174: Holiday Shipping Hacks: Surviving the 4th Quarter

It's Q4. You've got your marketing calendar set, product is arriving daily, but have you thought about fulfillment and shipping? How you handle the increase in orders, it can make and break you this holiday season. I've got some quick tips for you to think about right now to make your life easier. Come join me.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now And now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

Grab your favorite mug of coffee or something stronger if that's your holiday vibe, because we're about to tackle one of the busiest, craziest times of year for product-based businesses. Now in Q4, we tend to focus on marketing and selling, which I agree should be number one priority. But what happens after we sell our face off? We have to fulfill and ship all those orders. And if we aren't prepared, it will bottleneck your business, creating chaos and preventing you from having the bandwidth to continue to sell over these next critical months in your business. So I want to start by talking about how we can prep for increased shipping and get ahead from our big promos. Now, this is not one of those sexy podcasts where you leave feeling jazzed up and ready to roll. But this is one that's really important for you to understand how small little tweaks in your fulfillment and shipping can make or break you this holiday. Okay, so let's start by talking about— there's really 3 sections here that I want to go over with you. So the first one is prepping. Let's start by talking about how you can prep for increased shipping and get ahead of those big promotions that you're planning. Okay, so I want you to think about shipping your subscription boxes every single week. Just think about that. If I were to ship these subscription boxes every week, what would I need? Okay, so this is the increase that we're going to see. Just imagine shipping your subscription boxes every single week. You'd need to increase your boxes, your labels, your filler. All the things that you need to have on hand to ship is what we need to prep for. So the first thing that we need to do is really audit our supplies. I want you to just take a checklist. Let's go audit our supplies. Do this today because we're already in the middle of everything, right? So check and see how much tape you have, how many labels you have. What does the box situation look like? Do I have enough filler to get me through the next few months? What are your supply situation look like? Then I want you to order enough to get you through December, maybe even January, because When I think about what I'm thinking, feeling, and doing in December as a product-based business owner, I'm typically just ready to be done. I'm just struggling through the last few weeks. I'm exhausted. I probably haven't washed my hair in a few days or weeks, and I'm not thinking ahead to January. So then when I actually get to rest and spend some time with my family, I come back, I'm like, oh, we don't have anything for January. Oh, we're not prepared for January. So if you can order enough through December, give yourself some for January so that you don't have to remember when it's the most chaotic and hectic time for you. I want you to plan for the unexpected. The unexpected could be, I'm going to do more sales than I thought I was. So give yourself a little room. You're going to use these supplies. You'll use them in the new year. So these are not things that you're going to order and be like, well, I ordered too much and now they're sitting here forever. You're going to use them. But I really want you to plan up for this. And then the other thing that can really help you when we talk about the prepping stage for supplies is, can you create dedicated space for these extra supplies so that everybody knows right where to find them? Okay, so it doesn't help to just order a bunch of supplies and then nobody knows where they're at. Nobody can find anything. We're in the midst of chaos and we don't know where all these things that we prepped for. So let's let's get a dedicated shelf. Let's get a dedicated pallet in the back. Let's get a dedicated table to put all the extra supplies under and let everybody know where they're at so that you're not in the midst of things and you can't find what you need because that makes us inefficient. Inefficient is the word that makes us inefficient. And it causes us to stop when we're in a rhythm. Okay. So here's another thing. When we, when we think about prepping and when we think about the supplies that we need, Something that goes through my mind is what types of packaging will I need? So when I sit down and I look at my marketing promotions that I already have planned out and I think of like, okay, I'm going to do a Tumblr sale on one of my 10 Days of Framed Deals. Well, that's going to require boxes and bubble wrap. Okay. So I know I'm going to do a really great sale here. I got a lot of tumblers. I'm going to sell a lot. I need to make sure I have boxes for 1 tumbler, 2 tumblers and more. Okay. So this is what I'm thinking about my promotions. I know that I'm going to do a cardigan sale. OK, well, that, that would go in poly mailers. So do I have enough poly mailers? Do we have the small ones that would fit one cardigan? Do I have the big ones that would fit two or three? So I'm looking at what I need and anticipating based on my marketing promotions. If I'm just going to sell t-shirts and sweatshirts over the next couple of months, I just need to