Why Companies Need to Automate Their Shipping Processes
If you run a company, you’ll need to do all you can to stay ahead of your competitors. You’re sure to have some, regardless of the services you offer or products you manufacture. Very few companies don’t have to contend with any other business entities offering the public similar or identical items.
Everything you can do to simplify your company’s business model helps. With that in mind, you’ll probably want to automate your shipping processes if possible. We’ll talk about why shipping automation matters right now.
You Can Save Money Through Automation
You’ll want to automate your company’s shipping processes to save money. If you set up a shipping API, it can communicate with delivery companies to let them know how many packages you have to pick up, where they’re going, and during what timeframe the customer expects them.
If you don’t automate all of that, you’ll need to hire many more employees to handle it. They will need to scramble to get that information, and they probably won’t keep track of it as well as shipping APIs can.
Paying for a shipping API will not cost you nearly as much as hiring an army of employees who would do approximately the same thing. The money you’ll pay for the API is negligible compared to what you’d have to pay the workers. You’d have to pay not only their salaries but also for things like paid vacation time, 401K programs, and healthcare plans.
Automate Shipping Processes: You Can Access a Management Portal at Any Time
Setting up shipping automation results in a streamlined shipping process whenever you get orders. You can access a central hub where you can see the order number, when it came in, the items in the shipment, and the recipient’s name. You can see the rate the shipping company charges, which you can pass on to the customer as part of the order total.
You can see whether the customer wants that order sent priority or standard domestic. You can see whether the buyer added additional information, such as precisely where the carrier should drop off the package. In short, you can find out everything about an order all in one place. You don’t have to look for that information across several websites or apps.
You Can Reduce Human Error
If you automate the shipping process with an API, you will also cut down on potential human errors. Automated programs can occasionally make a mistake, but generally, they will work exceptionally well.
Humans make errors much more frequently. Shipping automation can cut down on fulfillment time, and your team can create labels with a few easy clicks. If you have humans make up each shipping label, the chance of someone putting in the wrong information multiplies exponentially.
Humans can grow tired if they’re working long hours without enough sleep or caffeine. It’s easy for other workers to distract them if they’re talking or joking around. An automated process for label creation and order fulfillment won’t allow that to happen.
You Can Get Instant Support if You Need It
If you automate your shipping processes with the right API, you can also get 24/7 customer support if you ever need it. You should understand that these APIs and their many features do not operate in a vacuum. They are service-on-demand models for which you pay a subscription service, similar to software as a service.
As such, if a feature ever doesn’t work the way you want it to, you can reach out to the company that you’re paying for the shipping automation. For instance, say that you’re seeing barcodes that don’t work like they should, or maybe the central hub goes down, so you can’t see the orders, people, place. These events don’t happen often, but they’re always possible.
You’re paying for customer service as well as the API itself. You can talk to a live operator whenever you need to and find out why something has gone wrong.
If you try to handle shipping on your own, you’re the one troubleshooting the system. Unless you’re an IT expert, you probably don’t have the technical expertise to do that. Even if you do have the requisite skillset, as a business owner, you probably have more important responsibilities.
Shipping automation can get rid of many headaches that you’d have to deal with if you didn’t have it. Because of that, you should regard it as crucial for your business in 2022 rather than optional.
