Online Glasses Selling. Best Practices for Shipping Customer Order
When you get your first order on your own LiveOptical website, you will be excited! Perhaps a bit nervous about how to deliver the order to your customer. First, verify the payment. Then get the eyeglasses ready for shipping. Shipping eyeglasses is very similar to shipping other goods. If you ever sold anything on eBay or Amazon, you would be familiar with the practice. If it’s a first time you ever shipped anything there are several precaution measures that you can take to assure the safe delivery and avoid issues with customers.
- Take pictures. For your own assurance, take several pictures of the glasses with your phone or camera. You can print shipping label directly from your LiveOptical website administration panel. Put the shipping label on the table and then put glasses on the label. This way you will record not only glasses but also a customer they are for. Photograph eyeglasses model number, color and size. In rare cases, there could be questions arising later about you making a mistake and shipping the wrong model. You will have photos to check who made the mistake you or a customer.
- Use good packing material. Put glasses in the case and the hard box. Don’t just put them in the envelope. Small hard boxes can be bought at any Dollarama or packing material store in bulk, for just $1 each. Put some bubble wrap or packing paper, (a news paper if you can’t find any better) around the eyeglasses case to ensure it does not move inside the box. While it is rare for eyeglasses to break inside the hard case, it is always nice to take extra precaution.
- Ship via Traceable method. Any postal service whether it’s Canada Post, USPS or courier have ways to trace the package. The price for tracking is usually a bit higher, but it’s well worth it. Canada Post and USPS do have non-traceable shipping methods, but they are no good for $200-$500 glasses. If package goes missing, no one will be able to find it for you. On the other hand, whenever you have a tracking number, as per experience of our LiveOptical customers 99.9% of the time package can be found. It does happen that the package has arrived, but the customer wasn’t home and Post Man didn’t leave the note. Or Post Man left the note, but customer didn’t notice it. The tracking number will show that the package is at the post office waiting for pick up. In rare cases package was sent to a wrong address and again, Postal service can find it and reroute to correct address.
- Insure all packages. Insurance costs a bit more, usually $2 per each $100. Not only it gives you and your customer piece of mind, but it puts onus on Postal service to treat your package with extra care. Any wrong move on their end, they will pay for the entire worth of package. Most of packages sent by Canada Post and USPS are not insured. So when they are insured, they are on the special radar.
- Obtain signature whenever you can. It guarantees that package is delivered to hands of person package is for. Should wrong person get the package and your customer claims he didn’t receive it, you can always go after Postal service for mis-delivery. Signature option is not always available and may cost a lot. When you ship from Canada to US for example, signature is only available for Xpress shipping which is CAD $32.00. Regular traceable method is only CAD $15. At LiveOptical shopping cart platform you can configure different shipping methods for different country or even state/province. You can offer your international customers a choice of shipping method with signature or without. In the end of day, they should also be interested to receive their glasses safe and sound and may be willing to pay extra for this option.
- Put a Fragile sticker on the package. These stickers are usually available for free at the postal office. They may not mean a lot, but it is an extra warning to people who handle your package that item inside is fragile.
- Take picture of the item with tracking number on it at the post office. This is going to an extreme and it never happened to any of our LiveOptical customers that they had to prove that package really existed. But if you want, you can take such picture for your own record. Pictures are free and only take a second to take.
- Keep all the receipts and shipping slips until the package is delivered. We recommend keeping them for a few months. If there is a mis-delivery claim Post office will demand for you to provide a proof that you shipped the package and paid for it. Plus it will be another way for you to keep track of all the packages you shipped.