In E-Commerce in the Pandemic – Part 1 I talked about shifting your perspective to help your mental health and improve efficiency. As promised, here is part 2 about logistical changes that can help improve efficiency, and by extension, your mental health! There are a lot of common questions and pitfalls that I hope to give you some pointers to overcome.

Sourcing

Sourcing books is a big consideration right now. If you’re in a region where you can be open and have staff, you have more flexibility. If you end up closed, on the other hand, you may be working from home using a drop-shipping service like Ingram‘s Direct to Home program or using a Bookshop.org page for an affiliate commission. Whatever the case, streamlining this process is important.

The biggest thing you can do to improve this portion of the workflow is create a way to cross reference orders against your store stock. If your POS can import your web orders directly, it may have a way to run a pick-list. If you use a service like IndieCommerce, your website will be able to generate it for you assuming you’ve synced your inventory. Either way, if you have a list of books that customers have ordered, which includes the order information and stock, you can very quickly fill large portions of your orders. If you’ve designed your site to optimize shopping for in-stock items, it goes even farther.

Take that list, use a paper cutter to slice it into individual titles, and you and your staff take 5-10 slips at once (or more if you have book carts) and walk the floor pulling titles. Have another staff member ready with order invoices to collate and pack the orders as the books are picked. If you can control the format of your picklist, make the slips large – like 1/5th sheet of office paper, with a prominent order number. Having an easy time seeing what order a given book is on will greatly speed up the collation and packing that happens later.

Once you have the list off in stock items, you’ll have its opposite as well – the items that are on order, but not on your shelf. Again, your POS may have a great way to generate a PO for the appropriate vendors, and get those books in ASAP. Then again, you may need to be breaking these out by hand to decide whether to send it to the publisher or a jobber. This is where the slowdown can come in. Having an experienced buyer on staff (or being one yourself) will work wonders, since you’ll already have a workflow for placing orders. However, if you’re new to buying or haven’t had to think much about where the orders go, here are a few tips.

If you do most of your business through a jobber like Ingram, and that’s working for you, now isn’t the time to figure out a whole different workflow to start trying to incorporate publisher orders into your workflow. A trick I learned from a store I work with was to use Ingram’s quick order feature to paste in the full list of ISBN’s for the items you don’t have. There is a portion of iPage where you can put in ISBNs, one per line, and click “Check Stock”. It will build an order that you can place directly on iPage with only a few clicks. The upside is you’ve saved a ton of time. The downside is you potentially miss out on a few points of markup by not going to the publisher.

If you have a robust backlist program and do regular orders from publishers, try and start filling special orders that way as well. PRH has been almost as fast as Ingram for several years now, and if you’re doing backlist orders with them, there’s no real reason to give up the significantly better margin you get by ordering from the publisher just to shave off a bit of time.

Shipping

Shipping these days is so much easier than it once was, but no less lacking in decisions and options than anything else. First, you absolutely need to find a service. I use PirateShip, Mike uses Stamps.com, still other folks use ShipStation or one of the other many shipping sites. The main considerations or being able to create labels in bulk and efficiently, and choosing a service that supports the carriers you use.

I love PirateShip because I use Cubic Rate Priority Mail a lot. I’m a rabid supporter of the USPS, so I don’t need something like ShipStation since I don’t ship via UPS or FedEx. PirateShip has great rates for USPS and is super easy just to upload a spreadsheet to. They also support saved packages and the ability to copy/paste an entire address and intelligently parse it into the correct format.

Mike raves about Stamps.com because he makes extensive use of their hardware. He uses an integrated scale, and in combination with the ability to import the shipping addresses he can weigh the books, spit out a media mail label, and have the books processed and packed lickity split.

Perhaps the biggest challenge with shipping, though, is managing costs. Customers have, thanks to certain retailers I shall not mention, become accustom to artificially low shipping fees. We all know we can’t compete with that realistically, and our customers are getting used to that fact, but it’s still hard not to lose money on shipping. Often, you’ll be selling using a platform that has fixed or only minimally customizable shipping rates. This means that you have to figure out how to average your shipping costs across your orders, rather than obsess about getting a certain margin on each individual order.

How do I do that, you may be asking. Well, track your shipping costs over the course of a few days, weeks, months, and try to come up with the average cost to fill an order via a given method. Use that data to find prices that average out to zero or a bit better. Let’s say that you offer Media Mail shipping for $4.50 and Priority for $7.50. You’ll frequently be spending less than $4.50 for Media Mail, which will offset the times you’ll spend more than $7.50 to ship Priority.

This calculation is where good flat-rate shipping methods can be a lifesaver. The Priority Rate Cubic I mentioned above is a good example. It is based on size, not weight, much like the USPS Flat Rate options, and is almost always cheaper. It’s often not all that much more than Media Mail, and the service is more reliable and comes with insurance. Read up on it, see if it’s right for you. If not, there’s something out there that is.

Supplies

Having the right supplies for shipping is important as well. There are a lot of sources for packaging and labeling, and everyone has their preferences and requirements. The biggest recommendation I have is self-adhesive labels^*. Printing out 50 labels at once and not having to tape each one on individually will save you literal hours of your week.

For packaging, consider the free supplies from USPS. They will deliver them in cartons to your door if you request it, giving you a ready supply of packaging for anything you ship with them. Other folks I know will buy padded envelopes in bulk off eBay^*.

I hope this post gave you some ideas! Please send us a note with any questions, comments, or hot tips you’d like to share.