Split Shipping: How eCommerce Sites Utilize Split Shipment Orders

Offering a split shipments option on your website can be an excellent way to attract more customers and let them self-serve at the same time. This can eliminate customer miscommunication with salespeople, which in turn reduces orders shipped to the wrong address or parts of orders lost in the process.

Of course, ease of use is vital to the success of a split shipment option. You might be able to offer split shipments, but it's no good if your customers don't like using it.

Who Uses Split Shipping?

Every aspect of your eCommerce portal should make purchasing items as easy as possible, and that includes the split shipments feature. Customers should have confidence knowing that they'll be able to easily send every package exactly where it needs to go, with minimal effort on their part.

Any business selling physical products can make split shipments happen, but there are types of businesses that use split shipment more than others. The good thing is that split shipments can be customized to fit any sales and supply chain software so that it works seamlessly with back-end software. Here are three of the most common split-shipping scenarios:

B2B (Business to Business)

It's important to remember that the ability to split shipments doesn't just make life easier for you; it also makes life easier for your customer. They're looking for the most efficient way possible to do their job. Price can be a secondary concern if ordering is easier and saves them time.

Split shipments work so well because of the way that many businesses are set up. Multiple offices are common for businesses, whether they need toner and paper clips split across the country or across town. Franchises will also use this feature to order products on behalf of their franchisees, and this might be the only way that franchisees have access to the items.

Buying Groups

A buying group is a collection of businesses within the same industry that have pooled their resources in order to increase buying power. One hundred bookstores buying at the same time will have more power to negotiate better prices than each individual bookstore.

Buying groups may place orders on behalf of each bookstore, and each order will be shipped to a different address. It is more likely, however, that each bookstore will order by themselves as part of a goal to reach a discount on a particular product. It is a single order for the group but requires separate billing and shipment for each store.

How Split Shipment Options Can Help

As we mentioned above, split shipments are something most customers have come to expect. While split shipments are incredibly versatile and can be designed around the needs of your business, here are some tips that can improve customer engagement and performance.

Keep It Clean

Your entire website should be streamlined and easy to use, but it's worth mentioning the importance of a clean split shipment experience. It's one of the newer parts of the checkout experience, so some developers don't have the experience to put the proper care into creating it. We've found that the easiest place to incorporate it is as part of the checkout screen. The mini cart on the checkout page can even go away while they're splitting their order so that they have more room and less clutter.

Find the Best Place to Stop Changes

It's important that you don't get in the way of customers clicking that “Order Now” button. In general, you should allow them to make changes while in their shopping cart, while split shipments happen on the checkout screen. You don't want to inundate them with confusing options just before they finalize their order.

Make it Obvious You Can Ship More Than One Package

The multiple address option can be hidden behind a toggling button or always appear on the checkout screen. This will be determined by your business model and how many of your customers are making use of the option.

Add Address in the Moment

Once again, you never want your customer to move away from their cart when they're about to purchase. Make sure they can add an address during checkout so that they don't have to navigate away to their account details to add one.

Quantities Don’t Have to Be the Same

Split shipments gives your customers the chance to change the number of each item they’re sending to each location. In other words, they might be ordering 20 items, but it doesn’t have to be split evenly. 14 can go to Brooklyn, 6 to Queens.