Have a cool Kickstarter product but unsure how you’ll manage to handle the logistics side of the business all by yourself? Prefer not to store all your inventory in your garage and drop off product at FedEx or UPS everytime you need to make a shipment? Tired of keeping track of inventory on an Excel spreadsheet or on a piece of paper? Need to ship your product globally but overwhelmed by the myriad tax and tariff laws?

If you said yes to any of the above (or you know someone who might), please read on and spread the word.

Shipwire is excited to announce an all-new page dedicated to helping people who have a Kickstarter project get the logistics side of their business off the ground. We have had tremendous success in this space, helping many of the most successful Kickstarter projects deliver tens of thousands of orders. If you have a Kickstarter project or are thinking about starting one, this is a must-read.

Or, if you prefer to get started on the road to streamlining your Kickstarter rewards shipping right away, here are a some downloadable resources:

• Kickstart your idea into a ship”able” product – Download white paper
• Customer case study: The Glif – Download case study
• Kickstarter shipping best practices guide – Read the guide

Kickstart Your Idea Into a Ship”able” Product
Have an idea? This guide will go over how to fund the product and test the market, prototype, choose your sales channels, generate buzz, and project your brand on packaging and labels.
» Read the white paper

Customer case study: The Glif
Two interaction designers knew there was a market for their nifty iPhone 4 stand and tripod mount, but they needed Shipwire’s logistics to deliver the goods worldwide.
» Learn how they shipped 7,000 orders in one day

Kickstarter shipping best practices guide
This guide will go over everything you’ll need to know to get started with shipping your Kickstarter project rewards. It will cover topics such as fulfillment, packaging, shipping rates, international shipping and Harmonized Tariff System (HTS) codes, taxes and duties, product catalogs, and more.
» Read the guide

Kickstarter white paper	Kickstarter case study	Kickstarter Guide – PDF
Download white paper	Download case study	Read the guide

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We’re halfway through the best e-commerce holiday shopping season ever. While we at Shipwire would love for the festivities to continue on forever, it’s time to start thinking ahead to December 26. Specifically, I’m talking about returns.

Facilitating a smooth and hassle-free return experience for your customers can make you stand out in their minds and influence where they decide to shop. Though the reward is great, planning, executing, and perfecting a return policy is no easy task. Here are a few of tips for a top-notch return policy from our learnings from years past.

Map out a decision tree for your return policy
It’s important to have a clear and concise return policy and the first step to such policy is to map it out to make sure all the bases are covered. You’ll likely be facing one or more of the following scenarios when a customer wants to return a product:

Determine best practices for each scenario
Once you have the scenarios mapped out, it’s time to draw up, document, and disseminate the best practices (both internally and to your customers). We’ve found that using a carrier that offers return tracking, providing automatic return shipping labels, and encouraging customers to insure return packages are some practices that generally result in a better return experience. To learn more about managing returns, read this article.

Regardless of how you decide you handle returns, make sure your policy is communicated clearly to your customers to avoid confusion and to instill buyer confidence. Make sure the policy is documented clearly on your site and written in a colloquial tone – not everyone is a lawyer and making sure your policy is understood is important. Also include any information about charges in the policy.

Less strict equals more revenue
Industry experts agree that having a more lenient returns policy not only increases customer satisfaction, it boosts total profits and sales as well. Best Buy and Johnson and Johnson are great examples of how a return policy can make or break a company – the former saw its sales surge as it revamped its return policy to eliminate restocking fees and the latter saw its market capitalization drop due to poor handling of recalls.

A second study shows that more than half of all online shoppers have returned merchandise back to the online retailer. Among shoppers who have returned merchandise, the top expectation for returns is a preaddressed prepaid return label. In other words, if you do not provide free return shipping, chances are you are not meeting your customers’ expectations.

December 26th is two weeks away. As more companies realize that a good shopping and return experience is the best way to keep existing customers happy and attract new customers, make sure you stay ahead of the curve – and that means revisiting your returns policy. It’s not too late to invest in your customers this holiday season – you just might see better results in the new year and beyond.

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1. Less is more: clear and concise subject lines

The subject line is the most important part of your email message. If your audience doesn’t open your email, all the work that went into designing the email body will have gone to waste. Try to keep your email lines short, intriguing, and to the point. Avoid using vague words and subjects that trick your reader (they might open only to unsubscribe). A/B test these lines and aim for a 20% improvement to start. Look out for specific combinations of words, topics, and lengths that optimize opens.

