amazing lead generation tool (I’ve taken the test, you know, beardless problems… and it was actually really fun and engaging). 

The quiz was powered by Typeform and it was such a huge success that even Typeform interviewed Eric Bandholz to breakdown his strategy.

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At the end of the quiz, the brand asks you for your email in exchange for the results and this proved to be so successful that the brand collected more than 150k emails only from the tool and the quiz’s results got shared thousands of times on different social media platforms.

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And that’s just one within many benefits. After analyzing the data they collected, Eric and his team noticed that the majority of their customers mention travelling as one of their top hobbies, and this led the brand to design travel-friendly products in terms of size. 

So if you’re considering which type of content you should focus on, interactive content is definitely something you should consider. 

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Before ending this article, I’ll share with you some tips and things to remember before choosing your content types:

• Make sure the content types you choose are relevant to your brand and to your audience. 
  

• Don’t stick to just one type of content and try many approaches.
  Content marketing isn’t an exact science, so test, test, and test. (keep the good and throw the bad)
  

• Producing great content isn’t enough, so make sure to spend as much time to distribute it through various channels.
  

• Repurpose your content and make sure to repackage it and share it more often on different channels. 
  

• Include storytelling in your content to create an emotional bond with your customers and to strengthen the relationship with them.

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Finally, e-commerce content marketing is an invaluable opportunity to raise awareness around your brand and to drive more engagement. Choosing the best types for your e-commerce is crucial for your strategy’s success. 

PS: Don’t forget, content works best when it’s relevant and targeted to a specific audience.

As we’ve seen it in our previous article about customer service, providing great customer support is crucial to driving success for your e-commerce. It helps you boost your customers’ loyalty, get positive reviews, enhance brand reputation and ensure sustainable growth. 

In order to provide great customer service, you’ll need to implement different strategies and use the latest tools. One of these indispensable tools is having a helpdesk. 

A helpdesk is a centralized information and support management system. It is an assistance center that offers a one-stop point of contact which provides the opportunity for companies to handle and resolve customer problems, questions, and queries by automating the complaint resolution processes through a ticket management system that automates the management of customer interaction among all the channels. 

Using a helpdesk can help you increase customer satisfaction as they will have their queries resolved quickly and their questions answered through the channels that they like the most. It also helps to boost your customer support team productivity since the repetitive tasks can be automated and the customers’ information is centralized and easy to access which makes the customers’ experience smoother.

To choose the right helpdesk for your e-commerce, you’ll need to take into consideration different factors. To help you out, we selected for you, the one, we feel are the most important:

1. Implementation and integrations:

Before choosing, make sure to check if the helpdesk is easy to implement in your actual setup, so:

• Take a look at the configuration and customization process and see if it's quick enough. 
• Double check the structure to how tickets, emails, team members and dashboards are organized. Related tasks should be performed quickly and thus getting a solution that provides the best user experience is crucial. 
• You’ll also need to see if it integrates with other software and solutions you use, while also making sure the integration of other add-ons and functionalities is quick and easy. 
  

2. Scalability: 

One software out there might be the best one for you at the moment but there’s one thing that you need to keep in your mind if you plan on still growing your e-commerce business: scalability. The solution may fit your budget and requirements for now but it has to be able to satisfy your customer service needs and deliver the main functionalities as your operations will scale. Switching plans is both expensive and tiring as you’ll need to train your team on your new solution, so making sure you choose a helpdesk that scale with your e-commerce as it grows is essential when you make your choice. 

3. Cost:

It is obvious that you will want to select the helpdesk with the best performance at the lowest price, however, make sure to know exactly what features do you want and what’s the size of your operations and team to anticipate all the possible costs before making your decision. Many solutions offer add-ons and integration and the addition of everything can be really expensive, some others have good starting packages but get more and more expensive as your company grows. Some of them offer a free trial which can be a good way to test different solutions and see which one matches best.

4. Reporting and analytics:

Once you implement your customer support processes and start working to solve your customer queries, you’ll need to monitor the performance and efficiency, Choosing a solution that helps you track your team’s and individual performance is essential to improve your processes and team’s results. Being able to track different indicators such as the number of tickets assigned, customer satisfaction, tickets type, etc. can help you note which are the problems that your customers are usually facing (hopefully not too much) and you can design the solution needed to prevent these problems from happening. Easy and detailed reporting can really help you boost your whole customer service department so don’t forget to focus on it before making your choice.

5. Channels:

Helpdesks provide customer support on multiple channels including emails, calls, chatbots, forms, etc. Subscriptions usually escalate from a tier to the upper one in the number of functionalities, channels, and price. So make sure the channels that you’re using or intend to use are available with the plan that you choose. If your customer service department focuses on multi-channel support, you may want to choose a solution that offers a big range of channels. 

6. The number of agents (or team members):

Many helpdesks base their billing sometimes on the number of agents per month, so determining it before you actually make your choice is an important step in the process. Having an exact number of agents will help you make the exact cost projection and thus will help you during the decision process. Defining your needs and your goals when it comes to your customer service and understanding these factors will give you a bigger perspective during your decision. It will help you save time and clearly erase any doubt (and if you still have some, don’t hesitate to email us). 

For the upcoming paragraphs, we’ll go through 6 of the best helpdesks right now, we’ll explore their pricing and some of their key pros and cons. We’ll also review some tools that might help you boost your customer support team: 

7. Freshdesk: 

Sprout: 

Free plan for an unlimited number of agents and includes different features such as email ticketing, knowledge base, etc. Good offer for a young entrepreneur or to test the solution before.

Blossom: 

$15/agent/month billed yearly. 

• It includes all the features included in the free plan.
• Offers other features such as automation, marketplace apps, chat and calls managing, etc. 
• It is a perfect offer for small teams.
  

Garden: 

$29/agent/month (billed yearly). 

• It also includes all the features in the previous plan 
• New features like performance reports, time tracking, and sessions replay. 
• It is ideal for a growing e-commerce with increasing operations and customers.
  

Estate: 

$49/agent/month (billed yearly). 

• Same thing as usual as it includes the same features as in the previous plans 
• Has an addition of features like the automation of tickets’ assignment or powerful reports with deeper insights and data. 
• Suits perfectly a large e-commerce website with thousands of customers. 
  

Forest: 

$109/agent/month (billed yearly).

• Offers the same features as the previous plan 
• Includes new features like skill-based ticket assignment, where tickets are assigned to the agents that are most proficient in handling specific issues.
• Has Co-browsing, where your agents can share their screen with customers to help them solve their issues. 
• It is perfect for big enterprises and companies that have a huge number of customers

As you may have seen it, Freshdesk is a really flexible solution that offers a variety of plans to accommodate any type of business. When it comes to the helpdesk itself, it has a wealth of integrations, it is intuitive and its most interesting feature is the gamification one, where support becomes more exciting as your turn it into a game, while agents are completing tasks, they earn points, win rewards and thus make support more enjoyable. The interface is really easy to use and you’ll have the opportunity to create accounts or emails from any page.

