If you are planning on doing anything you know that you will be doing it online. Welcome to the world of fear and lies. Only eCommerce is safe and shopping in person will kill you. Just kidding pandemic kills almost noone. Now at work, we decided to move locations to get out of some draconian lockdown laws. This meant that we were lucky to get into the new office at the right time, but we also new that we were going to need to keep costs even lower to keep up with the market. Staying competitive can come down to cash flow and the ability to spend money on more important things. This was very true for our company and if we could cut 5 thousand a year off of our supply room, that money could instead go to marketing. That was the mindset we took and I want to go through how we ended up using shipping supplies stores to lower our budget.
When we moved we wanted to get organized and thus, we logged everything. So when we packed up we decided to up our game and take copious notes. We spent an hour or so getting quantity of everything and then we kept amazing notes on every single thing we used for a month in our new office. This was to know exactly what we were going to be using and this time we knew it would even be more important because we were doing some internal marketing instead of outsourcing it. So our stock of things like boxes, tape, and labels was going to be in higher use and we went bargain shopping.
We used our notes and information well and we knew what we were going to use for the next month. This meant it was time to shop for these items and knowing that we were spending thousands a month on these items then we needed to find the best place. I started by looking at the local big box office store next to us. I had our list and went in and got pricing and quantity on each item. It turned out that much of the quantity was not there that we needed. Unfortunately, the price for our boxes, tape, and labels was pretty high as well. So with this information, I asked if they would do any discounts or bulk pricing and the answer was a quick no. There is no point in wasting money and we were not going to stand for it.
Of course, I looked online. I found that Amazon was going to be my next place to price things out. I really like to support local, but if the cost is going to be much less then my company deserves me to know. I put all the stock and quantity into amazon and found that the price was going to be about 20% less than the big box store and shipping would be about a day. If we needed rush items we would not be able to get them. That is a marketing problem and could cause problems in the future.
We ended up looking at the shipping supplies store next and that was the answer. They offered bulk discounts and that was what we needed. This was our solution to the lockdown eCommerce problem.
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