Introduction
Most ecommerce merchants choose WordPress for two reasons - the convenience of setup and content marketing capabilities. The convenience of WordPress e-commerce shipping is facilitated through a variety of shipping plugins. With these plugins, you can introduce a variety of value-added and basic delivery services with ease.
Unfortunately, nothing comes that easy in the modern-day. The choice of the right plugin as well as finding the right channels to set it up, can be difficult. In this blog, we will learn about the key factors that will allow you to set up the e-commerce shipping process for your WordPress store with ease.
How to Setup Ecommerce Shipping Process for WordPress?
A majority of the shipping plugins work through the WooCommerce plugin. WooCommerce, anyway, becomes essential for a better ecommerce experience on the platform. Here are six easy steps to enable a shipping workflow for your WordPress website.
1) Before starting on the permanent changes, make sure that your current store and the settings are backed up on the cloud. This will allow you to reverse your settings and avoid any huge reworks in case you encounter a bug or glitch.
2) You can enable the shipping workflow through the WooCommerce admin dashboard. Find the shipping section (WooCommerce -> Settings -> Shipping) and configure the shipping methods section. This will include creating shipping zones and assigning shipping methods and types to the respective zones.
3) The next step is to configure the product classes.In this setting, you can configure settings specific to the product category for a better shipping experience. You will find this setting at Products -> All Products -> Select Product -> Shipping.
4) Once you have configured all the shipping settings from the WooCommerce dashboard, you will need to look for viable shipping extensions. This can be extensions from individual carriers like FedEx or shipping platform extensions like ClickPost. You can add additional extensions that will help you in developing a more efficient shipping workflow.
5) Introduce customer experience enhancement plugins with your shipping flow. Adding features like Shipment Tracking, Milestone-based notifications, etc., will elevate your customer experience. Consider other aspects like returns and exchanges as they are imperative to the customer experience.
6) Once you have installed all the plugins, activate your user accounts with the services to enable the services on the platform. Test the shipping workflow with a few orders to ensure that there are no bugs. You are now set to ship orders for your customers.
3 Main Methods to Setup Ecommerce Shipping for WordPress Stores
While setting up the shipping workflow is relatively easy, the right choice of shipping partners, shipping methods, etc., is much more difficult and crucial. Here are three main methods you can use to ship for your WordPress store.
1. Self Fulfillment
The first option is that you become your own warehouse. Self-fulfillment will involve you and your team doing all the packaging to get the order ready for shipping. You can then use a courier service to deliver these orders to your customers.
This is the most basic method of handling the shipping operation. This would allow you much better control over your shipping operation. However, it will become difficult and expensive if you plan to scale your platform to above 200-300 orders per month.
2. DropShipping
For those merchants who are looking to leverage their marketing skills and want none of the fulfillment headaches, Dropshipping is an excellent option. In dropshipping, the manufacturer has to bear the responsibility of packing and shipping the orders as you receive them.
But this would mean that you would have to give a large chunk of the revenue to the manufacturer. It also allows you less control over the inventory, and your business is dependent on the nature of the relationship and capacity of your manufacturing partner.
3. 3PL
Most enterprises use a 3PL to handle their delivery load. A 3PL provides you with a wide array of services, from warehousing to last-mile delivery. This will allow you complete control over your shipping process and manage it efficiently without having to dedicate a huge chunk of your resources to it. Through this approach, you will also get a better control over your inventory and fulfillment setup.
3PL partners can be quite expensive for lower-order volumes. But as you begin to grow, you can leverage the higher order volume for better shipping and processing rates. On the plus side, you can also use multiple shipping partners according to your preferences to ensure a hassle-free delivery supply chain.
3 Benefits of Using WordPress for Ecommerce
With technology making things accessible, one might wonder if starting an ecommerce website on a platform like WordPress is feasible. Here are three key benefits of using WordPress for your online store.
1. Dynamic Websites
WordPress started out as a content marketing platform. As a result, the platform allows you to build more dynamic, lively websites. You can customize your storefront to suit your brand themes.
With the right plugins, the introduction of multimedia features like unboxing videos, testimonial videos, and other dynamic elements is also possible. All these features enable you to build a website as per your vision rather than following technical restrictions.
2. Easier Shipping Workflows
Through a variety of plugins, you can formulate and deploy efficient shipping workflows for your platform. This will help in establishing a better fulfillment procedure and improve the delivery speed and customer experience.
The shipping enhancement plugins will allow you to facilitate direct integration with courier partners as well as shipping management dashboards for better visibility and efficient shipping.
3. Easier Introduction of Customer Experience Enhancement
The quality of customer experience will dictate essential factors like customer retention rate, conversion rate, etc., for your ecommerce store. However, developing these features can be quite a hassle.
With WordPress’s developer-friendly platform as well as third-party service plugins, you can introduce these features with ease. This will include a branded tracking suite, milestone-based notifications, personalized product recommendations, etc.
5 Best Plugins for WordPress Ecommerce Shipping
The wide array of plugins available on WordPress is the primary reason behind its popularity. Here are the five best plugins for your WordPress Ecommerce site.
1. ClickPost WooCommerce Plugin
ClickPost is a logistics and customer experience management platform. To enable this functionality for their WordPress-based customers, the platform has a WooCommerce Plugin.
Through this plugin, multi-carrier integration can be implemented through a single-point integration. The software also has a carrier recommendation engine that automates carrier selection through ML-based algorithms.