Freshdesk is perfect for small teams since its first offer is 15$ and still offers all the necessary and quality of features. It is also a great fit for growing teams as it has a large number of offers with all the features that any kind of team needs. 

8. Zendesk Support:

Essential: 

$5/agent/month. 

• It is the starter plan and the most basic one. 
• It offers email and social channels support, interaction history and a mobile software development kit.
  

Team: 

$19/agent/month. 

• It has all the features from the previous plan.
• The addition of performance dashboards, different apps and integrations, and custom business rules. 
  

Professional: 

$49/agent/month. 

• It includes multilingual content, customer satisfaction survey, and advanced analytics.
• It also includes the features of the team plan. 
• It is the most interesting of the first ones, maybe not the best in terms of price but still worth the try. 
  

Enterprise: 

$99/agent/month. 

• It has many add-ons compared to the previous plan, such as multiple ticket forms, skills-based routing, multi-brand supports, etc. 
  

Elite: 

$199/agent/month. 

• It is Zendesk’s most expensive plan.
• It has all the features of the enterprise one.
• It offers unlimited light agents, elite support, advanced encryption and security, etc. 
  

Zendesk Support is really easy to use and has a solid ticket management system. It takes a real marketing-oriented approach and integrates the larger Zendesk suite. Even if all the plans include a free trial for you to test the product, it still remains a really expensive solution for small and medium enterprises, especially that all the best features are only available at the high pricing tiers. The price can also escalate pretty quickly due to all the different integrations that are separated from the plan.

Despite all this, it still is the best choice for e-commerce that wants to integrate marketing into customer support.

9. Zohodesk: 

Free plan: 

• Up to three agents.
• Includes 15 features like an email inbox and web form, a customizable help center, a knowledge base, etc… 
• It is a really good option for small e-commerce with just a hundred of customers.
  

Professional: 

$12/user/month. 

• It includes multiple new features such as multi-channel support, automation, customer satisfaction ratings, advanced reports, and dashboards. 
• It is the most popular plan of the three (according to themselves).
• It’s cheap and well suited for small teams.
  

Enterprise: 

$25/user/month. 

• It is the most expensive plan of Zohodesk.
• It offers multi-brand help center, scheduled reports, live chat channel and many other features… 
• It has at the same time a very good value proposition as it includes all the features to properly run a customer support team and a really cheap price compared to the competition. 
  

When it comes to the interface, it is really easy to use, it offers an efficient ticketing system and an easy to use knowledge base. It has various reports like first response time or resolution time by teams. It also integrates with the Zoho suite that offers plenty of other apps and solutions.

Even if it lacks on-premises functionalities and language support, Zohodesk is a good fit for small businesses (we all are poor) who seek a complete solution at a really cheap price. 

10. Kayako:

Inbox plan: 

$15/agent/month. 

• It includes a shared email, chat, and social inbox. 
• It has more than 600 integrations with Zapier, basic help center, insights, etc. 
• It is a good fit for really small teams and not a large number of customers.
  

Growth: 

$30/agent/month. 

• Has all the features from the previous plan.
• Grants access to a number of interesting add-ons such as automation, customer views and reporting, multi-brand, etc. 
• It also gives free access to 5 collaborators who write internal notes but can’t reply to customers. 
  

Scale: 

$60/agent/month. 

• It offers new features like advanced workflow customization, internal help center, and Salesforce integration. 
• It also allows access to 10 free collaborators. 
  

Kayako is a functional help desk that offers a lot of different communication channels. Its chat called Kayako Messenger integrates directly with your website. It certainly lacks a few features as the voice chat which requires other solutions from outside vendors. It also doesn’t provide a proper customer feedback option. We found Kayako to be a good helpdesk for a good price. It’s best suited for businesses with an average budget and who seeks a powerful chat support. 

11. Happyfox:

Mighty: 

$29/agent/month. 

• It comes with many features such as agent collision, ticket templates, self-knowledge base, scheduled reports, etc. 
• It has all the basics that a small business needs. 
  

Fantastic: 

$49/agent/month. 

• It includes all the features from the mighty plan.
• It has many added features such as customer satisfaction surveys, custom dashboards, notifications for SLA breaches, etc.
  

Enterprise: 

$69/agent/month. 

• Includes all the features provided in the fantastic plan
• New features like tasks and asset management.
• Provides reports on custom fields
• It offers a long list of integrations 
  

Enterprise plus: 

$89/agent/month. 

• It is the most expensive plan from Happyfox. 
• It has all the features from previous plans
• It offers the possibility to access the services of a dedicated customer success manager. 
• It can support up to 15 different brands within a single helpdesk and offers a storage space of more than 1000GB. 
  

Happyfox is a complete helpdesk with tons of integrations. All of the plans come with SSL security, an unlimited number of tickets, multilingual support and knowledge base. Though, it requires a minimum of 3 agents for every plan. It offers an easy ticketing system as emails can be automatically converted into tickets. It has a lot of helpful automation features. It lets you track the most popular article in the knowledge base which is helpful to better understand your customers.

Taking into consideration all these factors, Happyfox sits as one of the best helpdesks for any type of business as it is really flexible and affordable.

11. Gorgias:

Basic: 

$50/month with 2 months off (when billed annually). 

• It gives access to an unlimited number of agents.
• It lets you handle 500 tickets per month and offers 7 integrations. 
• You’ll have to pay $12 for each additional 100 tickets.
  

Pro: 

$166/month with 2 months off (when billed annually).

• It also gives access to an unlimited number of agents with 2000 tickets per month included.
• It has 15 integrations and it costs $10 for every 100 additional tickets. 
  

Advanced: 

$416/month with 2 months off (when billed annually). 

• It still gives access to unlimited agents.
• It covers the handling of 6000 tickets per month and has 30 integrations. 
• You’ll have to pay $8,3 for each additional 100 tickets. 
  

Enterprise custom: 

• This plan gives the opportunity to have a dedicated automation specialist with unlimited integrations and agents. 
• The ticket volume is custom and you can have a volume discount on them.
  

The specificity with Gorgias is that it is designed especially for Shopify stores, so it perfectly integrates with it. It offers a complete multi-channel experience as it connects all of your support channels. Gorgias is easy to use, set up and offers easy solutions for interaction with customers. It lets you set up automatic answers, tags to sort tickets in your custom views. You can design email templates which is a true time saver. Since Gorgias is a new product, there are many small bugs and glitches, but as they have great customer support (would have been funny if it wasn’t the case, right?), these small problems are fixed quickly. The only matter can be in its price structure as it is based on tickets handling rather than the number of agents, which can make it hard to compare with other helpdesks. So before you choose make sure to know approximately (we hope you do know… exactly) the number of tickets that you’re handling at the moment.

