Ways to lower your shipping costs

If you run an online business or ship items to your customers one of the costs of doing business is your shipping costs. For every order that is placed, you are going to have to pay shipping costs to ship the product to your valuable customers. One of the ways that you can reduce your costs for your business is to lower your shipping costs. Not to mention that lowering your shipping costs can help you to lower your product price so that more people buy your product.

Here are some things that you can do to lower your shipping costs.

Number one: Alternative shipping options
If you are not worried about how long it is going to take your product to be delivered, meaning if time is not a factor you can look at different shipping options to help lower your costs. The slower the delivery is the more money you will save when shipping your products. Priority shipping is going to be one of the higher shipping rates through your current carrier; you can also look at other carriers to see what kinds of rates they have to offer.

Number two: Discounts
If you are using a retail-shipping department, such as UPS, DHL, or FedEx, you can talk to your account representative about what kinds of discounts you are getting for your shipping needs. This can make a huge difference if you are giving those retail stores a lot of business. When it comes to retail shippers chances are that when you first signed up you were shipping things at a flat rate, discounts probably never crossed your mind. The only way that you can get the discounts is to ask for them, companies are not going to volunteer this information.

Number three: Surcharges
Surcharges, which most people do not give a second thought too, can greatly increase your shipping costs. The thing with surcharges is that nobody but you will be monitoring them to ensure that you are being charged the correct amount, which the longer you leave them unchecked the longer the potential waste of money can continue. You need to keep in mind that certain surcharges are higher for residential packages and these are charged in addition to the standard residential and fuel surcharges that your carrier charges. Another thing to watch out for is address correction charges, make sure that you get the address right the first time around so that you do not have to pay additional fees, such as shipping it out again to the correct address. Try to avoid having the packages picked up for shipping because most carriers will charge you a small pick up fee. These fees can add up quickly, so drop them off at your local carrier on your lunch break or even on your way home from work.

Number four: Hundredweight pricing
If you are the type of business that sends out shipments of multiple packages to a single location, such as a large order to a customer, you can be eligible for something called hundredweight pricing. This method of shipping rates can also be referred to as multiweight pricing, what it is referred to depend on the carrier that you are using. With this method of pricing, multiple packages that are being shipped to the same destination are rated as a shipment at a rate per unit weight rather than weight per package. When shipping multiple packages to the same address you want to look into both shipping prices to see which price is going to be the lowest, not all cases will result in hundredweight pricing being the low cost option.