The platform is hyper-focused on enabling a superior customer experience for its clients. It focuses on establishing seamless communication with your customers through branded tracking pages and automated notifications. Along with this, the platform is focused on making shipping and fulfillment easy for its clients through its management services for NDR, NPR and Returns workflow.
2. WooCommerce WordPress Plugin
WooCommerce is among the most popular WordPress Plugins. It becomes difficult to handle and maintain e-commerce-related workflows on WordPress without this plugin. WooCommerce will enable an admin dashboard for the website. This makes it easier to set up Shipping flows, design your cart and checkout page, etc.
Additionally, WooCommerce acts as a gateway to introduce shipping plugins to your website. Renowned carriers like FedEx, UPS, etc., provide their shipping services on WordPress through WooCommerce. Additionally, intricate shipping settings like Shipping Classes, Shipping Zones, etc., facilitate a much better shipping and fulfillment workflow.
3. Conditional Payments and Shipping WooCommerce Plugin
Setting up a linear shipping flow is not enough. You might end up overpaying the carriers or delaying your packages often due to the wrong choice of carriers.
This is where the Conditional Payments and Shipping WooCommerce plugin comes in. With the help of conditional logic, the plug-in allows you to add various automations for carrier selection and delivery cost calculation.
These conditional logics can be set up on the basis of product cost, product category as well as the delivery pin codes.
You can even customize workflows through payment gateways and implement discounts, bonuses, and coupons based on their purchases. It is also possible to enable free shipping for a particular cart value.
4. Table Rate WooCommerce Plugin
The Table Rate plugin has specific use cases pertaining to the calculator of shipping costs. As the name suggests, the plugin uses a table to calculate the delivery costs for the shipments with the help of purchase and shipping conditions. The table can have separate costs for various scenarios like delivery region, cart value, product category, etc.
The plugin will require you to create a table with all the required criteria you want to factor in to calculate the shipping cost.
Then you will create a table with corresponding rates for the combination of the conditions you have added. This logic is then applied to calculate the delivery costs for the customers on checkout.
5. Weight-based WooCommerce Plugin
The Weight-based WooCommerce Plugin allows you to customize shipping rules and rates based on the consolidated weight of the cart. Therefore, you are able to offer better shipping rates on checkout.
The plugin can customize the rate calculation process based on various other factors like origin, destination, and weight class. You can implement progressive shipping rates or flat shipping rates based on the entire cart.
4 Tips to Improve Ecommerce Shipping with WordPress
Now that we have learned all about the benefits and the plugins you can use, here are a few tips that you can use to improve the overall shipping performance of your WordPress Website.
1. Use Shipping Zones
The shipping zone is a setting unique to the WordPress WooCommerce dashboard. It allows you to preset a bunch of configurations according to delivery locations. A shipping zone can be as big as a country or as specific to a particular region or zip code.
You can select your preferred carriers for these zones to keep your shipping costs in check. Along with this, the shipping class setting will also allow you to customize shipping methods like Flat rate shipping, Free Shipping, etc. This will allow you to geographically separate your shipping experience according to consumer preferences.
2. Focus on Post-purchase Experience and Engagement
Repeat orders are like an energy drink for ecommerce orders, they boost the business with profitability and brand recognition. One of the key elements that can bring in these repeated orders is post-purchase engagement. Once the customer has made the purchase, the customers are more inherently inclined to engage with your platform.
Sending push notifications about order updates to align with the updates shared on the branded tracking page will enable better engagement. You can use these visits to recommend products based on that particular purchase or their past purchases.
3. Classify your Products Into Shipping Classes
WordPress has always focused on convenience. This can be seen in the shipping enablement features like the Shipping Class. Through a Shipping Class, you will be able to dictate shipping and delivery terms according to the product/product category.
In this way, you can customize carriers for fragile and heavy products to ensure safe shipping. This can be done for your entire catalog, and you can assign shipping methods and rate types according to the product. This will allow you to charge fairly to the customers and manage your shipping budget at the same time.
4. Invest in Intelligent Shipping Automation
Your fulfillment operation has to continuously grow its capacity to process orders. You can use intelligent shipping automation platforms to implement multi-carrier integration and carrier recommendations for your fulfillment.
This will include a single-point integration with the platform, which will enable a variety of features. The key focus will be to automate carrier selection based on a set of parameters you can select. The software will evaluate carriers based on them and select an ideal carrier for each shipment every time.
Conclusion
New ease of business was introduced to the ecommerce businesses through WordPress. The plethora of plugins makes it easier to offer a more holistic experience with minimal technical effort.
While setting up an ecommerce store with WordPress might be easy, figuring out the right shipping process might take some time. Hopefully, the above blog can act as a repository for you to get started on your WordPress Ecommerce Shipping Workflow.
FAQs
1) Is it compulsory to subscribe to WooCommerce services to ship with WordPress?
It is not compulsory to subscribe to WooCommerce services to ship with WordPress. However, WooCommerce is one of the best ecommerce plugins on WordPress. It has an admin dashboard that has pre-setup all the shipping and customer experience processes to make it easier for you to start selling.
2) Is it possible to offer free shipping above a particular cart value on WordPress?
With the help of a conditional shipping or table rate woo-commerce plugin, you can customize shipping rates for different shipments. These plugins also allow you to add a cart value condition. Through this workflow, you can enable free shipping above the cart value of your choice.