Gorgias is a really interesting solution for Shopify shops as it has all the features and integrations needed for growing businesses.

Having reviewed the 6 helpdesks that we believe are the most interesting ones nowadays, you have a clearer idea of which one is better for your e-commerce and business needs. 
Adding to that we also wanted to quickly review some other solutions and tools that can help you boost and optimize your customer service processes and here are 2 of them:

12. Front:

Front is an email management software that helps you manage private and team emails as well as other communication channels such as chat widgets, social media, or SMS. It helps you manage email addresses such as contact@pleasedonttellusyourissues.io in an organized way. It also provides the opportunity to automate your workflow. It offers different insights on message volumes, response time, or team performance. It offers plenty of integrations such as Hubspot, Slack or Salesforce.

When it comes to pricing, it offers 4 different plans:

Starter: 

$9/user/month. 

• It includes individuals email inboxes, 3 team inboxes (only email), and 3 basic workflows.
  

Plus:

$19/user/month. 

• It offers everything in the starter 
• It includes 10 team inboxes with email, social and chat. 
• It provides unlimited basic rules and 3rd party integration.
  

Pro: 

$39/user/month. 

• Has all the features from the Plus plan.
• It also has 25 team inboxes with all types of channels. 
• It offers pro rules and integrations and also has deeper analytics reports.
  

Platform: 

$79/user/month. 

• It offers enhanced admin controls and security settings suitable for large organizations.
• It grands the possibility to manage multiple team workspaces in one account with unified billing. 
  

According to your needs and the size of your e-commerce, you can choose the plan that best suits you to boost your interactions with your customers and optimize your processes. The only matter is that all these add-ons can be pretty expensive at some point for SME. 

Anyway Front, remains an interesting tool that can help you take your interactions and communication to a whole new level.

13. Botmind:

Botmind is an hybrid chatbot solution that easily integrates with customer service tools to automatically answer the frequent questions of your customers. It automates to some extent your customer support live chat. It is primarily targeted for e-commerce owners in order to gain time and decrease costs. The solution can help you automate 40% of your chat support by answering questions like: where is my order? or I want to change my delivery address, how can I do it?

The solution basically uses all the data available to answer the possible questions and if the answer isn’t available would automatically forward it to one of your agents. Botmind has a large offer of integrations to different CMS, live chats, and helpdesks

Talking exclusively to Botmind’s co-founder, Jonathan Kam, he revealed to us that today, the tool answers up to 50 questions and is expected to reach a number of 90 questions in the near future and instead of covering just 45% of live chat automation, it will reach about 65%. Talking about his vision of the customer service industry nowadays, Jonathan summarized it really well:

“The only real boss is the customer”.

Botmind’s prices aren’t displayed on their website which doesn’t give us an idea on how much would its usage cost. It also has the main limitation that any AI-powered tools face, which is the inability to answer questions that need empathy. Despite these small disadvantages, it still remains a really interesting tool, especially for an e-commerce website where live chat is core to their customer service.

Now that we’ve covered what does good customer service mean, that we listed all the factors you need to take into consideration while choosing a helpdesk, that we reviewed the best helpdesks available and showed you some interesting tools that can help you boost your processes, you’re ready to design a kickass customer support strategy to enhance your customers experience and increase their satisfaction.

In recent years, with the development of the digital and constantly connected world, we’ve witnessed a huge change in our consumption habits.

E-commerce now has become a part of everyday life, customers are using their different devices (phones, tablets or computers) to buy products with increasing frequency. According to Statista, it is growing at such a pace that, the revenues generated from e-commerce sales are projected to reach almost 4.88 trillion dollars by 2021 which represents a growth of 365% compared to 2014.

This increase in sales in the e-commerce industry is followed by another phenomenon: the increase in the number of returns and despite all the efforts made to acquire new customers and to retain them, online retailers are still overlooking this part of the process.

According to Invesp, at least 30% of products ordered online are returned while in the last three years, 89% of consumers have returned an online purchase. As reported by Shopify, 42% of them have returned an online purchase during the last 6 months.

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1. Main reasons of product returns

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There are many reasons behind these incredibly high rates and here are the 8 most important ones according to chargeback:

• Incorrect product or size ordered
  The main reason for this is that customers don’t have the chance to test the products before making their purchase which makes it hard for them to select the size that fits them best. Which makes it the main reason for returns, especially in the fashion industry.
• Product no longer needed
  Many customers change their mind in the time between the buying decision and the order delivery. That’s why it is crucial to have an efficient and fast shipping method.
• The product did not match the description on the website or in catalog
  Most of the times the product pages aren’t clear and accurate. Pictures sometimes don’t give a real view of the product and description aren’t that detailed.
• The product did not meet customer’s expectations
  This is due, most of the times, to the fact that e-commerce are overselling their products and customers just don’t see the product’s value you’re claiming.
• The company shipped wrong product or size
  We’re human and we all make mistakes but it is important to coach and teach your employees to reduce these mistakes.
• Purchased during the holiday season
  Many gifts are offered during the holiday season to relatives and friends and sometimes we just don’t know what they like and we get it wrong (well, I always get it wrong) which increases the returns rates.
• Wardrobing (when a buyer purchases an item and uses it for a one-time purpose with the intent of returning it after the fact)
• Deliberate fraud
  ‍Here, we talk about criminal fraud, most of the times, it is due to peolpe paying with stolen credit cards or counterfeit money.

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2. Types of product returns

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Along with these reasons, we also notice the emergence of some “out of the ordinary” types of return customers:

• The "wardrober" type: The kind of customer who buys an article to use it once and then return it after. We all have that one friend who buys classy and expensive clothes, to wear them during parties and return them the day after.
• The fitting roomer:
  The kind of customer who buys the same products but with different sizes and colors, tries them and returns the ones that did not fit or the ones he didn’t like.
  This kind of purchasing behavior is becoming so popular that some brands are trying to differentiate themselves by specifically encouraging customers to do so.
  To illustrate, Warby Parker, an e-commerce company that sells fashionable and affordable eyewear, started as a small e-commerce and is now valued to almost 2 billion dollars. The secret to their success is their Home Try On program where they target fitting roomer customers. The program consists of shipping to the customers 5 frames for free so that they can try them, select their favorite and ship back the rest. With this initiative, the e-commerce company turned one of today’s struggles into one of their differentiation points.
  

