Shipping

• Have you negotiated shipping rates with couriers? Do you know how the Post Office charges for your types of products? Could you achieve better rates by using a courier "aggregation" service.

• Have you considered / talked to your courier about less common services like international shipping, remote areas shipping, express services, insured services, collections, pay-on-delivery etc. Don't get surprised when couriers charge you over the odds for such services because you forgot to negotiate specific rates.

• Set up the shipping methods you want to offer on your e-commerce system so that they reflect the charging structure (unless you want to explicitly make a loss or profit on shipping). Pakk - set up your shipping methods and apply to your site.

• Could you offer free shipping? It's highly enticing for customers. Perhaps you could offer free shipping for orders over a particular value.

• Have you set up your physical order processing workflow for maximal efficiency? This is a bit beyond the scope of this article, but think through: picking list generation and printing, picking in the warehouse, packing, shipping labels, daily courier collection or deliver in to courier's depot, post dispatch tracking etc. Pakk - you might want to set up customer Order 'stages' and define a starting stage to reflect your internal workflows.