With the influx of our economy changing to a more eCommerce-based style, many companies are struggling to keep up. The fact that our world is moving to online sales and less in-person contact the ability to stay competitive or even stay alive as a business is hard. There are a whole lot of ways to make money in this economy and by no means is the United States going to destroy itself with this move. But it can be hard to change from a brick and mortar store into an online store. This is a big change and even the small things can end up costing you lots of money. The ability to buy and source your shipping supplies correctly is really important and can help your company stay ahead.
Our company went through a pretty big change in order to stay ahead of this economy and with that we learned a few things about how to cut some costs. We ended up shipping a whole lot of goods online ourselves and what that did was make us purchase a whole lot of shipping supplies in order to do it. So we at first decided we want to be wise with our spending and started our search.
We first did what everyone does and picked up our smartphones and searched for boxes, tape, labels on Amazon. We figured out what we were likely to ship in our first month and ended up ordering a whole month of supplies from what we thought was the lowest priced things. After we were done we figured we may be able to find another way of saving money or being more efficient. We ended up only spending just enough to get us through one month in order to give us a baseline to shop other locations.
Being a good steward of our money mattered to us and wanted to make sure that we were also supportive of our local companies if we could be. So we ended up looking down the street and shopping local. We went to big box stores and local shops in order to source our boxes and tape and see if we could spend the same or a similar amount close to home. It is also nice to be able to pick up spare boxes and tape just down the road if we ended up running out or needing something quick. But the costs of this was about 30% higher then our Amazon budget and was more complicated to get all of the items we needed. So the next idea was to go online and find source manufactures.
We called up big online companies who could end up being more of a partner than just an online shopping experience. We talked with agents that new what we were doing and had ideas to actually make our shipping department more efficient and cost less. We used better tape that cost less in the long run and bought better boxes that held our items more safely and cost us less. We were able to accomplish this by buying in bulk and being able to get discounts from our quantity of purchases. The final result was to save about 20% from our Amazon spending and this was a great help to our department. It made us more competitive and I hope it helps you too.
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