Key Takeaways
- Integrating your eCommerce platform and shipping software allows you to manage all your operations in a single platform, helping you optimize your supply chain.
- By integrating your business applications, you get more timely fulfillment and improve business relationships.
- Split shipping is made easier with direct connections with freight companies, which allows you to compare prices, pull data from muliple shipping scenarios, and get delivery schedules.
- With custom handling, you can include special shipping instructions, custom packaging, automatic alerts, and automatic calculations for how many pallets are needed.
- Keep track of inventory counts in multiple locations and ensure you're shipping from the closest warehouse.
- Shipping integrations also allow for custom EDI features, including Smart Shipping options for lower energy use.
- Other benefits of shipping integrations include custom drop shipping, international shipping, and dimensional weight-based shipment pricing.
- Working with an experienced development and integration team can help you integrate your systems completely and cost-effectively.
Shipping integrations for business-to-business eCommerce companies offer a range of benefits. There's also several things a fully integrated solution should include, and when looking for a development company or integration solution to work with, you want to make sure those key functionalities are enabled. In this article, we'll go over everything you need to know about shipping and handling integrations for your B2B organization.
B2B Shipping and Handling Integrations Deliver Greater Functionality
Among the most popular and critical integrations that any B2B company can offer its customers are shipping and handling tools for calculating sales taxes in foreign countries, managing customs and duties, calculating B2B sales tax, simplifying split-shipping and drop-shipping, and connecting directly with carriers for complex B2B shipping needs.
Unlike B2C (business-to-consumer) websites, versatile eCommerce business platforms that sell to other businesses don’t just ship by the big-three shippers: FedEx, UPS, and USPS. B2B companies ship by trains, planes, ships, and trucks. Many companies use two or more carriers on each B2B shipment to a singular address. What started as train freight might become air freight; then, like so many shipments, it ends as ground freight.
Buyers also ship products to multiple stores, choose different business-to-business shipping strategies based on inventory locations, and often need to arrange logistics for storing products when they have to remain idle between carrier pickups. All these variations create a complex supply chain for B2B companies and their customers, but both can manage their shipping professionally from a single platform—a business-to-business platform that’s been customized for B2B shipping.
Customizable B2B Fulfillment Solutions for Better Customer Satisfaction
The primary question in determining which platform to use is really quite simple: How customizable is it?
Customizable platforms are scalable, flexible, responsive to design changes, display well on multiple devices, and allow planners to integrate vast capabilities based on their industry- or company-specific needs. 75 percent of internet users prefer mobile-friendly sites—including B2B customers—and 96 percent have found sites that didn’t function well on mobile devices, leading to negative customer satisfaction.
Such a platform allows business-to-business companies to build a solution for now and the future, address evolving digital trends, and customize web abilities based on the device that each person uses to visit a website or web page. The obligation to provide better user experiences, more features, better tracking, sales assistance, and personalization will continue to grow in importance as competitors adopt these processes and B2B platforms increasingly become multichannel and omnichannel eCommerce resources for their customers.
B2B order fulfillment solutions include:
- Tracking shipments, viewing waybills, submitting freight claims, and checking shipping schedules when shipping wholesale orders
- Calculating shipping charges for large and complex bulk orders, including API connection to land, sea, and air freight carriers
- Calculating state sales and use taxes where applicable
- Performing multi-currency eCommerce conversions for foreign shipments
- Automatically calculating customs and duties for any country
- Retrieving bills of lading and proof of delivery
- Submitting claims for shipping damages
- Viewing real-time rates and updated inventories across warehouses, distribution centers, and B2B order fulfillment centers
- Managing drop-shipping and split-shipments
- Requesting special price quotes for special handling, hazardous materials, and products that require special B2B shipping methods such as flat-rack or open-top containers
- Receiving instant updates on shipping prices
- Generating real-time order tracking updates
- Comparing freight rates from dozens of carriers
- B2C order fulfillment if a lucrative direct-to-consumer opportunity comes along
- Streamlining and automating freight shipments
- Arranging for recurring orders to be scheduled and shipped automatically
B2B Company Benefits of Shipping Integrations
B2B companies benefit tremendously by offering their customers eCommerce API integrations of the most popular carriers including trucking carriers such as DHL Global, Conway, YRC, UPS, FedEx, DayTon Freight, ABF, R&L, Super Regional, and more than 200 other companies that offer shipping APIs for B2B shipping integration. Scalable B2B eCommerce platforms can add as many of these direct integrations as desired based on their customers’ preferred B2B shipping methods.
