“uAfrica integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce and bidorbuy and Magento. It pulls orders placed on your specific online store to your uAfrica dashboard, and allows you to manage and ship orders from one central space. The goal of a system like uAfrica is to make your ecommerce processes simpler and the fulfillment process faster,” explains Niebuhr.
5. Ensure you have the baseline of reliability covered With ecommerce becoming more and more mainstream, there is a baseline of reliability that consumers expect from brands and courier companies. These must be met at a minimum if you want to ensure customer loyalty and repeat customers to your platform.
“Courier services and logistics are playing catch-up in a country where technology and ecommerce have simply boomed in the last few years,” explains Niebuhr. “Some courier services have struggled to scale with this rise in ecommerce, and the first ball that drops is often customer service. Good customer service is the backbone of every successful company.
According to Niebuhr, the baseline should include:
- Technology-driven logistics. Technology-driven logistics have upped the baseline of customer service. Gone are the days of sitting on the phone to a call centre to request the delivery status of your shipment.
- Proactive customer service. Customer service is now expected to be proactive, rather than reactive and driven by well-designed technology to lessen human error. Although customers and businesses alike are happy with (the expected) good service, it is the “going to the extra mile” that sets apart a good company from a great one.
- Ensure support staff can deliver during peak times. There are always peaks in retail and ecommerce is the same. It is important that the courier you work with is able to deliver during peak times and not just ‘business as usual’.
“This is an important goal for uAfrica. By scaling the support staff well in time for the annual ecommerce peak, namely Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we are well-prepared for the busiest seasons of the year. Small steps like making a personal connection with our customers, assigning specific support agents to certain accounts and building strong relationships with the couriers have led to a support team like no other,” says Niebuhr. “The support team is the absolute core of uAfrica – without them, the company would not be where it is today.”
6. Ensure tracking technology is standard“Technology-driven logistics are undoubtedly the future of ecommerce. Recent trends include auto-allocation and route optimisation of drivers, and in the future we expect to see drones delivering parcels to an exact location and not a fixed address,” says Niebuhr. “These trends are driving the industry forward at a rapid pace.”
It also means that technology – and tracking technology in particular – is a must-have, not a nice-to-have.
Here are a few reasons why:
- Automating and streamlining logistics reduces the risk of human error, enhances efficiency and allows companies to remain competitive.
- Good and accurate parcel tracking and communication with customers regarding their shipments are a necessity in the current landscape.
- Our top advice? Choose a delivery partner that is technology-forward for that all-too-important competitive edge.
7. Understand a courier’s breakages and returns policiesEven the most reliable couriers will sometimes damage products and returns are inevitable. Here is what you should consider when choosing a courier.
Breakages/damages: Returns are inevitable and merchants must have a system in place to handle returns in a quick and streamlined manner.
- The rate of returns increases as customers switch from physical shopping to online shopping and, ultimately, the biggest problem with returns is the increased cost.
- Courier companies charge returns as another shipment, thus doubling your shipping costs for one parcel. This cost can be increased again if a replacement item needs to be sent to the customer.
- These costs can affect the bottom line and thus, it is up to the merchants to try and reduce returns upfront.
- There are a variety of ways to do this, but returns are, unfortunately, impossible to avoid and must be taken into account when considering shipping costs.
8. Review shipping costs and factor them in to your overall costsShipment costs very much depend on the size of the parcel you are shipping. When the courier books your parcel into the hub, the parcel goes through a volumiser machine that measures its weight and dimensions (the volumetric weight). You will always be charged on the bigger of the two weights, so be sure to take that into account.
Here are some factors to keep top of mind:
- The cost of an account with a courier or courier aggregator varies from courier to courier and can depend on the amount of shipments your business does in a month. Some couriers only charge per shipment, others ask a monthly account fee – again, it all depends on what you are shipping and what your business model looks like.
- uAfrica offers five pricing plans depending how many orders your business processes in a month. These pricing plans vary to suit businesses of all sizes, from the individual shipping once every few months to those running a large and successful ecommerce store. These pricing plans also scale with the business:
- The free plan (no integration to an online store) has no monthly cost, with the first paid plan starting at R99 per month.
- The monthly subscription fee is charged above and beyond the shipping fees charged for each parcel that is being shipped.
- The shipping fees will be based on the plan you have subscribed to and the number of shipments conducted.
- uAfrica pricing plans and rate cards can be found on the uAfrica website.
All uAfrica accounts begin with a 30-day free trial for you to test the system. During the 30-day free trial, you can experiment, play and ship as much as you please. After the trial has expired, you can decide if uAfrica is for you. If not, no questions asked. If you loved it, you can pick a plan and join the uAfrica family.
Simply head to the uAfrica
website and sign up. To learn more about the software, you can visit the “Get Started” section, join a webinar or book a demo and start shipping!