Black Friday is your make-or-break. It can boost your sales, helping to smoothly deliver your annual goal. But it may also become your downfall if you don’t fine-tune it beforehand.
Did you know that 65% of abandoned carts come from misunderstanding the available shipping methods and their costs?
As one of the final stages of the order fulfillment process, shipping is often overlooked by online merchants. But at the same time, it is also one of the most important elements of the customer experience.
Make sure you don’t lose customers this Black Friday due to complicated or inaccurate shipping rates and a poor shipping experience. Here are the top 10 shipping mistakes online sellers make on Black Friday.
Flat rate shipping is the most basic pricing method. It is all right, but only up until a certain point.
The trouble with flat-rate shipping is that it doesn’t allow you to effectively manage your shipping costs – everyone pays the same, regardless of factors such as distance, size, or weight of the product.
This makes it unfair to your customers and unprofitable for you. More complex shipping configurations could be possible, but they would require a lot of thinking and manual work.
This is why it’s better to download a table rate shipping plugin. At Octolize, we offer 2 options:
1. A free Flexible Shipping plugin that allows you to set dynamic shipping rates based on price, item, and weight.
The best Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce. Period. Create shipping rules based on weight, order totals or item count.
Go to WordPress.org or Download for free2. A premium Flexible Shipping PRO plugin with more conditions, such as dimensions, product classes, user role, time of day, and much more.
The best Table Rate Shipping for WooCommerce. Period. Create shipping rules based on weight, order totals or item count.
View Details or Add to cart
This common Black Friday shipping mistake can cost you a lot of money. If the shipping rates displayed on your websites are too low, you will end up paying extra for every order. If they are too high, you will lose unhappy customers.
The perfect solution is to connect your WooCommerce store to the carrier API. It will automatically display the current rates taken directly from their website. This is especially important during hot periods such as Black Friday, when carriers may temporarily change their standard rates without you even realizing.
At Octolize, we offer live rates integrations with several top international carriers:
They are designed to work smoothly together, so you can get one or invest in the Live Rates Bundle, giving you access to all 6 Live Rates plugins for less than the price of 2.
Offer real-time UPS, FedEx, DHL Express, USPS, Canada Post and Royal Mail shipping rates and decide when carrier services should be available to pick and when not to.
View Details or Add to cart
Customers love free shipping. 90% of consumers name free shipping as their top reason for shopping online. Even more importantly, 62% of shoppers declare that they won’t complete a purchase without free shipping at all.
Luckily, you don’t need a special plugin to configure free shipping in WooCommerce. The basic settings let you set a free shipping threshold. This easy trick will encourage your customers to spend more in your shop, just to avoid paying for delivery.
You can also offer free shipping to local clients. The Distance Based Shipping Rates plugin allows you to establish an area you consider “local” and provide cost-free delivery to customers living nearby.
The Distance Based Shipping Plugin works as an extension of the Flexible Shipping plugin – both the free and PRO versions.
Offer real-time UPS, FedEx, DHL Express, USPS, Canada Post and Royal Mail shipping rates and decide when carrier services should be available to pick and when not to.
View Details or Add to cart
The Bin Packing Problem is the waking nightmare of every e-commerce store owner.
If you have been blindly throwing your products together into random boxes, this Black Friday is the time to stop and adopt a new approach.
The Flexible Shipping Box Packing plugin uses an advanced algorithm to fit the ordered products into boxes in the most optimal way possible. All you need to do is set up the dimensions of your custom boxes and products, and the plugin will figure out the shipping costs for you. You can configure shipping rates based on box types.
This way, you save money by avoiding paying for shipping half-empty boxes and adjusting the rates to their sizes.
Our Live Rates plugins also come with built-in box-packing algorithms – both for the standard carrier packaging and your own custom boxes.
Perhaps your issue isn’t the efficiency of packing your boxes, but shipping your products by categories. You make the mistake of pairing items that shouldn’t be shipped together, losing money and customer satisfaction. Or worse – you set it up manually.
You can automate packaging with the Shipping Packages plugin. It allows you to split the cart contents into separate boxes based on shipping categories. Just like that, fragile products won’t be crammed in with heavy ones, and items shipped from warehouses in different locations won’t be assigned to the same box, causing confusion and delays.
All you need to do is create shipping classes for your products, and the plugin will handle the rest. You have complete control over which items go into which category and ultimately end up together in a box.
Split cart into multiple shipping packages in WooCommerce.
View Details or Add to cart
Customers like to have a choice. Over the past few years, the percentage of online shoppers opting for home delivery has dropped from 73% to 64%. Those who still like to have their packages delivered to their doorstep would prefer to choose between different carriers.
With the Octolize Live Rates plugins, you can integrate your store with UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL Express, Canada Post, and Royal Mail. The plugins work seamlessly together, allowing you to offer a range of couriers.
Moreover, 77% of online shoppers indicate that they would like to have the option to choose a pickup point as their delivery method. Those who can’t afford to wait for a courier at home and don’t want to risk missing their package prefer to collect it whenever and wherever they like.
You can offer this possibility with our Pickup Points PRO plugin. Allow your customers to collect their orders from pickup points, parcel lockers, Access Points, and PUDOs of 32 carriers worldwide.
