Very urgent....

P

Pinky Winky

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If you have a business that takes online orders and you handle or know how shipping is handled please call me at 817-632-1506. My name is Daniel. I need to talk to you about this now. I have our company store going live in 2 hours and I need to have some ideas about how backorders are handled for freight charges. This should have been taken care of alot sooner but my boss has dropped the ball and no one else in our company knows anything.

Please someone help.

Thank you.
 
is this parcel, LTL or truck load stuff? (UPS, FedEx or truck load carriers are all a bit different, never worked with truck load stuff but plenty of UPS/FedEx)
 
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ok let me break this down for ya.

Our company is going live with an online store for our products. Now you go and order your products put in your info and pay with a CC up front. That will charge you for the product and the shipping and handling. Now when I have a backorder since you have already been charged for the shipping in the first charge how do I make up the difference in the new backordered parts freight charges? Do I just invoice the customer for the new freight charges? The reason this is coming up is if you have two products that weight 0.5lbs each then you only get charged for a one pound package, since FedEx rounds the weight up. But if ONE product is shipped and the customer is charged for a ONE lbs package and then I ship the backorded product I now have another ONE pound package that has new freight charges.
 
I would call your FedEx customer service rep and ask him how HIS/HER other million customers handle the situation. Obviously/Hopefully a precident for a business your size.

Call your competition, pretending to be a customer and ask them the same thing.
 
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Daniel, I use to run an online store a few years back and I'll tell you how I did it. I'm assuming that you are manufacturing the goods you will be shipping from your previous entries so this may not apply.

If a customer placed an order for a back ordered component we would not charge that order or that part of the order. We would then send the customer an email explaining that the item they ordered was back ordered and that we would hold the order for 30 days. Once the item came in we would send them an email with the new charges including the shipping for that one item and then charge the customer. At any point during this process the customer had the right to cancel the order. I only had to deal with one maybe two back orders a month so it wasn't that big of deal to me to make it a manual process.

If the customer bought multiple items and only one of them was backed order our software that we used actually invoiced them with two shipping rates. One for the products in stock and one for the products not in stock.

I hope this helps a little and I wish you luck!
 
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NickSully said:
Daniel, I use to run an online store a few years back and I'll tell you how I did it. I'm assuming that you are manufacturing the goods you will be shipping from your previous entries so this may not apply.

If a customer placed an order for a back ordered component we would not charge that order or that part of the order. We would then send the customer an email explaining that the item they ordered was back ordered and that we would hold the order for 30 days. Once the item came in we would send them an email with the new charges including the shipping for that one item and then charge the customer. At any point during this process the customer had the right to cancel the order. I only had to deal with one maybe two back orders a month so it wasn't that big of deal to me to make it a manual process.

If the customer bought multiple items and only one of them was backed order our software that we used actually invoiced them with two shipping rates. One for the products in stock and one for the products not in stock.

I hope this helps a little and I wish you luck!
Click to expand...

Id like to do it that way but not how our system is setup.
 
You should charge for ALL shipping and handling UP front, including back ordered goods.. Your "handling" fee should be padded to offset any loses incured when shipping back orders..
Even padding your your fee will probably NOT totaly wipe away any possibilyt of taking a small lose..
My company Budgets about 2.3 Million a year to operations including / Freight cost. We budget for an expected loss of 3-5% on frieght..
Mostly due to (shipping back orders)

Hope this helps..
 
Man what a handful... the online store backend needs setup for any of the items below..

I am guessing you have issues with broken orders and shipping on individual BO items..

I looked at my client sites I host.. they have options on BO items..

Combine all items to single shipment.. (single shipping charge)
Send initial shipment, combine all back order items to second shipment (2 shipping charges)
Ship each item as it becomes available (individual shipping charges)

one site uses inventory control, you can not order an item out of stock but can be put on list for notification. This would appear to be the "safest" option but again a lot of backend work for inventory..

I sent an email to one of my clients that does nothing but shipping to see if he will talk to you about how they do it... will update you as soon as I hear back from Ethan..
 
It also makes a huge difference what type of product your shipping and what industry your sering..
For me, were shipping large Kitchen appliances, to contained area...
(Within a 100 mile radius of NYC) .. Becuase of the nature of the job sites and industry very often every thing cannot ship at one time, job site is not ready for every thing, some items are factory back orders.. All items are large, heavy and costly to move, not to mentions very very expensive high end product...
 
I was the "internet guy" at a company in Coppell for a couple years who had similar issues with backorders. We had several different ways of handling these depending on the item and/or situation. We knew the weight of some items and others we did not. Some items were drop shipped from the manufacturer or distributor others had to be shipped to us to then be shipped out. It was a mess but if you tackle each individual scenario as a separate challenge it will help.

With that said we still took a loss on occasion, which would pit me against the owner of the company arguing customer satisfaction versus $2-$10 of "loss" due to shipment. In the long run it was easier for the customer and cheaper for us to rely on profits from the sale of the item(s) combined with the 'guestimated' shipping for any back ordered item. We would then notify the buyer at the time of the transaction which items were on back order and that they will see more than one package arrive at their shipping address. Once they agreed to everything, we would process the order and they would see a single charge on their card.

Now, this was easy to pull off because our profit margin was like 200%, so you might not have quite the wiggle room.
 
I work for a manufacturer. If we backorder anything, we eat the freight in getting the product to the customer. It's how we roll.

Good luck, Daniel! :beerchug:
 
either nickscully or scar....it's all about how you want to offer your service...at the end you should always provide your customer with the option to either ship what you have in stock or hold order for the backorder to be filled...that's where quoted lead times come in
 
dont backorder:rulez:

charge for full shipping on original order then ship BO free.

When we have backorders we pay freight when they deliver....if the original order met minimum order size.
 
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