The Impact of Impact — How to Reduce Loss During Shipping
Thanks to Amazon, customers around the world expect to be able to purchase goods online and have them arrive in a matter of days, if not minutes. Unfortunately, shipping is a dangerous endeavor to all sorts of goods; if your business’s products have far to go, all sorts of harm could come to them before they reach a customer’s doorstep.
Thus, the key to competing in a shipping-focused marketplace is knowing how to keep your products safe. Unfortunately, that is sometimes easier said than done.
Types of Damage During Shipping
Shipped items are never truly safe. Even if you own the shipping service that delivers your products from point A to point B, your items are subject to all sorts of damage. There are ways to protect your products against damage — but first you need to know what the most likely forms of damage are. They include:
Physical. Physical damage is by far the most common threat to cargo. Drops, bad stowage (or failing to secure items properly within a shipping container) and other mistakes result in physical damage, which often means components of your products bend and break, making them unsuitable for sale.
Moisture. Also called wet damage, moisture is much more harmful than many companies think. Even if your products are particularly water-resistant, you should beware moisture, which can destroy all elements of packaging, including the box and void fill.
Contamination. Generally, contamination occurs when a package is “made impure” and is thus unusable. Not all products are subject to contamination, but delicate cargo, like clothing or food, can easily become polluted or poisoned during the shipping process.
Infestation. Pests are always a danger to your business’s products, especially during shipping when there isn’t likely to be much human supervision. Insects and animals like rats and birds can cause contamination-related damage by spreading disease amongst cargo, and they also cause physical damage.
How Damage Affects Profitability
It’s not a good idea to allow any type or amount of damage occur to your business’s products because damaged products provide a poor customer experience and result in lower engagement and sales. Here are a few extra costs that come with damaged packages:
Product replacement. Either you must provide customers with a new, undamaged item, or else you must pay to repair the damage before returning it to customers.
Freight. You must absorb the costs of returning a damaged item and shipping out the product replacement.
Customer service. Your customer service team doesn’t work for free; the more shipped items are damaged, the more time they will need to sort out the issue, which might mean paying to expand the customer service department.
Customer lifetime value. Perhaps the costliest impact of all, customers are unlikely to continue doing business with companies who sent a damaged item. Plus, dissatisfied customers are more likely to post low ratings and reviews online, dissuading future customers from making purchases.
Ways to Prevent Damage From Occurring
Fortunately, damage isn’t always inevitable. If you are noticing that an overwhelming number of your products are being damaged during shipping, you can take steps to reduce the impact and keep your customers content. While it’s impossible to eliminate shipping damage entirely, it is possible to diminish it considerably with the following procedures:
Measure. You need to know what kind of damage threatens your products specifically. Impact monitoring will help you identify sources of physical damage, and you can use other shipping monitoring devices to measure moisture levels, air pollution and more.
Package. Proper packaging is the best way to safeguard your shipped items, hands down. Once you know what type of damage your products are subject to, you should invest in the right type of containers and insulation to protect and cushion your products appropriately.
Research. If you aren’t controlling your shipping directly with your own fleet of shipping vehicles, you need to sufficiently research your shipping partner. You should be certain that your shipping provider is doing their utmost to keep your items safe.
Loading and bracing. If you do have the resources to ship your items, you should understand the proper methods for loading a shipping container safely and bracing products to prevent damage during movement. As with packaging, loading and bracing goes a long way to prevent the most common types of damage.
You definitely don’t want your products to come to harm at any time — but you especially don’t want your products damaged during shipping, when they are just about to reach customers. While package protection isn’t free, it is more than worth your investment.
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