Returning a product means more cost (and sometimes more frustration) for either the customer or the e-commerce, that’s why it is important to understand the role returns play in the purchasing experience. According to Statista, returns delivery will cost 550 billion dollars by 2020 in the US only. This represents 15% of all revenues generated from e-commerce and it reveals to be a clear conversion and profit killer.

So in order to address this problem, (as we’ve mentioned in our last article: How to boost your sales in your e-commerce with growth hacking?) focusing on each stage of the customer journey to drive sales growth is more than crucial for e-commerce and returns now plays a big part of it.

Facing returns while not being prepared for it can be very expensive and since you cannot get rid of returns completely, creating a return strategy is then a priority if you want to sustain your operations as an e-commerce owner. Setting a clear policy to manage your reverse logistics can help you move from a cost to profit perspective. Providing a smooth return experience to your customers does not only help you decrease costs and gain in profit margins but also develop your sales. It is an opportunity to retain customers rather than lose them.

According to a research study conducted by Professor Amanda Bower, customers who receive free shipping on returns increased their purchases over the next two years from 58 to 357%, which comes to prove what Craig Adkins, VP of Services and Operations at Zappos, said: “Our best customers have the highest returns rates, but they are also the ones that spend the most money with us and are our most profitable customers.”

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3. Build an efficient returns process

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Defining an effective return strategy can also help you gain a competitive advantage, increase efficiency and optimize every step of your logistics chain. Along with that, you’ll also need to ensure that returns decrease, in order to do so, we prepared for you a list of things to check:

• Identify which products have the highest return rate:
  Analyzing your data related to returns can help you spot which specific products are causing problems to customers; it will help you point out any quality or communication problems related to the specific products that are returned. You’ll then be able to address these problems and so decrease the return rates and provide a better experience to your customers. Imagine that you are selling shoes and you have a very high return ratio on one specific pair, you might discover that those are mislabeled!
• Add a feedback form:
  Adding a feedback form that your customers can fill gives you the opportunity to collect the right information from the customers. You’ll be able to understand the reasons behind each return and also get a clear idea of your customers expectations.
• Add customer reviews:
  Encouraging customers to leave reviews in your product pages can be a good way to avoid returns and boost your sales. It increases your credibility and builds trust with your customers. It also provides more information to support your reviews to provide the right information for other customers to make the best purchasing decision.
• Optimize your product page:
  Make sure to use detailed descriptions and quality images for your products. Also, make sure to include additional information that is specific to each type of product: for example, if it is for clothes, don’t forget to add size guides. You can also add videos on how to set the product with different components if the product needs a specific set up. This will help you set the right expectations for your customers and thus not only decrease your return rates but also increase your conversion rates.
• Provide real-time customer service:
  ‍Another way to decrease return rates is to offer real-time customer service via chatbox, this allows your customers to interact with you before making their purchase. Helping and providing them with the needed information will help you ease their experience, boost your sales and significantly lower your return rates.
• Create an FAQ:
  Creating a FAQ where you answer common questions your customers ask is a great way to provide relevant information about your products and your return policy
  This will help your customers to easily navigate through your website and have all the needed information before making their purchase. It will also save time and effort for your customer's support team.

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4. Improve your returns process

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Now that you’ve got this list of actions to decrease your return rates, it doesn't mean that you won't have anymore returns, some can't be anticipated, your customers might have changed their mind between the moment they make the purchase and the moment they receive the product (even if you provide same day delivery, yes…). So let’s move on to the list of actions you’ll need to take in order to establish a good return policy:

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Define the cooling off period:

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The cooling off period is the interval of time between the reception of the product and the moment in which the customer has to return it. One of the most important factors to take into consideration before setting your cooling off period is the law.

Each territory has its own laws regarding consumer rights, for example in Europe, 14 days is the minimum amount of time for a cooling off period and customers don’t need any valid reason to return a product. While in the United States, there’s no minimum required and so you can set it the way you want, your return policy will need to state it clearly or else the cooling off period is defined by the laws related to each state.

You can set your strategy however you want though, you can opt for the shortest period possible by law if you go for a cost-effective strategy, or you can set a longer interval if you want to use return as a differentiation point. Nike for instance, offers a "30 days free return dirt and all" policy, you basically can run a marathon with your new nike shoes and return those for free...

The laws related to the cooling off period apply in the country where the company is established, not the customer.

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Define the valid reasons for a return:

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Depending on the territory your e-commerce is established in, you can chose to define the valid reasons for a return. If your e-commerce is located in Australia, you can for example set which reasons are valid and which ones are not.

When it comes to e-commerce established in Europe, as we’ve mentioned earlier, customers don’t need a valid reason, but what you can do though is to define which reasons are valid for refunds and which ones are valid for exchanges.

This will help you avoid any confusion with your customers.

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Define who pays the return:

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As you may know, return costs are quite expensive and in order to avoid any confusion during the process, you’ll need to clearly define who pays the return fees.

If you want to go for a cost-effective strategy, you can let the customer pay the return fees. While this decision can a good one in the short term, opting for a differentiation strategy by supporting the return fees is much better in the long run.

According to Invest, 79% of consumers want free return shipping and 62% would buy again from a brand offering free returns/exchanges. So opting for a free return strategy can be expensive on one single order but this will help you drive more sales and offer a better experience to your customers (and improve their lifetime value)

If your e-commerce isn’t able to offer free returns, you can also choose to share the return costs with your customers

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Define the conditions of the return:

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In order to avoid any confusion, you’ll also need to define the specific conditions needed for the return to be valid. A good way to do it is by asking yourselves the following questions:

Do you need the price label to be still on the product or not?

Do you need the product to be in the same package/box?

Do you need the return label to be in the shipment?

For example, in order to avoid wardrobing, many fashion online retailers ask for the price label to be still on the clothes for the return to be valid. Again, we all know someone capable of doing an entire party with the label hid in the collar :)

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Include instructions for returning the products:

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One important aspect to include in your return policy is the instructions for your customer on how to return your products. This will help make each step of the process as easy as possible for them. According to Invesp, 92% of consumers will buy something again if returns are easy. So easing their return experience will not only help you gather positive reviews but also boost your sales.

Here’s a simple example of how your instructions could look like:
- Please, make a return inquiry on the website by specifying the product, the number of the order, etc.
- Please, use the same package we sent you.
- Fill out the return label that you found in the package and include it inside your shipment.
- etc.

You can specify which carrier can the customer use to send back the product. You can also specify the sending method for example through pick up or drop off, etc.
Your instructions need to be simple, clear with an easy to understand language.

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Explain how the refund works:

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Another thing that you’ll need to state in your return policy is how the refund is going to be made. You’ll need to give information about how many days will it take for the customer to receive their refund or their exchange. You need to state at which stage of the process you are going to refund them, is it when the return is accepted ? or will you refund them when the product is finally received in your warehouse?