2. Design with mobile in mind

Emails viewed on a mobile device surpassed 30% of all views in 2011 and is growing at a tremendous pace. When creating an email, it’s important to think about how it will look and feel on a mobile device. According to EDialog, 80% of users find viewing an email to be harder on their mobile device. Top complaints were having to scroll across a page, too much text, images not rendering properly, and content not downloading. When developing emails, keep the width and height of mobile devices in mind (it’s best to approach 480w if possible), use smaller file sizes for images, limit the amount of copy, and always test attachments/links.

3. Get to the point without images

Many email clients disable images by default. Be sure readers know what the point of your email is without having to load images. Chances are, most readers will discard/move on from your message if they don’t understand immediately what you’re attempting to communicate. Images should enhance the experience and aesthetic of your email, but they shouldn’t be used to solely convey the main message and call to actions.

4. Mix up content and calls to action

More often than not, I’ll delete an email if it is one gigantic block of text, even if it is on an interesting topic. Big chunks of content work for some industries, but make sure you mix up the content types (video links, images, charts) and calls to action (buttons, graphics) in your emails to keep it interesting and give your audience’s eyes a break. No one likes an “email essay.”

5. Know your target audience

What does your target audience like? Where are they in the buying cycle? If your buying cycle is short (average of 1 or 2 touches), you’ll probably want to beef up the special offers and promos. 48% of people name special promotions as their favorite type of email to read on a mobile device. If your buying cycle is long, you’ll want to mix in reminders of products they’ve browsed recently, and perhaps increase repeat customers by suggesting further buys on a delivery tracking update email (tied for 2nd most-liked type of email).

6. Test your emails on the most popular clients

Let’s face it, there are just too many types of clients out there – there is no way to test your email on all of them. So how do you decide which ones to prioritize? Query your own database and find out which are the most common domains to the specific segment you’re sending to (for each email if you can). Chances are, you’ll see a good mixture of web clients (Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail) and corporate addresses. If your database has a significant amount of corporate addresses, I would add the top PC desktop clients as well as the top Mac clients onto the test list. Litmus and Campaign Monitor are a couple of tools we like that allows you to test multiple clients at the same time.

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What’s better than a slice of homemade pumpkin pie to go with a hearty holiday meal? You guessed right: another Shipwire software product update.

We’re excited to present some of the highlights from the latest release:

• More granular merchant hold preferences
• Spreadsheet upload enhancements
• Submission delay option for automated orders

More granular hold preferences

Merchants can now choose to hold orders based on the following criteria:

• Order value at cost
• Retail value
• Shipping cost
• Specific SKUs

Spreadsheet upload enhancements

We’ve improved and simplified your spreadsheet upload experience based on feedback we’ve received:

• Upload can now handle spreadsheets in a “flat file” format
• Request an order to be held (Order Hold), and to be held under certain conditions (Hold Reason) upon upload
• Relaxed spreadsheet input restrictions – no longer required fields:
  • “IsCommercial”
  • Email address

Submission delay option for automated orders

Merchants may now control if and how long they want automated (API) orders to be held before they are submitted to the warehouse.

When they’re not helping themselves to another slice of delicious pie, the Shipwire development team is working feverishly this holiday season to improve your product experience so be sure you’re kept up-to-date on the latest product, shipping, and e-commerce news by subscribing to our blog.

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Cyber Monday was born in 2005, when Shop.org, the online arm of the National Retail Federation (NRF), noticed a trend of online sales jumping on the Monday following Thanksgiving, keeping up the momentum of shopping kicked off by Black Friday.

