Black Friday Survival Guide: Maximise Your Profitability and Keep Your Customers Happy with OneShip
Black Friday is the ultimate shopping extravaganza that marks the beginning of the holiday season. For businesses, it presents a golden opportunity to boost sales and profitability. However, the surge in customer orders, high expectations for rapid deliveries, and the pressure to provide exceptional service can also bring numerous challenges. In this Black Friday survival guide, we’ll explore how OneShip, a NetSuite SuiteApp can be your secret weapon to not only survive but thrive during this retail frenzy.
OneShip is a top-tier SuiteApp designed for NetSuite, offering businesses seamless connection with major UK and EU carriers. This all-in-one solution simplifies shipping and fulfilment directly within the NetSuite platform. OneShip’s user-friendly design, efficiency, and exceptional customer experience makes it the ultimate tool to streamline your shipping processes and enhance your logistics capabilities.
Learn how OneShip for NetSuite can help you optimise operations, improve efficiency, and ensure your customers stay happy throughout this high-stakes shopping event.
Key Challenges Faced by Businesses During Black Friday
During Black Friday, businesses encounter a myriad of challenges. The sudden surge in customer orders can strain inventory management, leading to stock shortages. Scaling up internal operations to process the influx of orders and maintain efficiency becomes a priority but is often met with capacity constraints. Moreover, businesses face uncertainty about shipping carriers’ preparedness, adding complexity to carrier selection and ensuring timely deliveries.
These challenges can have lasting repercussions on business operations and reputation in the long run. Stock shortages, for instance, can result in lost sales opportunities and disappointed customers who may turn to competitors. Insufficient processing capacity can lead to overwhelmed staff and a dip in customer service quality, potentially harming customer loyalty.
In this high-pressure environment, addressing these challenges becomes paramount to seize the opportunities Black Friday presents. Let’s dive deep into these challenges:
- Skyrocketing Order Volumes: The sudden influx of orders can strain existing logistics and fulfilment processes, leading to delays and errors.
- Shorter Delivery Timelines: Customers expect swift deliveries, and on Black Friday, these expectations soar, making on-time shipments crucial.
- Inventory Management: Balancing stock levels to meet demand while preventing overstocking or stockouts requires precise coordination.
- Accurate Order Fulfilment: Ensuring the correct products are picked, packed, and shipped accurately becomes more challenging with high order volumes.
- Staffing and Training: Hiring additional seasonal staff and providing comprehensive training within a limited timeframe adds complexity to the workforce. This influx of personnel can potentially lead to increased errors and shipping inaccuracies.
- Carrier Coordination: Coordinating with multiple carriers for increased shipping volume requires meticulous planning to ensure all shipments are processed efficiently.
- Packaging Challenges: Unique packaging requirements during promotions, such as gift wrapping or personalised messages, add layers of complexity to the shipping process.
- Return Management: Anticipating higher return rates and implementing a streamlined returns process is essential to maintain customer satisfaction.
- Cost Management: Managing increased shipping costs while maintaining competitiveness is a constant concern for businesses.
OneShip: Your Black Friday NetSuite Shipping Solution
Introducing OneShip, the answer to these popular shipping pain points. Working in synergy within your NetSuite platform, OneShip is your ally when it comes to automating and optimising your shipping operations. Here’s how…
Automate Shipping for Black Friday Success
OneShip offers automated shipping rules that simplify this process. Define criteria to streamline carrier selection, shipping methods, and delivery options, ensuring cost-effective and efficient shipping that meets customer expectations.
Streamline Your Workflow with Bulk Shipment Processing
OneShip’s bulk shipment processing capabilities allow you to streamline picking, packing, and shipping. By automating these processes, you save precious time and minimise manual errors, ensuring orders are fulfilled accurately and swiftly. Integrating OneShip into your NetSuite eliminates the need for manual shipment processing from external systems, enhancing accuracy and providing comprehensive order and shipment visibility for all team members.
Delight Customers with Integrated Tracking and Notifications
OneShip captures tracking info and enables your customer service team to respond to shipping queries quickly by tracking shipments directly from NetSuite transactions – enhancing the customer experience. The real-time tracking information ensures that customers stay informed and satisfied, particularly when they have precise updates on the status and location of their orders.
Cost-Efficiency with OneShip
Managing shipping costs is a constant concern for businesses, especially during Black Friday. OneShip helps you optimise your shipping services by automating the carrier selection process in NetSuite with customisable shipping rules, enabling you to handle more shipments with fewer resources, ultimately improving your bottom line. Save on operational and staffing costs, increase shipping capacity, and allocate staff to other tasks efficiently.
Speed Up Dispatch for Black Friday Rush
Every second counts during Black Friday. OneShip significantly speeds up the dispatch process, reducing the time it takes to produce shipping labels – because OneShip is within NetSuite this removes the need for your team to manually process customer shipping data into external carrier platforms. This not only enhances efficiency but also minimises the margin for error, ensuring orders are sent out quickly and accurately.
Error Reduction and Improved Accuracy
Automation within OneShip significantly reduces errors in the shipping process. This is crucial during Black Friday when the risk of mistakes is higher due to the sheer volume of orders. Keep your customers happy by delivering the right products on time, every time. Remove manual copy and paste between systems, significantly speed up the dispatch process, and reduce label production from ~3 minutes per shipment to a few seconds.
Wide Carrier Integration for Versatility
OneShip offers pre-built connectors to more than 90 UK and European shipping providers, granting you access to services from renowned shippers such as DHL, Royal Mail, Evri, DPD, FedEx, DX, APC, and many more. These prebuilt connections, combined with the efficiency and effectiveness of NetSuite, not only eliminate the complexities of costly custom integration but also provide you with the flexibility to seamlessly navigate the constantly evolving world of shipping carriers.
Black Friday presents both challenges and opportunities for businesses. With OneShip as your NetSuite Shipping Integration, you can not only survive but thrive during this high-stakes shopping event. Master order management, automate shipping, streamline workflows, enhance customer satisfaction, and optimise costs with OneShip’s advanced shipping solutions. Maximise your profitability and keep your customers happy, making this Black Friday a resounding success for your business.
Case Study: Fiorucci maximises their profitability and keeps their customers happy with OneShip
Let’s have a look at a real life example that demonstrates the effectiveness of OneShip in helping businesses survive the Black Friday Rush. Fiorucci, a renowned fashion brand and retailer, was looking to upgrade their customer service to provide the best possible quality of care for their loyal shoppers. Their ecommerce division was previously overseen by a 3rd party logistics provider, but as their sales grew, they quickly came to the realisation that their 3rd party provider simply didn’t have the capacity and operational efficiency to accommodate an increase in workload and growth. Dispatching customer orders became a slower and disconnected process, and with the additional challenge of not being able to receive any tracking data they risked creating unhappy customers. It’s these challenges that drove Fiorruci’s decision to bring One·Ship into the mix. Issues with timely dispatching of their e-commerce orders, expensive custom integration and no customer shipping tracking/poor customer experience. Leveraging OneShip’s features, Fiorucci streamlined their operations and achieved notable successes:
- Enhanced Customer Confidence: Real-time tracking and notifications within OneShip gave Fiorucci’s customers insights into their deliveries’ progress. This enhanced transparency and instilled confidence in their customers.
- Faster Order Fulfilment: Switching to One·Ship allowed Fiorucci to speed up their order fulfilment by decreasing the amount of time it took to transfer customer information onto the package labels. This also allowed them to ship out packages individually, rather than relying on a much slower batch process. This new-found efficiency allowed them to expand their shipping offers to customers, and they were even able to start offering super-fast next day delivery.