Shipping for Small Businesses and Major Suppliers Alike

Shipping for small business needs to focus on some elements that are different from shipping for large corporations. Ideally, a shipping company can do both, but they know well enough to build each relationship with different priorities in mind.

Not every business has the same needs or priorities when it comes to shipping. It also matters who you’re shipping to. Are they individual customers, a small business, or is it a large corporation that’s receiving your goods?

Shipping costs are factored into the costs you eventually pass on to customers, whoever they may be. How you build those costs and the time it takes to ship is influenced directly by who your customers are.

What About a Major Supplier?

Let’s take some regular shipping contracts with several specific needs as an example. Let’s say you’re providing regular shipments of medical supplies to a company. This means you’re able to plan most of your shipping out in advance. You know their typical use rate for your goods, and so you know when to ship to get new supplies to them before they run out of old ones.

You can plan ahead for when shipments need to be there, which means you can rely on more deliberate modes of transport that help save you on cost. Rather than sending something to get there in two days, you can send it to get there in four. You know what you’re going to send when, so you simply send it earlier with less expense. There is one exception. Some medical supplies need refrigeration. Here, you need to balance the use and cost of reefer (refrigerated) containers against the shipping period.

These considerations help you cut down on your costs while passing along some of those savings on to your customer.

What About a Small Business?

Now let’s say that you’re a different company that engages in e-commerce. You build handmade toys for children. Your shipments are irregular, often to new people and at unpredictable times. You may have an unpredictable surge if your products are shared on a blog. You also have a priority in terms of time. You want things shipped as quickly as possible. Of course, this is built into your cost, but your shipping needs couldn’t be more different than those of the medical supply company we just discussed.

This doesn’t mean you need any less communication or expertise from your shipping company. This is why shipping for small business is so crucial. It’s what builds your business and allows it to grow. Customer satisfaction is directly related to your shipping company being able to come through for you with irregular orders to a variety of locations.

These are examples on two ends of an extreme, but they illustrate how much it matters who you work with and whether they’ll treat your business and who you ship to in context. Every business has unique needs, and you need a shipping company that will communicate with you about them.