5 Cold Shipping Tips to Beat the Heat
When someone starts their first business, they tend to pour their heart and soul into it; anything less wouldn’t suffice. Your business can have the most beautiful website, eye-catching packaging, and a memorable tagline, but if orders arrive in bad shape – none of that will matter to your customer.
First impressions last, especially when it comes to perishable goods. Chances are that your first-time customers are understandably nervous already. A few years ago, cold shipping got left to the huge players who could afford special transportation, and the quantity ordered justified that extra shipping spend.
These days any business can ship cold or frozen foods; they just need to follow these five tips below:
Understand The Challenges
The quickest way to do a job badly is by not understanding what you are doing. Transporting and storing temperature-sensitive items like frozen berries or pharmaceuticals require advanced packaging materials, specialized refrigerators, and cold boxes to maintain the product’s quality.
Fresh, perishable items have to be delivered fresh and free from contamination. As a business owner, you must understand the challenges that come with cold shipping, such as higher costs and inventory management techniques.
Manage Delays
With cold shipping and cold drop shipping, you need to eliminate delays in the chain as much as possible. Delays often equal damaged, unusable goods. The longer the delay is, the more compromised the items will be if the temperature fluctuations are too much.
Shipping delays are all too common with standard shipping, but if external factors get stacked against you, you have to learn to mitigate them to protect the integrity of your products.
Insulated Shipping Supplies
To keep perishable items cold or frozen during shipping, you have three main options for cooling: dry ice, gel packs, and normal ice. Then you put your the items and cooling options of your choice inside saeplast containers. Most couriers will have shipping requirements and restrictions for using coolants so be sure to check ahead of time.
Insulated shipping supplies are a necessity. Do ample research and find the right option for your business’s cold shipping requirements.
Choose A Shipping Partner
Finding the best shipping partner for your business can be tricky if you’re a first-timer for shipping. For professional shipping of items that require guaranteed delivery times, be prepared to pay more.
Your business could qualify for shipping discounts and special pricing depending on your current and projected order quantities. With most of the big names in shipping, you should be able to negotiate for at least a 20% discount off full retail without promising massive volumes.
Sit down with your prospective shipping partners and find the best way forward for your business and theirs.
Build Shipping Fees into The Product Price
While your business may not be able to add the total shipping cost to each item, a portion of those costs certainly can be added to the sales price. That will allow your business to set lower shipping prices for your customers while still covering the actual costs.
Start small and add a 30% markup to the price of your items, then pass the rest of the shipping costs onto the customer. If your product is worth it, your customers will be more than willing to pay.
