Warehousing & Shipping
Selling products is the easy part. Making sure they are shipped to your customers quickly and carefully is not so easy. You need a reliable shipping department, a reliable shipping company, a reliable warehouser, or at very least a reliable drop shipper. Without one or more of these things, you will likely see more returns and cancelled orders than sales.

Web River Group has years of experience in shipping and distribution. Whether you're using your own warehouse facilities, compiling your own stockroom and shipping out of your basement, or participating in one of the Internet's many rising drop ship business programs, we can help make your shipping process more efficient and successful.

We also specialize in changing shipping methods. As many websites grow, they wish to decrease expenses and increase profits by shipping their own products. No matter what size web site or company, our consultants can guide you through the steps of e-commerce warehousing and shipping efficiency, and walk you along the path from drop ship website to self-distributor.

If you're a smaller website that would prefer to handle your own warehousing and shipping of products, please follow our free guidelines below and contact us if we can assist you in any way.

1. Organize. If you're shipping out of your home, keep one room, the garage or basement specifically for housing products. In that room, keep a computerized spreadsheet of all products in stock, on order, and on the way out. Update daily and reorder whenever you get low. The last thing you need is to sell 10 sale items in one day, only to find that you've only got 3 left in stock.

2. Know what's in stock. Not just at your home warehouse, but in the distributor as well. Make updates to your website accordingly. If something's running low, let the customers know and encourage them to buy while still available. If you see your distributor running low on a popular product, order more even if you have plenty in stock. You can always sell more, but you can't always get more when customers are buying them up.

3. Ship twice a day. Big warehouses have trucks come multiple times per day. In order to compete, ship products twice daily. If you've got a carrier account, request bi-daily pickups. If you can't, run to the carrier around lunch to ship night and early morning orders, and later in the day to ship early and late afternoon orders. The more often you ship, the quicker your customers will receive their products, and the more often they'll return to buy again.

4. Keep records. Every morning before you begin, and every night before you call it quits, update your logs for what you've shipped and what you've received. By the end of the week, you should have your numbers memorized. As long as you know what's coming in and what's going out, you'll always know how well the business is doing.