Guest Post - Streamlining Shipping Operations and E-Commerce Business
This article was contributed by Mitsui & Co., Ltd., the company that developed the Plus Shipping app to support shipping for Shopify stores. They share insights on the relationship between streamlining shipping operations and growing your e-commerce business.
Shipping operations come with structural challenges that often become a burden or a dilemma for e-commerce merchants. By streamlining time-consuming shipping tasks, businesses can eliminate mis-shipments, reduce labor costs, and improve profitability — freeing up resources to focus on revenue-driving activities such as product development and marketing. In that sense, it is a challenge that directly impacts management, making it a high-priority issue that e-commerce businesses aiming for growth should address as soon as possible. This article introduces "shipping operations" as a key lever for improving e-commerce business performance.
0. Shipping Directly Impacts Business Performance
Many readers may not immediately see the connection between shipping and business improvement. Shipping is a critical function for e-commerce merchants — not only does the product itself matter, but shipping also serves as an important customer touchpoint that communicates your service quality, brand image, and promotional information such as flyers featuring recommended products. At the same time, shipping operations are labor-intensive and costly. With today's labor shortages, inflation, and weak yen keeping freight rates elevated, shipping has become a factor that can squeeze business profitability. It should therefore be considered a top priority when operating an e-commerce site.
Let's take a closer look at the relationship between e-commerce efficiency and shipping.
1. Challenges Facing E-Commerce Merchants
After selling products on their e-commerce site, merchants must handle shipping to buyers. Driven by major platform players, service level expectations have risen significantly in recent years, and shipping operations now demand greater accuracy and speed. In this environment, e-commerce merchants — particularly those handling fulfillment in-house from their own offices, warehouses, or workshops — commonly face the following challenges.
1. Labor Costs
As online sales gradually grow, the burden of routine shipping tasks increases and existing staff can no longer keep up. During peak seasons such as sales events, gift seasons, Christmas, and the New Year holidays, temporary staff need to be hired, which raises costs. Inexperienced temporary workers also tend to make more shipping errors.
2. Operational Errors
Shipping labels written by hand or managed on paper are prone to mistakes and create significant administrative overhead. Mis-deliveries do occur, leading to time-consuming negotiations with carriers and handling customer complaints.
3. Shipping Rates
With relatively low shipping volumes, merchants struggle to negotiate competitive rates with carriers. Since standard shipping rates in e-commerce are well-established, merchants cannot pass excessive freight costs on to customers and end up absorbing them, which puts pressure on profitability.
2. Introducing an App That Makes Shipping Orders Easy
For e-commerce merchants handling fulfillment in-house efficiently, adopting a convenient app or system that allows a small team to complete tasks quickly is essential.
The app we are introducing today is "Plus Shipping" (Plus Shipping).
Plus Shipping is an app that enables Shopify merchants to handle their shipping operations efficiently and at specially negotiated rates. It is especially well-suited for e-commerce merchants fulfilling orders from their own office, storefront, or warehouse. The app automatically syncs Shopify order information and allows users to complete the entire process through to shipping label issuance with simple operations. It is an all-in-one service covering carrier enrollment, shipping information management, label purchasing and printing, and shipping fee payment — and it is the first Shopify app that allows merchants to place shipping orders directly within the platform.
For merchants just starting out in e-commerce, one of the first walls they hit is shipping rates. With low order volumes, shipment quantities are also low, making it difficult to negotiate favorable rates with carriers. Plus Shipping's greatest strength is that it aggregates Shopify merchants, which has allowed the company to partner with carriers and secure competitive rates on their behalf. On top of that, rates are flat nationwide by package size, eliminating the need for complex shipping cost calculations. In addition to per-shipment charges, a monthly "Plus Shipping app usage fee" is also required. The pricing tiers are: up to 50 shipments per month for $14.90/month, 51–100 shipments for $20.80/month, and 101 or more shipments for $29.70/month.
Comparing the shipping label issuance workflow before and after adopting Plus Shipping reveals a clear difference. Previously, using a carrier's own app required launching it and performing additional steps separately. Because Plus Shipping is a shipping order app designed specifically for Shopify, it reduces the time spent on label issuance by 93% compared to using a carrier's native app.
Let's Streamline Your Shipping Operations!
We have reviewed the key challenges in shipping operations and the current landscape of available apps — we hope this has been helpful. Depending on the products you sell and your business model, there are various approaches to streamlining shipping. We encourage you to actively pursue improvements, including leveraging useful apps, so you can redirect resources toward revenue-generating activities like product development and marketing, and continue expanding your business.
*This article was contributed by Mitsui & Co., Ltd.
StoreHero Comment
Another new logistics solution has arrived on Shopify. Plus Shipping from Mitsui & Co., who contributed this article, not only streamlines operations but also has the potential to reduce shipping costs — and we look forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.