Fast forward seven years later, and Cyber Monday is expected to approach a haul of $1.5 Billion in online sales in 2012 in the U.S. alone. Cyber Monday, which falls on November 26 this year, is fast approaching. It’s not too late to cram in a few last-minute pointers, so here is how you make sure your online store is ready for a healthy slice of that pie:

• Prepare and test the mobile experience of your site across different platforms – If you have an online storefront set up, you’re in good shape: 75% of Americans plan to shop online this holiday season vs. 69% who plan to shop in physical stores. But is your store ready to handle the devices that will be used to access it? A study shows that out of the 75% who plan to shop online, 69% plan to access sites using their home computer, while 44% will shop through a tablet, and 34% browse online stores with a smartphone. Make the experience great for all devices.
• Give special promotions – In 2010, 88% of online merchants launched special promotions for Cyber Monday. So if you do not offer promotions, you will stand out for the wrong reasons in the eyes of shoppers. Special email campaigns (63%) and free shipping promotions (22%) topped the list of promos.
• Encourage your customers to buy in bulk – Growth in average amount spent per shopper outpaced growth in the number of shoppers by 8%. Your store has a higher chance of faring better if it gives special discounts/offers to shoppers who spend more than a certain amount.
• Figure out your demographic – 18-34 year olds were 40% more likely than 65+ year olds to use the internet at their work to shop online.
• Brush up on general holiday merchant best practices – read our 2-part series on how to boost your online sales this holiday season.

The holiday season and Cyber Monday can be an exciting time for everyone, shoppers and merchants alike. It doesn’t matter which side of the (virtual) checkout line you’re in – you get what you put into the holiday season. So this year, be sure and to invest some extra time and resources and the results just might surprise you.

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For the past two years, I’ve had the privilege of attending Dreamforce, the cloud computing conference put on by Salesforce and one of the biggest technology events of the year. Last year, I was a sponge, almost like a tourist, absorbing the conference and taking in the sights and sounds. This year, while still a sponge, I’m less starstruck by the shiny exhibits and big keynote names (although still blown away by the rumored 90,000+ attendees) – allowing for a chance to collect my thoughts.

The exhibits, breakouts, and keynotes all revolve around three core themes essential to running a successful business, three things Shipwire itself puts great emphasis on. We’ve found that these core elements work best when built on top of one another:

1. Data warehousing and synchronization – Base layer
   • Every department in your business generates data. As more and more solutions are built to handle and report on that data, you should consider where all that data lives and how those systems talk to each other. It’s inevitable that different parts of your business will be run with different systems, but the goal here is to get one version of the truth. Without one version of the truth, it’s impossible to get accurate visibility into your business – you’ll be taking stabs in the dark if you don’t lock down your business data and reporting.
2. Collaboration and communication – Second layer
   • What’s the difference between collaboration and communication? You collaborate with your internal team but communicate with prospects and customers.
     • Internally you’ll want a way to share your data: Figure out the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business and tie the performance of a team of leaders directly to each metric. These KPIs are the one version of the truth. Furthermore, each business KPI should be complemented with a series of drilldowns, or second layer metrics. These secondary metrics roll up to, and should explain the performance of the primary metrics. Assign managers to secondary metrics.
       • Chances are your business leaders don’t have the time to navigate the technology to get the data. Thus, it’s most effective if internal data is compiled and pushed to the inboxes of the executive team on a scheduled basis – once a week is a common timeframe.
     • You want your external communication to be as automated as possible and driven off data as well. Marketing communication should be broken into two parts: general nurturing and lead/customer lifecycle. Both sets should be driven off of data but serve different functions.
       • General nurturing should be informational content about your company. Example content includes product releases and customer success stories. Be sure to keep it relevant to your demographic otherwise your customers will be turned off.
       • Lead/customer lifecycle should focus on promoting your company and products in the context of where your customers are in the buying cycle. For example, you may want to send an early stage lead a link to a free trial of your product while you’d probably want to opt for an upsell webinar invitation to your customer base instead.
3. Strategic planning – Top layer
   • You have all your data and everyone’s working on the same page. It’s time to think about the future. If you’re like most companies, you’re thinking about the bottom line but constrained by resources. Thus, you need think about how to tackle the lowest hanging fruit to make the most out of what you have:
     • What are your short term vs. long term goals and what is the timeline?
     • If you just kept the ship on cruise control, where would your business by the time the goals should be realized?
     • How do you bridge the gap?
   • The above questions shouldn’t be a one-and-done type deal, rather, these are questions you should be thinking about every time the visibility is refreshed and you get new insights on your business – you’re going to want to steer the ship differently according to what shows up on the radar.

One of the main reasons Dreamforce has seen such staggering growth is the solutions it offers for businesses to succeed in the above three core areas. So if it isn’t already, Dreamforce should be on your list of must-attend conferences. Of course, headliners with the likes of Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Will.I.Am don’t hurt the cause, either. Rock on.

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