10 Simple Ways to Impress Customers During the Holidays

With the holiday season in full swing, being prepared with a solid strategy can make or break your success during this peak period. For the modern eCommerce professional, success means going beyond simply offering high-quality products, especially when it comes to the customer experience.

In the world of online retail, your shipping and fulfillment process is not just a logistical necessity, but a direct extension of your brand and a crucial element of building and maintaining a better customer experience. Without a streamlined, efficient strategy, your decisions can negatively impact your business, causing delays, unnecessary expenses, and customer dissatisfaction.

To help you ensure a smooth shipping process and truly impress customers during the holidays, we have compiled 10 essential tips for eCommerce business owners to your business to ship smarter, not harder this holiday season.

1. Offer Shipping Options that Fit Every Budget

A customer's checkout experience can quickly turn south when shipping costs are high, often leading to lost revenue from abandoned carts. To combat this, you should offer a variety of choices, including standard, expedited, and express options, to cater to different urgency levels and budgets.

How ClickShip Helps: ClickShip’s multi-carrier rating system automatically provides discounted, real-time rates for both parcel and pallet shipping services from the most trusted carriers in North America every time you book. Many of our integrations allow you to provide these real-time rates at checkout, giving your customers the power to select the best service suited to their needs.

2. Diversify Your Carriers for Unmatched Reliability

Selecting reliable shipping carriers is essential for meeting customer expectations during the holidays. Carrier volumes skyrocket during peak season, which is why diversifying your shipping options by working with multiple carriers is a key strategy. This approach not only mitigates the risk of delays but also gives you the flexibility to leverage the individual strengths of various partners.

How ClickShip Helps: ClickShip seamlessly integrates with North America's most trusted domestic, cross-border, and international carriers. Our platform brings all these options into one place, ensuring you always have access to the optimal service for any given shipment, which is vital during the holiday rush.

3. Maintain Centralized Order Management

Today, it is common for eCommerce professionals to sell across multiple channels, which is an effective way to increase your reach and customer base. However, without the right tools, managing the fulfillment across these diverse channels can quickly become a logistical headache.

How ClickShip Helps: Our Multi-Channel Synchronization feature eliminates these challenges by integrating with the most popular eCommerce platforms and online marketplaces. It seamlessly syncs all your orders across every sales channel, allowing you to book shipments for all your customer orders from one centralized platform. Automating the aggregation of orders reduces the likelihood of errors and provides a better customer experience.

4. Eliminate Costly Measurement Mistakes

Providing incorrect weight and dimensional measurements is a common, yet costly, mistake that can lead to extra charges such as reweigh and remeasure fees. These unexpected fees and delays can hurt your profits and delay the shipment, which is unacceptable during the holidays.

How ClickShip Helps: Proper packaging plays a vital role not just in safeguarding orders, but also in ensuring that shipping rates are as affordable as possible. ClickShip’s Packaging Presets feature allows you to save the dimensions and weights of your most common package types, and our Smart Packaging technology automatically chooses the optimal packaging for your order. This automation saves you time and optimizes costs, all while maintaining accuracy.

5. Prioritize Post-Purchase Transparency

Once an order is placed, one of the most effective ways to build trust and impress customers is through proactive communication. Customers value being kept informed about their order's journey from your door to theirs.

How ClickShip Helps: Our platform provides real-time tracking information for all shipments. This allows both you and your customers to stay updated on the status of their packages, ensuring transparency and providing much-needed peace of mind during a busy shipping period. This feature greatly mitigates unnecessary customer inquiries and complaints, saving your business time and resources.

6. Speed Up Order Fulfillment with Automation

During the holiday surge, time is your most precious resource. Manually managing the booking and fulfillment process for every single order can slow you down, preventing you from serving your customer base quickly and efficiently.

How ClickShip Helps: ClickShip’s Advanced Shipping Rules give you the power to create unlimited automation rules based on parameters that you set. These rules can effectively automate the entire process of booking and fulfilling your customers’ orders, leaving you to simply apply a shipping label and send the packages on their way.

7. Make the Delivery an "Unboxing" Experience

The box that shows up at your customer’s front door is the closest you can come to a second chance for a first impression. Particularly in the eCommerce sphere, customers expect brands to put thought into their packaging, making the act of opening the package as engaging as the purchase itself.

How ClickShip Helps: You can add your business’ personal touch across all major shipping touchpoints using our Advanced Custom Branding feature. This allows you to stand out from the sea of brown cardboard and turn a routine delivery into a memorable and shareable experience that promotes your brand.

8. Use Quality Packaging to Protect Purchases

Shipping inherently carries with it the risk that goods may get damaged in transit. Providing the right level of protection on your shipments will not only greatly lower this risk but can also greatly improve your customer experience. Using proper packaging techniques, like quality boxes and appropriate dunnage, keeps your goods secure while in transit.

How ClickShip Helps: Our platform features a built-in tags system that allows you to organize your entire inventory with ease. Tagging fragile items or goods that require specific handling in-platform can help to ensure orders with these goods are fulfilled with greater accuracy and care, especially during hectic, high-volume periods.

9. Streamline the Returns Process with Confidence

While the prospect of returned products is not ideal, a clear, straightforward, and customer-centric return policy is a great way to impress customers. A strong return policy is crucial because it helps build trust and sends a message that you stand behind the quality of your product.

How ClickShip Helps: ClickShip offers a range of features to help streamline your return process and improve efficiency. One of the key features is the automated return label generation. This allows you to provide a seamless, hassle-free returns experience for your customers, differentiating you from competitors and boosting confidence.

10. Prevent Shopping Disappointments with Integrated Inventory Management

Nothing frustrates a customer more during the holidays than placing an order for a gift, only to receive an email afterwards informing them that the order has been cancelled due to an inventory error. These cancelled orders not only mean a lost sale in the moment but can all but guarantee a negative impact on customer retention long-term.

How ClickShip Helps: ClickShip IMS is a standalone inventory management platform that acts as a digital representation of your physical warehousing space. ClickShip IMS syncs your inventory seamlessly across all your sales channels and woks in tandem with ClickShip to help you manage every step of the inventory management process from receiving and put-away, to pick-and-pack and fulfillment.

Impress Your Customers All Year Round with ClickShip

By leveraging an all-in-one shipping platform like ClickShip, you can transform your shipping into a highly automated, efficient, and cost-effective engine for customer satisfaction.

Our platform integrates seamlessly with the leading eCommerce platforms and online marketplaces, giving you access to discounted rates on parcel and pallet shipping from the most trusted carriers in North America, all for zero upfront or monthly fees.

Don’t let the holiday rush overwhelm your business. Use these 10 simple ways to elevate your customer experience and accelerate your growth.