You’ll also need to define which way you are going to refund your customers. You can choose to refund them on their credit card, offer an exchange or offer a gift card.

This step is important so that your customers have a clear idea regarding the refund or the exchange process.

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Set a clear return timeline:

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It is crucial that your customers understand and know how much time will all the process time. You’ll need to specify the number of days they have in order to make the return request, the number of days that it will take for them to get refunded or to get their product exchanged.

You can also consider extending this timeline during the holiday period.

Christmas, for instance, is one of the busiest periods of the year when it comes to returns. Since many of the purchases made during that time are gifts for relatives. Extending your returns timeline will help you keep the shoppers who made size errors happy.

Creating a return policy will help you set the right expectations for your customers, improve your customer service and boost your sales. Now that you know how to create a return policy from scratch, we prepared for you a list of tips to optimize it:

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Highlight your return policy:

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Based on Invesp insights, 67% of shoppers check the returns page before making a purchase, so make sure your return policy is easily and quickly accessible for your customers. You can add it to the header to be accessible from any page on your website. Also make sure to showcase it in your cart, products and checkout pages. This will help you ease your customers’ experience, build trust and use it as a differentiation factor to boost your sales.

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Automate your return processes:

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Answering your return inquiries manually can take a lot of time, cost and effort, so automation is a great option to improve your customer service. Customers should be able to create their and track their returns easily.

Automating your processes gives you the opportunity to be more time and cost effective. It also provides a better experience for your customers that will lead to a better retention and thus a growth in sales.

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Use returns as an opportunity:

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Having a clear and customer-friendly return policy can be a great opportunity to showcase your services. Providing a good customer service can turn potential leaving customers into loyal ones who will spend even more money on your products in the future.

Finally now that you know everything about returns, from the main problems to the best tips to do, let us know how implementing a good return policy helped you boost your customer satisfaction and grow your sales.

Daniel Wellington is a famous brand that sells watches and changeable bracelets. Nasty Gal is the fashion brand that started by selling vintage clothes and now has its own product lines and expect from being in the fashion industry, these 2 brands have another thing in common:

They both are digital native brands that achieved exponential growth in a short period of time.

They managed to grow and go from a simple e-commerce website or an eBay store to multi-million dollar brands  by using a simple method and it consists of only one word "Growth hacking" (oh, shoot, it's 2 words, you get me though).

Except from being a buzz-expression, growth hacking is the thing every company is looking to implement, from tech startups like Bigblue to e-commerce websites like Daniel Wellington or multi-billion dollar empires like Walmart.

In this article, we’ll (make your wish come true) explore what is growth hacking, how these companies place growth hacking in the heart of their strategies and how it helped them (and will help you) take their e-commerce businesses to a whole new level.

Growth hacking is a set of strategies (or small “hacks”) focused on driving fast growth with small budgets. These small hacks consist of using innovative techniques to dramatically increase your KPIs (traffic, conversion rates, revenue, etc.) and thus grow your e-commerce store as quickly as possible.

In contrast to what many people think, growth hacking isn’t only about marketing. It is about using clever, cheap and sometimes technical methods while making rapid experimentation across different channels. It is also (and mainly) a data-driven process in which measurement, testing, and optimization are at the core of its foundations.

"Whereas marketing was once brand based, with growth hacking it becomes metric and ROI driven" - Ryan Holiday

Growth hacking combines data analytics, marketing, and product development. The picture below explains it perfectly:

Now in order to understand it better, let’s go back to the beginning.

The expression “growth hacker” was first used by Sean Ellis in 2010. By that time, he had helped many companies achieve incredible growth by setting up innovative processes and techniques. As he was looking for his replacement, he couldn’t find a good fit to take in charge the growth of these companies.

The problem was that his job post was for marketers, but a traditional marketer does only focus on the lead acquisition phase of the funnel while a growth hacker focuses on the whole customer journey. Once they have enough leads to start running experiments, a growth hacker will run tests and experiments in order to increase conversions, ease the customer experience and thus drive growth for the company.

Since his job post didn’t work that well, he had to experiment (hacking everywhere) another way, and so he published his blog post: Find a Growth Hacker for your Startup, where he was looking for a Growth Hacker and that’s how the whole concept was born.

One of the most important parts of the Growth Hacking process is the Pirate Metrics framework, also known as the AARRR framework (because you know, pirates go "Aarrrr"). AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. This tool is crucial when it comes to understanding your customers’ journey and optimizing your funnel to drive growth for your website or startup.

1. Acquisition:

Attracting and gaining new customers is important for any e-commerce, but this is not an easy task as there are so many brands out there competing to acquire these customers.  

In this stage, you’ll be experimenting with different traction channels and different types of messages to see which ones fit your brand and business model and which one resonates best to your customers.

There are different categories of channels: viral/word of mouth such as social media or embeddable widgets, organic like SEO or content marketing, and paid e.g online ads or retargeting.

You can pre-select some of them and then collect data and analyze it (yes, data analysis everywhere), to then be able to select, optimize and focus your resources on the best traction channels for your e-commerce. If you wanna know more about the channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business I recommend you to read a good book called: Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

The perfect example to illustrate this is the strategy that Daniel Wellington’s CEO, Filip Tysander took in his early days. Instead of reaching superstars to sponsor his beautiful watches by paying them a huge amount of money (that he obviously didn’t have), he targeted many micro influencers with a small audience on Instagram by offering them watches in exchange of a picture of them wearing the watch on their account. This resulted in the brand growing disruptively and in the launch of what we know now as Influencer marketing.

2. Activation:

Now that you’ve attracted all of these potential customers to your website, you’ll need to activate them and ensure that they buy and use your products. Activation is about the first experience your potential customer has with your product. It is about how much time does the customers spend on your website and how many pages did he visit.

During this step, you’ll need to ensure the visitor interacts with you by signing up or subscribing to your newsletter, etc.

The key here is to identify each point in your customers’ journey and each step they have to take in order to get to the activation. For an e-commerce store, the steps can simply be: find items they like, add them to the carts, sign up with an account, add information and buy the product. A simple frustrating detail in one of these steps can lead to your customer losing interest and leaving your website.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to study the data, analyze conversions and understand your customers’ behaviors, and based on this you can experiment with different hacks to optimize this experience until the activation and thus drive growth.

To illustrate, we’ll take a closer look at how Sophia Amuroso, who founded Nasty Gal as a vintage fashion eBay store. She used a methodical and data-driven approach by tracking popular search terms to predict upcoming trends in the clothing industry. Based on her data analytics, she also noticed that clothes on humans sold better clothes on mannequins or on the back of a chair. When a product didn’t sell enough and received bad comments, she would change the model to see how conversions evolved.