stock up on poly mailers and have a few boxes for bigger orders. If I have hard goods, What do I need? Hard goods like tumblers, decor, things like that. I'm going to need boxes. I'm going to need filler. I'm going to need, I'm going to need all those things. So it's not just let's just stock up on everything. Let's anticipate what our promotions are because we should have those planned out by now. And then from looking at those promotions, what types of supplies, what types of packaging do I anticipate needing more of over the next few months? Okay, so that's something I want you to really think about and consider. Then there's another part of this that you can get ahead of, and I've been thinking about this as well. We're kind of already in the weeds, but when we get all of our boxes out this month, we'll be able to go back and do some of this prepacking. So I want you to think about what can I prepack? Okay, do I have items that are going to be sold together in bundles? In pre-packs? Am I offering free gifts with, with a specific item purchase? So can you pre-pack some of those items now? And when you're thinking about this, like, I'm thinking about some of those 10 Days of Frame Deals where I'm selling my tall wall calendars. Those all have to be bundled and rolled and put in a tube. So can we go ahead and prep 50 of those? Can we go ahead and prep 100 of those so that when the sales start coming through, all we have to do is grab the tube and we're ready to go? We don't have to pull calendars, roll them, and, and package them. That's something we can pre-pack. I also think about one of my Black Friday deals is you get a bag and an accessory that matches it. Can I go ahead and bundle those together and make sure that they're just paired together? I don't have to pick and pack all of those free gifts with the bundles as I go through the Black Friday sale. I have them already paired up and matched. So I want you to think about What can you pre-pack right now preparing for the next promotion? And then when you have everything out for there, what can you pre-pack to prepare for the next promotion? And just what can we do to be more efficient as we go into this kind of crazy season? Now that's section number 1 for the podcast is prepping supplies, thinking about my promotions and what packaging I'll need for those. And then also what can I prepare and pre-pack now. Okay. The next thing I want to talk about, let's dive into fulfillment. How can we reduce friction? And when I say friction, I mean the complication. How do we uncomplicate what we're doing? How do we make it super simple? How do we reduce friction? How do we reduce steps and how can we be more efficient when it comes to fulfillment? So when I think about fulfillment, Do I have everything in reach, or am I going to have to step over here to get a poly mailer? Am I going to have to make 3 steps to grab a tape? Am I going to have to take 2 steps to grab this? Do we have everything in reach so we can minimize the amount of time it takes to pack and the friction it takes to have everything I need when I'm packing an order? And so set up a packing station. If you've not had a packing station, because maybe you'll just have a few orders a day and it's not a big deal. But when it comes to this time of year, we have to be more efficient. We can't just keep doing things the way we've always done them. So do you have a packing station set up with everything that you need? If you don't have a dedicated packing station right now, can you create a table in your packing fulfillment area right now dedicated with all the supplies? And maybe you take that down after the holidays because it's in the way of whatever else you do. But we need a dedicated station to reduce the friction and make your packing more efficient. Then what we do in our shop, because there's different variables to what we do, is we have some dedicated spaces for different things. So does this order need monogrammed? It goes over here on this table, and they're put in order from left to right of what came first so they can be monogrammed in order. So we have a dedicated table for all the orders that need personalized, and they're, they're put over there. The other thing that's important is having checks and balances with your orders. For me, this reduces error big time, and it's going to be super important this time of year. So if you've never had double eyes on an order, this is the time to implement it. And what I mean is that the person that is picking the order, there needs to be another eye on it before it gets packed. You can do this in a couple different ways. For me, I've got a few employees at the warehouse. One person picks it, one person packs it, one person picks it, or another person comes behind them and checks the order and initials off on that packing slip. Having different eyes, two different eyes on every order before it goes out will reduce so many errors that you could possibly have. Because here's the thing. When I look at an order, I can go like, oh yeah, that's the shirt and that's the shirt and I'm picking and I'm packing, I'm doing all the things. If you don't have a scanning system in place, that could easily be misread by me. Oh, that's the Pumpkin Everything shirt. And then I grab a shirt and realize that's not the actual shirt. It's a different shirt, but I missed that with my eyes. So if I pick and pack that order, that order is wrong. If I pick that order and put it down to be reviewed by someone else or to be packed by someone