Business benefits of customized B2B shipping and handling capabilities include better integration with B2B inventory management software and CRM systems, ability to print shipping labels with carrier-specific labels, better order tracking, faster B2B order fulfillment processes, and automation for customer self-service that frees staff from time-consuming manual shipping duties.
Split-Shipping Integrations
Split-shipping is probably the most popular of shipping integrations, because purchasing managers routinely purchase products for chain stores and companies with multiple offices and divisions including items for resale and business supplies. It’s common to negotiate bulk prices or custom rates, but the actual deliveries can be split among dozens or hundreds of addresses. Split-shipping integrations can remember all these addresses, keep track of shipments by address and products, prepare correct shipping labels for order fulfillment, and deliver many other offering efficiencies for both customers and the B2B company.
Split-shipping can be labor-intensive without customized split ship tools, but the challenges for B2B companies is to design a user interface that can manage the process seamlessly. When customers also want special price quotes for custom handling or unusual B2B shipping requirements, split-shipping can become even more complex.
Fortunately, most freight companies can provide APIs that provide direct connections with them so that customers can negotiate and compare prices, pull data from multiple shipping scenarios, and get instant prices and delivery schedules. These integrations also allow customers to track their orders directly from the B2B platform, so they can follow the shipping journeys of hundreds of shipments from the same convenient user interface or customized dashboard.
Usually, drop-shipping integrations handle shipments that require using other distributors, vendors, and manufacturers to fulfill large orders. However, it often makes sense to arrange B2B shipping from multiple company warehouses where inventory is stocked and ship the products separately by using split-fulfillment.
Custom Handling
B2B shipping integrations for custom handling might include special shipping instructions, custom packaging, automatic alerts about how full shipping containers are, and widgets that retrieve information on package and pallet sizes and auto-calculate how many pallets are needed for different product counts. Customers can calculate small-freight orders for LTL (less-than-truckload) B2B shipping by connecting with many carriers that specialize in delivering LTL orders at competitive prices.
Many carriers charge extra for special handling, providing delivery notifications and handling orders with special care. Customers can review the price differential, compare carrier prices, and choose B2B shipping options and carriers more intelligently.
Warehousing Management
Many companies stock their inventories in multiple warehouses, which are often in different regions to facilitate faster global shipping. Keeping track of real-time inventory counts in multiple locations is the first difficulty that this practice generates for B2B companies. Customizations can update orders in real time and estimate delivery times for B2B order fulfillment when items aren’t in stock in sufficient quantities.
Customizations can also provide customers with increased B2B shipping options by optimizing warehouses and fulfillment centers to get the lowest shipping costs and managing split-shipping based on shipping to different addresses from the closest warehouse.
Benefits of Customized EDI
Electronic data interchange—or EDI—can support many warehousing customizations that optimize warehouse management, help customers avoid premium freight charges on expedited shipments and track orders more efficiently for greater transparency and visibility. Custom features of EDI in eCommerce might include delivering advanced B2B shipping notifications to warehouses and improving supply chain management for environmentally conscious customers who are looking for low-energy SMART shipping options, environmental sustainability, and ethical sourcing in the chain.
Custom Drop-Shipping Options
Many of the larger product vendors—especially those with large product lines or regional and global offices—don’t stock all their products in company warehouses. Some companies manufacture products only after receiving orders for them, and some vendors customize products to order. These situations present challenges to B2B sales platforms that want to offer their customers the fastest possible B2B order fulfillment.
However, a platform with a robust shipping integration like drop-shipping management can send part of the order based on what’s in stock and arrange later fulfillment of the remaining order. Known as drop-shipping, the missing products can be ordered, shipped from vendors directly, or rounded up from diverse warehouses, distributors, vendors, and manufacturers. These company business associates usually ship the order to the customer directly.