This experimental and data-driven approach helped her optimize her activation processes and led her to grow from an eBay store to a 100 million dollar brand in just 5 years.

3. Retention:

Retaining customers has become a priority since acquiring new customers is much more expensive than keeping them, especially in today’s world, where advertising costs have increased drastically due to the fierce competition for online exposure.

Retaining customers means they not only buy once from your website but multiple times. Retention is a crucial factor to achieve rapid growth. I mean what’s the point of attracting new customers if you end up losing them right after their first purchase? ‍

During this stage, you’ll need to stay in touch with your customers. Some great way to do it is email automation. You can A/B test which type of content they best respond to and which type of messages incentivize your customers. You can use, Crazy Egg which is a website optimization software that offers A/B testing, heat mapping, and usability testing tools. It helps you build A/B tests without any coding experience. It also allows you to send more traffic to the optimal variant of your test and track to track conversion with a very intuitive tool. Based on your data analytics results, you’ll be able to tailor the best offers to drive growth.

You can also add new features or offers to your website. The perfect example to illustrate this is Amazon’s subscription program: Amazon Prime.

The number of amazon prime members in the US as of December 2018 is 101million and they represent 62% of the total Amazon customers in US. The average amount they spent on Amazon in 2018 is $1400. Amazon achieved these amazing numbers mainly by offering the two-day free shipping on thousands of items but also by adding other features such as their video and music streaming services. These features helped Amazon turn occasional customers to subscribers who are now using their products on a daily basis. This basically led them to retain 62% of their customers which is phenomenal.

4. Referral:

Referral is by far the best way to drive growth for your e-commerce. I mean why would you spend a large amount of money on advertising when customers who trust you can spread the word about your products and brand.

During this phase, you’ll need to focus all your efforts into turning your active users into brand advocates. We’re talking here about the core of growth hacking: Virality.

You can use different ways to grow your referrals: coupons, games, giveaways, etc.

The best example of referral and maybe the most famous in the growth hacking world is the example of Dropbox where Sean Ellis was responsible for the company’s growth back in 2010. After analyzing their customers' data, he found out that one-third of their customers came from referrals, which means that people loved the product and were talking about it. He got inspired by the Paypal referral program in which the company offered $10 to each user who invites his friends to use their services but Dropbox couldn’t afford such an investment, instead, they opted for offering 250 free megabytes of storage (which was something they could afford) in exchange for referrals. This resulted in a growth of 4000% in a period of 14 months.

5. Revenue:

The end goal from acquiring, activating, retaining customers and referring your products to new ones is to earn revenue and make a profit. So during this phase, you’ll need to focus on increasing the Lifetime Value of your customers (LTV) and decreasing your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).

Customer Lifetime Value refers to the average revenue you’ll generate from a single customer over time while Customer Acquisition Costs refers to the amount you spend on acquiring this customer.

In order to ensure growth, you’ll need to keep a positive LTV to CAC ratio.

Now, let’s imagine you’re an e-commerce owner and you want to grow your lifetime value.
After analyzing your data, you find out your average order value (the average amount spent by your customers for each order) is about $46. In order to increase this amount, you can use a little hack by offering free shipping for orders above $50. This will lead people to add an item to their cart so that they can benefit from the free shipping and so will drive an increase in your average order value and thus in your customers’ Life Time Value.

In order to decrease CAC, you can opt for automating your processes. Automation is a great time, effort and cost saver. Spending less time doing a task that can be done automatically lets you focus your efforts and resources on other aspects of your business.

Finally, growth hacking is much more than just a set of techniques, it is a mindset, that once implemented into your company’s culture, will help you boost your sales and drive exponential growth. Focusing on each step of your customers’ journey and not just on acquisition will help you better understand your customers' behavior and design the best solutions to optimize their experience and so drive exponential growth for your e-commerce.

On our previous article, how to build a community for Kickstarter, we discussed the importance of the pre-launch stage to build and engage a strong community of followers.

It is true that the pre-launch period is the most important (I can’t repeat it enough) as it gives you the opportunity to plan every aspect of your project, from product development to marketing. I really think that this part should take at least 6 months, if not 12.

Preparing and planning your Kickstarter is a key factor in ensuring success for your campaign, but a successful campaign isn’t just about reaching your targeted pledge goal. It means getting all your rewards to your backers' doorsteps on time, and in order to do so, you’ll need to prepare your shipping strategy as early as possible, especially if you want it to be free of charge for your backers.

One of the most common mistakes made by creators is not taking into consideration shipping and fulfillment during their pre-launch phase. This leads to major problems during the shipping and fulfillment process of the rewards and thus can result in many unexpected costs, delays on delivery, fulfillment issues and potential overcharges for backers.

The perfect example to illustrate these problems is the story of Podo:
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Podo launched on Kickstarter in September 2016 with the goal of shipping by December. The creators set their goal to $50,000 but ended up exceeding it to reach $761,130.

A real success you may say, well it’s not that easy since even after 2 years, Podo’s team failed to ship all the rewards to their backers. According to Eddie Lee, the president of Podo Labs, the major issues they faced were related to the product’s supply chain but if you wanna know more about Podo’s story, check Ashley Carman’s article on why Kickstarter products take so long to ship?

Now, in order to ensure a good backer experience and to deliver all your rewards on time, you’ll need to spend a lot of time preparing and planning your supply chain and shipping strategies. To help you during the process, we prepared this small list of essentials to consider and , maybe, implement a free shipping strategy for your campaign:

1. Forecasting:

Do you plan to ship all your products yourself? Or are you going to outsource this process to a logistics provider?

While shipping all the products by yourself is great and cost effective when you have just a few rewards to send, it can result in huge unexpected costs when shipping large volumes of rewards to backers. It also requires a big space to store all your products and most of all, it is time and effort consuming. That’s why if you plan to reach a considerable number of backers, my advice would be to talk to a logistics provider. Check our previous article, if you wanna know more about what are the factors to consider while choosing a logistics provider.

2. Product design:

When you’re designing and manufacturing the product, it is important to keep logistics and shipping in mind especially when it comes to size, weight, and dimensions.

For example, in many countries, if your product’s thickness is 30mm or less, you can then ship your product with the postal network in a letter without having to put it in a box. Also if a parcel weighs less than 2kg and its dimensions Length + Width + High measure less than 900mm, each side measuring less than 600mm, it can qualify as a “packet”, which allows you to send it by the international postal network. Postal services offer lower prices which can be a really good opportunity for you to be more cost-effective and to gain margins.

So if you’re designing a really small product and your product’s thickness is just a bit bigger than 30mm, you should really consider redesigning it to reduce the size and thus cut some shipping costs.