Pro tip: If you run a brick-and-mortar business, don’t forget to also enable pickup at the store. You can offer it for a price lower than other delivery options, or entirely for free, encouraging local customers to complete their purchase.
Showing shipping options that aren’t available for a certain product or region is one of the most common Black Friday shipping mistakes. Sadly, it is also one of the main reasons online shops lose sales and customers.
It is all too easy to get your delivery methods mixed up during this hectic period. But it doesn’t have to be, if you have the right tools at your disposal.
The Conditional Shipping Methods plugin lets you hide and display shipping methods as you need. You decide which delivery options are visible to a customer based on a range of conditions: product, shipping class, price, weight, destination, time, and more.
Remain transparent and show your customers only the shipping methods that are available for them. No misunderstandings, no confusion.
Conditionally display and hide the shipping methods in your WooCommerce store. Define the rules when the specific shipping methods should be available to pick and when not to.
View Details or Add to cart
There are few things as frustrating for a customer as finding out their actual shipping costs are not what they expected them to be. Remember that 65% of abandoned carts result from confusion regarding shipping costs and methods. It is very difficult to recover a disappointed customer and get them to complete their order.
The good news is that you can prevent that from happening to you for just $39 per year. The Shipping Cost on Product Page plugin does exactly what its name suggests: it lets your customers see the real shipping costs even before they head to checkout.
All they need to do is enter their shipping address, and they can see all the delivery options available. Such transparency contributes to customer satisfaction and significantly lowers your cart abandonment rate – two crucial factors all year round, but especially during Black Friday deals.
Black Friday coincides with Thanksgiving. Many customers may plan trips or travel to see their families.
This might be an issue when it comes to the delivery of products purchased on Black Friday. Even a pickup locker can store a package for so long before it gets sent back. A lack of flexibility might potentially discourage customers from purchasing from your store for fear of not being able to collect their delivery.
Luckily, there is an easy fix for that. With the Delivery Date Picker plugin, you give your customers the power to decide when their parcel gets delivered. They see a calendar at checkout and select a date that works for them.
Of course, you are in full control of the shipping costs for specific dates. You can charge more for next-day or delayed delivery.
Let your customers choose a convenient delivery date for the ordered products and make the shipping cost dependent on the date they choose.
View Details or Add to cart
Even if you do everything right, a customer may still see the “no shopping options were found” notice. You can’t help it if it’s, for example, related to their location, which might not be served by the carrier they selected.
However, there is something you can do to make their experience in your store more positive. With the free Octolize Shipping Notices plugin, you can customize the message your customers see.
You may make it friendlier than the rigid custom notice, offer a substitute, or tell the customer to contact you directly for other solutions. This way, you will show them that you care and prevent them from abandoning their cart and your shop.
Black Friday comes with hundreds of new orders in a very short period. And each order comes with a shipping label.
Things can quickly get confusing due to the pressure of time. Managing dozens of files with labels, matching each one to the correct order – it can be a nightmare, especially for small businesses that don’t normally handle such high order volumes.
If you collaborate with DPD UK, make your life easier this Black Friday with the Flexible Printing plugin by Octolize. Print your DPD UK shipping labels automatically at the same time an order is placed. The plugin connects to thermal printers via the PrintNord service and accesses DPD UK labels directly from your WooCommerce orders list.
If you’d also like support in creating shipping labels, make sure to check our UPS Shipping Labels and Tracking and the DPD UK & DPD Local plugins. They both generate labels based on the orders’ details.
Print the shipping labels on thermal printers using the Print Node service. Let the labels be printed automatically the same time the order is placed.
View Details or Add to cart
This shipping mistake is common for businesses or agencies managing multiple online stores. The seller spends time figuring out the perfect shipping configuration in one shop, only to have to repeat it for the others.
What if we told you it can be done in seconds, with minimal effort on your part?
The Flexible Shipping Import/Export plugin lets you download your shipping setups in CSV files and upload them to your other WooCommerce stores. You can copy the entire configuration, or just the selected shipping methods.
This plugin is an extension of our flagship product, Flexible Shipping, helping you automate your shipping setup even further.
You can easily avoid the top 10 common Black Friday shipping mistakes if you use the right tools. At Octolize, you can find solutions to every shipping problem to automate your delivery, increase customer satisfaction, and drive sales.
Feeling overwhelmed by the options? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Our All Plugins Bundle includes all the plugins listed in this article, and more. You don’t have to debate which plugins to choose to fit them within your budget, as with the bundle, you get 20 plugins for the price of just 3.
Get your online store ready for Black Friday with the All Plugins Bundle!
Lucyna Polok is an SEO and content specialist passionate about crafting effective strategies and creating engaging content. She has worked across a variety of industries, both in-house and as a freelancer. A strong believer in the power of storytelling, she believes that good content not only delivers business results, but also resonates with customers through an emotional connection with a brand.
At Octolize, she is responsible for aligning the content strategy with business goals and increasing visibility, trust, and authority of the brand via data-based SEO efforts. On the blog, she focuses mostly on topics for those only beginning their adventure with e-commerce, explaining scenarios and terms in an approachable way.