Drop-shipping integrations can post these orders to the company’s ERP system, track what’s shipped directly and send a fulfillment request order to the vendor, supplier or manufacturer. The integration can even be programmed to reorder the product for the B2B company’s inventory. The supplier can then send the order directly to the customer and replenish inventory or arrange production of the order and ship the products as soon as they’re ready.
Even though the vendor ships the products, they still bear the company’s label. Drop-shipping can be an accounting nightmare, but back-office integrations automatically update the figures in B2B inventory management and accounting and generate the necessary invoices to apportion the order to each party’s account.
International Shipping Conveniences
International shipping generates many special needs such as calculating VAT and other tax rates, printing labels in different languages, handling multiple currency conversions, adding customs and duties, qualifying shipments to breeze across international borders, declaring relevant information to each country’s customs officials to obtain clearances, and managing international logistics when shipments are to be transferred to other carriers and need to be stored securely between stages of the journey.
International B2B shipping generates headaches for any buyer and B2B organization, but B2B customizations can cut through the red tape faster than a fading celebrity who’s invited to cut the ribbon at a high-profile event. Some popular customizations might include variations on any of the following features:
CPQ Software for Custom Product Pricing
Do B2B companies and customers who ship their orders internationally need to register in each country where they do business? In many case, the answer is yes. Customizations of these fulfillment solutions can provide this information automatically.
Language Barriers
Translate shipping itineraries, customs registrations, routing information, and other documentation with a multilingual eCommerce solution.
Returns
Product returns can create complex situations that are affected by local regulations on returns, local import-export laws, and other variables.
Customer Service Issues
Buyers and B2B sellers face their own customer service problems that can be complicated by needing to address problems in a foreign language and a different culture. Customizations can connect to international service desks to manage CRM in other countries.
Payment Difficulties
Currency conversions aren’t the only problems caused by accepting international orders. In many countries, fewer percentages of the population use Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal, so websites might need expanded ways for customers to pay for their bulk orders and B2B shipping charges when using a foreign-based carrier. Another concern is that prices involving other currencies are always estimates until the order is actually processed due to fluctuating exchange rates. Payment hub providers can streamline this process.
Dimensional Weight-Based Shipment Pricing
Popular commercial and B2B shipping companies UPS and FedEx recently adopted dimensional weight pricing for shipments which requires a complex formula to determine actual weight, package size, and billable weight based on extra charges for large-volume packages of smaller weights that take up more room on trucks. B2B companies and their customers can use shipping integrations to generate the right prices for shipping large orders or bulk orders in an instant, but the tools can also be used to research ways to reduce costs by changing package sizes, packing items more efficiently on pallet,s and even negotiating with carriers that charge shipping costs based on dimensional weights. Carriers compete with each other, and many of these companies will negotiate special B2B shipping rates for larger and recurring orders.
Other Shipping Integrations and Customizations
Many custom shipping integrations are possible with customized software and development. These include customized user interfaces that let customers know how full their shipping containers are based on dimensional weight information on products and shipping container sizes and options of specific carriers. Tracking, scheduling, and transparency are very important in the shipping process because customers might want to determine their shipping strategies based on when products arrive so that staff will be available to receive, process, and unload the order.
Customizations can arrange high-degrees of delivery accuracy so that customers can optimize their use of business resources. B2B companies can make each shipment more streamlined, predictable, and accessible. Other custom efficiencies include using multiple regional carriers instead of a national or international service, planning deliveries based on speed and cutting costs by scheduling the cheapest options.
Tips For Shipping and Handling eCommerce Customizations
Shipping and handling issues concern every B2B buyer and eCommerce platform that sells products to businesses, and shipping and handling integrations are among the most important customizations your company can offer customers.
The Clarity Ventures team has decades of experience customizing these features for B2B companies, and they know how to develop customizations that satisfy new dimensional weight calculations and provide custom capabilities such as pulling in document signatures and corroborating photos as proof of delivery. Our engineers can tap the API layer of back-office operating software to integrate as many carriers as is practical so that your customers can compare prices, arrange complex deliveries, and track shipments with greater efficiency.
Call or contact us today for a price quote or (free, no-pressure) consultation on shipping and handling customizations.