3. Cost estimation:

One of the most important aspects of planning is cost estimation. It helps you determine how much money you’ll approximately (there are always some unexpected expenses) spend in every area of your campaign like the marketing activities paid ads or the manufacturing cost of your product. When it comes to shipping costs, you’ll need to know the exact weight and size of your packages since many carriers and logistics providers calculate the costs based on either the weight or the dimensional weight.

Dimensional weight (also known as volumetric weight) reflects the package density, in other terms, it is the amount of space a package occupies in relation to its actual weight. It uses an estimated weight that is calculated from the length, width, and height of a package. It is used by carriers and postal services as a shipment pricing method. Once obtained, the dimensional weight is compared to the actual parcel weight, the shipping price is based on the bigger one of the two.
To avoid all unpleasant surprises at billing, the right calculation of volumetric weight is essential if applied by the carrier. In order to compare your parcel dimensional weight with its real weight, you have to divide your parcel total volume by the volumetric coefficient.

Here’s a small example to help you understand better:
Your parcel is about 40x30x20cm, its weight is 2kg and the carrier dimensional coefficient is 5000

    - 40*30*20= 24000
    - 24000/5000= 4,8

4,8 being bigger than 2, the weight used for transportation will then be 4,8 kg instead of 2 kg.

Knowing the exact dimensions of your product will help you estimate your shipping costs and that will help you later when you set your reward pricing, to cover up all costs and make sure to keep a certain profit margin.

4. Location:

The location of your manufacturer, your warehouses and your backers play a big role in the definition of your shipping and logistics processes. Even if you have just a small influence for the latter; selecting a good location for your manufacturer, warehouses and fulfillment center can be a real game-changer in your campaign.

One popular strategy used by many creators who manufacture their products in China is to select different warehouses and fulfillment centers all around the world, from where they’ll ship their rewards to backers. To illustrate, you can select a warehouse in Europe, to cover the storage, fulfillment, and shipping to all your backers in Europe. You can select another one in the United States to cover all these activities within the North American territories.

The great thing about shipping from within these territories is that backers don’t have to pay customs fees. You pay custom fees and import taxes when importing your product in the zone, and you pay them in bulk on the manufacturing price, so at the end of the day you gain 2 advantages: First, you pay lower taxes, second, the backer experience is better as they don’t have to worry about taxes. Regarding backers from other parts of the world, you can use 2 different ways to charge them, but we’ll go into more detail in the next paragraph.

Because of the trade war going between the USA and China, the US has applied new customs fees up to 25% for certain products coming from China (board games for instance), so make sure to double check that your product isn’t on the list, and if it is we advise you to review your strategy according to these changes.

5. Taxes and customs:

Another important aspect to consider is the international shipment and all the costs that come with it. Import taxes, customs duties, value-added taxes and handling fees (fees that you pay to carriers for handling customs clearances for you). This applies only when you do cross border shipping, but if you deal with the tax ahead, final customers won’t be concerned by that. These are really important costs to consider especially when creating your reward pricing policy as it will help you define how you’ll charge your backers.

The 2 most common ways to handle the fees are the DAP or DDP:

DAP: Delivery at Place

Here, end customers need to pay the customs fees upon pledge arrival before being able to collect their parcel. The selling price should be free of VAT.

DDP: Delivery duty paid

Here, the sender (you) pays the customs fees in advance to the carrier. End customers collect their parcel without paying any additional fees in arrival. In this case, you can add VAT to the selling price.

Now when it comes to which one you should use, it all depends on your pricing strategy.

6. Reward pricing:

When it comes to your pricing policy, make sure to take into consideration all the different costs we’ve mentioned earlier. You can opt to offer free shipping to your backers but in this case, you’ll decrease your margins or you can choose to include the shipping and customs fees in the rewards pricing. These aren’t the only options you have, as you can think outside of the box and design another pricing strategy. A good example to illustrate is what Kill the Unicorns did during their campaign. They decided to sponsor part of the shipping costs to all their backers. The picture below summarizes their strategy perfectly.

This strategy helped Morning (the company behind Kill the Unicorn) reduce costs for their backers and provide them with fair shipping, whatever the region they live in.

7. Free shipping:

As already mentioned in our previous article: The 4 best shipping strategies for your e-commerce, free shipping is a great way to provide a good experience to your customers (in this case, backers) and you can use it as a promotional tool to attract more people, but (yes, there’s always a but) free doesn’t mean free of cost as you’ll still need to ensure your rewards get to your backers’ doorsteps. In order to do so, you’ve got many options and we’ve selected some of them that we believe can help you provide the best experience to your backers while still ensuring to make a profit.

Free shipping worldwide for small products:

As said earlier, small products can be shipped with postal networks which are way cheaper than other logistics providers. So if your product has small dimensions you could consider offering free shipping to your backers. Its costs will be at your expenses but you can use free shipping as a promotional tool and thus gain more backers.

To illustrate, let’s imagine you’re running a campaign about this amazing new connected wallet, it is small and doesn’t weight much. It costs around $40, and your margin is about $25. Its shipping costs may vary between 5$ and $10. Providing your backers with free delivery will reduce your margin, but you will be able to make up for it with the volume of pledges by attracting more people.

Free shipping for certain zones:

As we’ve mentioned earlier, many creators choose to locate their fulfillment centers in Europe and the US, in order to distribute the rewards to their backers in these zones without paying too much.

Knowing that around 70 or 80% of backers are from Europe and US combined, you can offer free shipping to the ones living in these zones which won’t cost you much since you’ll be shipping locally and you’ll pay the import tax in a bulk. Regarding backers from other parts of the world, you can choose to sponsor them the same amount as the ones in Europe and the US (like the Kill the Unicorns folks did), and they’ll have to pay the remaining fees. This is a fair way to offer free shipping for most of your backers and lower costs for the rest of the backers.

Free shipping in bulk:

Another good strategy is to offer free shipping for people that choose rewards with many products. One backer takes more product, resulting in additional margin for you and the shipping price increase will not be proportional to this margin increase, it will be much lower, giving your more liberty to offer the shipping costs. You can also choose to partner with specific shops in big cities, where you ship everything in bulk and your backers will just need to collect them. Shipping in bulk will let you decrease your shipping costs and give a better experience for your backers.

Free shipping can be a real game changer, you can use it as a promotional tool to attract more backers and at the same time provide them with a better experience.
In all cases, you’ll need to use your cost estimation and shipping planning to clearly define your pricing strategy and make sure to avoid any unpleasant surprise to you and your backers.
In conclusion, choose the method that best fits with your predictions of the aforementioned factors but most importantly the methods that are fair to your backers because ultimately they will decide whether or not your Kickstarter campaign will be successful.

Now that you know from our previous article, how to choose the best logistics provider for your e-commerce, it is time to talk about another important part of your logistics management: the different delivery options that lie before you.

