6. Shipping, who and how?
The first orders came in in January and that was really cool! Selling items is a lot of fun, but the real hard work comes in packing and shipping. Depending on your product and number of sales per week, you can certainly reserve 4 to 8 hours per week for shipping. Why ship yourself? If your webshop and your products are your passion, it is actually strange to outsource this via drop-shipping. Besides, I prefer to keep the margin, so that I can invest the profit in new stock.
Packaging material
One of the biggest mistakes I made was buying shipping boxes. I spent a long time considering which two sizes I would use and calculated exactly how much I could justify this investment (according to tip 3). What I didn't think about was this:
Aikipro delivery boxes
300 delivery boxes don't weigh much virtually, but when you get them delivered, it looks something like this. And this was just one of two pallets, so you can imagine how much space we have left in the attic for stock.
Sending packages
One of the good choices I made last year was to enter into a partnership with Pakketmail. At first I worked directly via DHL, PostNL and DPD, where I had to agree on prices with minimum volume how many numbers in thailand phone number purchases and everything went via separate platforms. With Pakketmail I can now manage everything via one platform and, depending on the destination and the size of the packaging, I can select which sender I want to use.
The time savings are enormous and a recommendation to do from 25 orders per month. Other providers besides Pakketmail are Cheapcargo, Myparcel, Logxstar and Sendcloud.
7. Going abroad!
Since there are approximately 5,000 to 10,000 Aikidokas active in the Netherlands, the potential target group is not as large as with other budo sports such as judo, karate or taekwondo. One of the first countries that I, like many other webshops, immediately connected was Belgium.
To Belgium
Despite the fact that the Dutch and Flemish speak the same language, there are indeed cultural differences. Experience has taught me that if you answer your mail and phone well and quickly, you don't have to have cold feet for Belgian growth. It is advisable to offer Bancontact and Creditcard as a payment method, because that is common there.