else and they're checking it as it goes in the box, like, oh, this is the wrong shirt. I'm like, oh, but I would have never caught that because in my mind I'm picking the right order. Does that make sense? When you have small teams, we just need double eyes on that. Okay. If you have a larger team or you have more than one person picking and packing, someone picks, a different person packs. That's just how it should go. And then the other part about fulfillment that's really important is batching similar types of orders. It really saves time and it really gives you a rhythm. So like, what I mean is like, so yesterday we had a couple hundred orders and they're all different orders because, you know, I sold a bunch of stuff. And it's like, okay, let's pick all the t-shirt orders. Anyone that has t-shirt orders, let's just pick all the t-shirt orders first. We know they all go in poly mailers. It'll be easy. We can get them picked, we can get them packed, we can get shipped. And then let's go back and pick the orders that have hard goods in them because those are going to need to be boxed. So if they have a t-shirt and a tumbler and some jewelry and whatever else is in their order, we'll save those for last. We're going to batch those together because then I'll have the boxes in reach, I'll have the tape gun in reach. I don't need that when I'm just packing t-shirt orders. I just put them in poly mailers and seal them. And so this will prevent me from going back and forth from poly mailer to box to tape gun to no tape gun. And so if we can batch those orders and have everything in reach for that type of order, it's going to make you more efficient and it's going to give you a rhythm instead of stopping and starting something different every time. Got it? So we talked about prepping. We talked about fulfillment. Let's dig into shipping. The first thing that I do when we get into fourth quarter planning, I usually plan my promotions and the dates But there's another date that's very important for me, and those are our carrier cutoff days. And they're usually out super early on their websites. Every carrier has them listed on their websites early, and I'm talking about like UPS last day to ship, post office last day to ship, FedEx last day to ship, and there's the different types of shipping. I'm going to go research those and pull those first, and then I'm going to determine when is my shipping cutoff date. Okay, now when you see their dates, I want you to use them as a guide and not a guarantee. I've been in this business almost 12 years now, and I can tell you, and you probably know from your own experience, Priority Mail sometimes doesn't get there in 3 days like they say it does. When you have these guaranteed ship dates, they're never guaranteed, okay? So I just use them as a buffer, and I make my cutoff date usually before their cutoff I need to give myself a little more time. I need to give these carriers a little more time because I've gone through a lot of Christmases where packages don't make it. And so I want to just be a little bit more cautious with that. I don't want to push things to the last day, the last minute, and then have upset customers. Okay. Don't risk cutting your shipping dates too close to the big day. Once it leaves your building, it's out of your control, and we don't want to have upset shoppers and bad experiences because this is your reputation. Okay, so I want you to think about that. I like to post these cutoff dates and my holiday hours inside my Facebook header, my cover image for my Facebook page. So I'll usually do one in November that has all of my holiday hours and our shipping cutoff dates, so out there, it's clear, it's easy to find. And then I'm going to remind them constantly, this is our shipping cutoff date, these are our holiday hours. But I need to have that in print at the top of my social media. And then I also make a little footer in my email campaigns that has the holiday hours and the shipping cutoff as well. So it's just, I start this in November so that it's just an easy reminder and, and they'll see it and it won't mean anything to them right now, but when they want that information, they're going to know where they saw it. They're going to go back to the Facebook header. So We just want to start to get that information out there so we can be really transparent about that. Now, just because you have a Christmas shipping cutoff date doesn't mean you have to stop shipping. It just means you can't guarantee it'll make it by Christmas anymore. We continue to ship every day that we're here working, and a lot of times it makes it before Christmas, but we just don't guarantee it. So we say that you can still order, we're still going to ship in the same time frame we normally do. We just can't guarantee once it leaves our building it's going to make it to you on time. So just be transparent with your shipping policies and how long before an item actually gets shipped. Because a lot of our customers live in this land that everybody is Amazon Prime, and so they think if they order something today, it's going to ship today or tomorrow. And luckily Amazon has pulled back some of that quickness over the last few years, so there's not a huge expectation anymore. But we need to know if this is personalized item, it takes X number of times. If this is something that's made to order, it takes this amount of time. If you're a week behind on orders, it's not going to ship for a week. We have to be transparent about that, and we can't just assume