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In recent years, marketplaces like Amazon have taken the game to a whole new level when it comes to product delivery which has led customers to raise their expectations towards the e-commerce standards of service. Almost half of the shoppers (46%) said that one of the key factors in the online buying decision is a convenient and personalized delivery service, according to a survey by Sorted.

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Product delivery is a crucial touchpoint in the customer experience. The latter starts when your customers enter your website sees your products and make a purchase online, all the way up until those products are delivered.

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Fortunately, you have the ability to control and to make sure this experience is a good one. A good delivery experience will help you improve customer satisfaction and retention which in turn will lead to an increase in sales and revenues.

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1. What is a good delivery experience?

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In order to provide a good delivery experience, there are 2 major factors you should consider:

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Traceability

Your customers need to be able to track at which stage the product delivery is. They also need to receive details about the delivery such as: the expected arrival time, the live position of the delivery etc…

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Traceability is an essential factor in designing the best experience possible, as it can save a lot of wasted time and frustration. I mean, are you satisfied when the toilet paper you just ordered is 3 days late, and you don’t have any way to know it? This can lead to serious problems.

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Proactive communication

As soon as the order is made, you’ll need to be proactive when communicating with your customers. You can send them the tracking link or keep them updated about the delivery by email, SMS, or with a pigeon…

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While the last one might not be my best advice, my point is that your customers like to know about the evolution of their order and won't be bothered by a tracking email. It is also crucial to keep in touch with your customers when issues occur as you might be facing delivery issues.

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In order to offer a good delivery experience, you’ll need to set a shipping strategy. Having a clear strategy to manage your logistics and your products' delivery is essential so that everyone involved understands their role in the process.

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This will also provide your different teams, from the marketing one to the customer service one, with a clear idea on how the process works. How to promote the different delivery options and how to better answer and resolve customer queries.

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Setting a clear shipping strategy can help you differentiate yourself from the competition, increase conversions, turnover and average cart value. It also helps to cut costs, gain margins, increase customer satisfaction and brand recognition.

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Now, in order to set your strategy, you’ll need to define which shipping options are best for your business.

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This obviously isn’t an easy task, that’s why we prepared a list with some of the best shipping options to consider implementing in your strategy.

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2. Free shipping:

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Free shipping became popular since Amazon introduced it for orders over $25. It is the simplest strategy to increase conversions and reduce cart abandonment.

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According to Pitneybowes, 91% of customers leave when shipping isn’t free or fast enough and 79% prefer the shipping to be free rather than fast.

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That’s why using free shipping is clearly an opportunity to meet your customers' expectations. You can also use it as powerful marketing option to differentiate yourself from your competition but (yes, there’s always a but) free doesn’t mean free of cost. You’ll still need to pay for the logistics provider to get your products delivered to your customers.

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So before offering free shipping, you need to understand how it affects your profit margins. Even if free shipping is driving more sales, there’s no point to offer it if you end up losing money on each order.

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Now in order to strategically use free shipping, there are many options that you can try:

• Including free shipping only when a certain amount is reached for the order. Amazon for example uses the $25 as the threshold. Don’t set any random price, make sure that the amount you choose covers the shipping costs.
  You can also set the minimum amount for free shipping based on your average order value. For example, if your average order value in $37, you can set the minimum amount for free shipping to $40, which will lead to an increase in your average order value.
• Including free shipping for a certain category of products where your margins are high enough to cover the shipping costs or products that have small shipping costs such as jewellery or fashion.
• Including free shipping as a promotional event for a certain period of time. This can be a good way to push sales especially in peak season. Don’t forget to back this initiative with clear communication on your website, social media and other communication channels.
• Including free shipping for standard delivery which usually are slow but cost less. You’ll lose less money on each order and ensure to satisfy the customers that are looking for free delivery.
  

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If you’re not sure which one is best for your e-commerce, you can still A/B test all the options and see which one works best.

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3. Flat rate shipping:

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Flat rate shipping is when you assign the same price whatever the product you deliver. The subtle part is to find the right balance to not undercharge or overcharge your customers.

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For example, you charge your customers $6 for any delivery without taking consideration of the size, weight, or value of the order. Flat rate shipping is a good option when you sell a similar product line in size and weight. It is also a good way to set clear expectations and give the right information to your customers. The good thing about flat rate shipping is that you have total control over the delivery price, which means that you can cover your logistics provider costs.

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You can also choose to “sponsor” part of the shipping as a marketing gesture/stunt (depending on if you effectively take the loss or add it to your product price). Your customer will be more likely to buy something from you that costs $40 with $2.90 shipping fees than the same thing at $30 with $12.90 shipping.

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4. Table rate shipping:

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Table rate shipping consists on providing different prices based on different factors such as destination, product’s size and weight or the number of items ordered. For many customers who live just next door, it doesn’t make much sense to pay the same amount as others who live thousands of kilometres away.

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Table rate shipping offers the flexibility to set up your different shipping options in any way you want. One simple way to do it is to differentiate your shipping price by zones. For example, let’s imagine you have an e-commerce to sell sneakers and your warehouse is located in Paris, you charge $5 for local deliveries, $6 in France, $8 in Europe and $12 for international deliveries.

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This solution is ideal for online store that ship to many destinations, it allows you to offer affordable rates for local customers while still providing fair ones to customers located in the other half of the world.

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5. Live carrier rate:

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Live carrier rate can be a good option as you’ll give the opportunity for your customers to choose and pay for the exact service they need.

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The option basically enables to generate live quotations when building an order and to cover your carrier costs. It takes the weight, size, origin, and destination address to calculate the shipping costs.

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The best way to use it, is if you have a small line of items, with the same dimensions approximately. But if you have multiple product lines with different dimensions and sizes, this can turn out to be problematic. Especially when customers add several products to the cart, as it can generate charges that aren’t realistic, all of that due to different items dimensions.

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Many CMS platforms such as Shopify integrate a real-time comparator to generate live pricing and all the possible shipping options.

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The downside with this option is that you can’t use it as a marketing and promotional tool because you can't sponsor any part of it. You can't differentiate yourself with it as it is an outsourced service. It also doesn’t integrate stocking, packaging, and fulfilment costs which you’ll either to support or to add as a surcharge during the checkout process.

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6. Mixed options:

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Another great way to master shipments and deliveries is to use multiple options between the ones we’ve talked about above. This approach can be really effective as it helps you control and cover your costs while still making the most out of promotional opportunities.

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Finally, now that we’ve gone through all the customer expectations and options to satisfy their needs. You can design a clear strategy to differentiate yourself from your competition while still offering the best customer experience possible. Let us know which strategy and options do you use, and how does it affect your e-commerce and your goals?

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PS: Customers don’t want their toilet paper to be delivered late.