The past year has been a challenge for individuals and businesses as the nation adapts to COVID-19. How we buy and sell, and even how we interact with one another has completely changed. Numerous businesses have folded in the climate of reduced sales, and many more will follow. The ones that have survived have adapted. For your business to continue, you’ll need to adjust too. So what did the companies that are thriving do? It’s very simple.
When COVID-19 became an increasing threat, there was an initial surge in retail traffic, as people panicked. Some sectors of retail thrived temporarily. Then, more and more people started staying home. Instead of shopping at stores, they began to flood the online markets, ordering pickup or delivery. Large retailers managed to adapt to this, shifting regular retail employees who they no longer needed into newly-created positions to pull and load products for delivery orders and process online purchases.
Other retailers struggled to adjust. They couldn’t afford the cost of changing their business infrastructure to shift to pickup orders. Because of the risk of spreading COVID-19, they couldn’t hire new employees to manage the increase in shipping needs as online orders skyrocketed. Smaller corporations and even smaller businesses found themselves between the rock of increased online sales and the hard place of not meeting enough of the demand to stay afloat.
Fortunately, a solution exists that meets the combined needs of being affordable, easy to implement and manage, reliable, and capable of handling all the retail shipping needs of any sized business: unified shipping management software.
With shipping management software such as ShipLeap, virtually every portion of shipping – from order processing to final reporting – becomes automated and requires very little oversight. Features of this automation allow businesses to:
- Accept online orders – all information is electronically processed
- Select carrier services – including comparing services to offer the best rate
- Pick and pack inventory – merging fully with existing automation
- Label parcels – including provide tracking to your customers
- Handle returns – providing return labels and information to customers
On top of this, businesses can train their existing workforce, reducing potential layoffs of loyal employees.
Although the pandemic has caused economic damage to almost every business, there are still ways to survive. The massive shift to online shopping affords a unique pathway to make everyday operations more efficient while increasing profits. Shipping management software is the road that leads to that success.