The cost of dispatch = the price per parcel?

If you own an e-shop or send goods to your customers by courier, the quality of the delivery is a key factor leading to customer satisfaction and repeat purchases. When choosing a courier company, an e-shop looks for one that delivers the shipment well and at the lowest possible price. But have you ever thought about the total costs you have to bear for dispatch?

The „cost of dispatch“ is not determined by the „price of a parcel“ alone. The cost of dispatch covers the process from receiving an order through fulfilling it, packing, communication, the courier collecting the shipment, delivery, any complaints and customer service, all the way to receiving the COD payment in your account.

The cost of dispatch therefore reflects all the internal company processes involved in preparing for dispatch and then the processes after the parcel is handed over to the courier.

In the lines below we would like to think through with you the individual aspects that, besides the price of a parcel, enter the dispatch process and can significantly affect your dispatch costs.

Time

Besides the price of the parcel itself, a significant factor entering dispatch costs is the cost of a man-hour. That is the time of the person who physically processes orders, dispatches them in the system and communicates with the carrier. Then there is the time of the accountant or administrative employee handling COD payments and issuing invoices. This process may also involve the person responsible for sending e-mails to recipients about dispatch, dealing with complaints, informing customers about delivery and so on. How is it at your company? Do you use your time and your employees' time efficiently? Or would optimisation be worth considering here?

Manual parcel processing vs. automation

As the number of parcels grows, so does the need to automate dispatch processes. While with 5 parcels a day you may not need to think about automation and can handle orders and fill out labels fairly quickly, with 20, 50 or 100 parcels a day filling out and copying recipients' details by hand is very slow and inefficient.

Thanks to automation you dispatch orders in a matter of seconds, the shipment data is pulled into the carrier's system, you print the labels along with the handover protocol in one click and – an unmissable fact – you record a big saving in man-hour costs. Besides that, you eliminate errors and can devote the „saved time“ to other important activities in your business.

There are ready-made solutions on the market today thanks to which your e-shop, administration interface or invoicing system is connected with dispatch software to such an extent that you handle all dispatch matters from the comfort of your own platform.

An overview of finances and shipments

Do you have every single euro spent on dispatch under control? Do you hunt for invoices, credit notes and COD statements in your e-mails? Would you appreciate a solution that gave you everything under one online login, clearly and transparently? Or do you handle it fine and manage to keep track of these things?

On the market today you will find companies offering extended options for simple, efficient financial management:

Displaying the total price of every single shipment with the individual items making up that total price – the fuel and toll surcharges, the COD price, the surcharge for express delivery, Saturday delivery and so on. An overview of paid and unpaid COD amounts, which allows better cashflow planning. Solutions like these also let you export COD data, in certain cases connect over API and upload it in bulk into your invoicing system to match pending payments.

Communication with the carrier

How do you handle a situation with a customer when a complaint has to be filed, the COD amount changed afterwards, the recipient's address altered, a phone number added and so on? Do you call or e-mail the carrier? Does it happen that you cannot get through to the customer line or track down the e-mail conversation?

Dispatch systems have a very simple notification feature developed for communicating with carriers. The sender does not have to think about which depot to call, who to send a complaint to, or where to call if you entered a COD amount into the system by mistake but the courier is not supposed to collect it from the recipient. Every single shipment has this feature for communicating directly with the carrier. The carrier processes the request very quickly and arranges the necessary change. On top of that, for a better overview of shipments that have been amended or complained about, the shipment stays specially marked once the request has been sent. As dispatch systems are online, you handle these matters from anywhere.

Notification e-mails

Most carriers send recipients uniform SMS messages and e-mails about the shipment being dispatched and then delivered. But what if you could get more out of an ordinary e-mail? What if you could edit the e-mails in terms of content and design, so that you can stand out from the competition and build your brand that way?

Some dispatch systems offer customers exactly these services and also let you insert any reference to news in your shop, a link to a promotion, a recommendation for your other services and so on. Besides that, if you dispatch shipments abroad, you can set up language versions for the individual countries and build good relationships with customers.

Statistics

In every company it is important to measure the performance of people and processes, analyse the results achieved, know your weak and strong points, compare previous periods with the current one – in short, to have statistics on which strategic decisions and the company's direction for the coming periods are based. Any area of a business can be measured and evaluated. And dispatch is no exception.

Would you like to have online statistics showing shipments dispatched and categorised by day, month and weight? Would it be useful to be able to compare, in a single overview, the number of parcels delivered in Slovakia with those delivered abroad and, on that basis, make better decisions about your activities on a given market? Do your customers choose delivery to ParcelShops? Can you turn that information to your advantage and use it to negotiate better prices with your carrier for this delivery option? Are you sending more or fewer parcels this week, month or year than last? The answers from a statistical overview can help you with various analyses of your dispatch activities.

If you would like to make your dispatch processes more efficient, we will be happy to help you in this area through our dispatch system Neoship :)