people know. So we need to let them know in our shipping policies on our website. When we're showing up, we need to remind them that orders don't ship for X number of days. It needs to be in our checkout page. We need to be transparent parent on when those will ship before it leaves the building. It's just going to reduce customer service emails and DMs and all that thing, and it's going to reduce frustration. If I know this isn't going to ship for another week, do I have time to wait? If not, I'm going to order something else, or I'm going to order from somebody else. But the last thing I want is to have a bad experience with this business because I didn't know that it would take a week for that to ship. So we just have to let people know, and that's really going to help us in the long run. Now, the other thing that I think is super important is to have shipping options. If you have only shipped with one carrier this whole time, we need to start to build relationships with other carriers. We need to have options. When one carrier starts to struggle or gets backed up, you'll be able to pivot and adjust. Here's an issue. Back in the good old 2020, we had a major, major issue with the post office. They were so backed up. A lot of my Christmas items did not get delivered until after Christmas. And this was even my holiday tees that got shipped out. What happened during Black Friday and Cyber Monday? They had this massive influx of orders. Because a lot of places were still closed. A lot of places weren't— a lot of people weren't comfortable shopping in person, you know, still at that point. And then the other part was they had a shortage of, you know, workers. So it created this huge pileup where you would see these distribution centers just packed from ceiling to floor with packages like it was going to take forever to to dig themselves out. When we saw things that went out during Black Friday not moving by December 5th still, we pivoted and we started shipping with UPS and FedEx. And so I want you to make sure that you understand what your options are and, and where— how you need to have those options. Do you take it to a UPS drop-off? Do you need to take it to a FedEx drop-off? If you don't have— if they're not coming regularly to pick up from you, make sure that you have options for shipping if one of your carriers gets really backed up, that you can pivot and start shipping stuff a different way. Okay. And the other thing that kind of goes along with this is having an open line of communication with your drivers. We know our drivers, we have their information, we, we can text them, they can text us. But having an open communication with drivers is really important. This can benefit you this holiday season greatly. I want you to exchange numbers with them. Show your appreciation. I always get them a little gift. I give them a gift card and some freshly made cookies from a local bakery. But remember that they have a huge increase in workload at this time of year too. And a little kindness can really go a long way with them. So you're stressed, they're stressed, you're tired, they're tired. Work with them. And I think that's going to be really beneficial for you. Now, one more thing to consider. Is your contingency plans. So what happens when a package goes missing? Make sure you have a solid plan in place for missing packages, including the timeline, a replacement, a refund, whatever that is. Don't let that catch you off guard. It's going to happen. What are your plans at that point? How long does it have to go missing before you replace it? How long do you see no movement before you replace it? Or refund or whatever, but make sure you think about it now because what may happen is somebody is going to be upset and you're going to be exhausted. Our reaction to things when someone's upset and we are mentally and physically exhausted is not always the right response. And it's not always what we would do if we were in, you know, a better state of clarity. So go ahead and write out an email response now. Go ahead and get those kind of mapped out so that you kind of have a copy and paste response so that when you get in that situation, you don't let your exhaustion take over your customer service. And really, you've got to be prepared for increased customer service emails and messages. So is this something that you need to hire some help for, for the holidays so that you're not in your inbox? For some reason, our customers think that we have this magic backend system that shows us different tracking than they get. And they— we just have to be clear, like, what you see is exactly what I see. And so we don't have any other way to track it. And some, for some reason, they think we have this magic backend link to look at where their package is, and we don't. So just remember To be transparent, people are stressed. Ask them to be patient with you at this time of year and encourage early ordering to help beat the rush and the stress of last-minute ordering. All right. You've got this. This holiday season is going to be hectic, but with a plan like this, you're going to feel more like Santa and less like the Grinch. So let's get out there and make this your best Q4 yet. And here's something I want you to do. If you have a shipping manager or you have a fulfillment team, have them listen to this episode to help increase efficiencies and reduce the holiday chaos around your shop. Thanks for joining us on the Launch Your Box podcast. 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