Digital retail is a set of actions, all planned and executed with the consumer in mind. Therefore, in e-commerce , the manager has many more crucial responsibilities than simply buying products, listing them, and displaying them online. They also need to perform other activities, such as load consolidation for freight calculation.
IMPORTANCE OF LOAD CONSOLIDATION
Certainly, having a good e-commerce platform is essential . A well-structured website with good navigability is also necessary. Furthermore, good marketing is crucial. But that's not all.
There is another important point: the logistics of product delivery, that is, the freight.
The cost of shipping has great weight when the visitor finalizes the purchase.
That's because when closing a purchase, the total amount is considered, with shipping included. It's not just the price of the product that is at stake at this time.
Therefore, it will be useless to have a good product, with an attractive price, but to provide few shipping options and with bad prices.
Then, regarding the shipping options, you can either manually hire several carriers, or you can automate your logistics through a transport hub.
As for the cost of shipping, there is a solution that can help you immediately reduce this in the shopping cart. I'm talking about cargo consolidation in freight calculation, also called volume consolidation. This can, in fact, reduce shipping costs by 20% to 40% for sales with more than one product.
HOW DOES CONSOLIDATION OF VOLUMES WORK?
In most cases, products from the same sale are sent in the same package, bag, box, etc. This action is done so that all products arrive together and to save material.
Regardless of whether products are grouped in the same package during packaging, the shopping cart doesn't work that way. When more than one product is included in the shipping calculation, the dimensions of the products are added together, and the result is used in the volumetric weight calculation.
You can already imagine that the cost of shipping will not be exact, right?
The consolidation of volumes allows you to register the volumes of your packaging (boxes, bags and so on) so that, at the time of freight calculation, the products are virtually grouped.
They are placed inside these packages (something like tetris) to make the most of the cubic space of the vehicle that will carry your package.
LOAD CONSOLIDATION: TAKING ADVANTAGE OF SPACE
It is important to emphasize that the products can be tipped, rotated and overlapped to better fit the packaging.
If there are sensitive products in your mix that cannot be tipped over or that are on top in consolidation, you must specify.
For example, in an online beer store , the crates could be stacked on top of each other. However, they could not be tilted.
Below you can see a case study from Frete Rápido . Note how they were able to significantly reduce their partner's shipping costs.
Regardless of whether your company is in the process of automating processes or not, it's always the right time to optimize them.
Knowing this, be aware of these possibilities and the importance of reconciling invoices.
Shipping can hide a lot of costs that eat into your profit margin, so know how much you've received and how much you'll pay in shipping, even if it takes some time.
Text produced by Eduardo Bragança, e-commerce logistics specialist and author on the Frete Rápido blog.
