Split Shipping on Marketplace eCommerce Portals

With a split shipping option on your marketplace platform, customers won’t have to call staff members to get their shipping preferences set up for each order, which saves time and gets rid of the potential for miscommunication.

Offering split shipping as an option isn’t the end, though—it has to be easy to use, or it’s no good. Users of your marketplace platform should be confident that they can get their packages delivered to the correct locations, whether that’s one, two, or ten places.

Using Split Shipping in Marketplace eCommerce

Vendors may want to offer split shipping to their customers if that’s expected for their niche. And customers in general may want the option, since there are a variety of circumstances in which split shipping would be useful.

Especially on a marketplace eCommerce platform, where you might have multivendor or multistore eCommerce, split shipping is an expected feature. And if you want it to work seamlessly to ensure customers get what they want from it, it’s best if your split shipping feature is integrated with your back-office software. Next, we’ll discuss some common scenarios where split-shipping would come in handy.

B2B (Business to Business)

It’s important to remember that split shipping doesn’t just make life easier for you; it also makes life easier on 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 shipping works so well in B2B eCommerce 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 Group

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 Shipping Can Help

As we mentioned above, split shipping is something most customers have come to expect. While split shipping is 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 at their shopping cart, while the split shipping option is saved for the checkout screen. You don’t want to inundate them with confusing options just before they finalize their order.

Make the Split Option Obvious

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 shipping 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.