Postage Retail Strategy
Ochre’s commercial model gives clients the ability to take full control over their entire retail strategy.
With regards to postage this includes the choice of marking up retail prices to maximise the potential margin, or benchmarking with other retailers and pricing competitively in an attempt to increase basket conversion.
Adding a Custom Margin
A postage margin above the carrier fees can be implemented by a simple choice of a percentage or a fixed amount added to the postage. This can be set across your store(s) or for a specific shipping destination
Complex postage calculations are handled automatically by Ochre’s core technology removing the need for custom spreadsheets.
Postage Calculations
With some e-commerce platforms you either need to set up various pricing tiers taking into account territories, dimensions, weights and fuel surcharges - or you introduce a serious risk of losing money on certain shipments. But with Ochre these complexities are already taken care of.
The platform will automate all of this for you and by default customers will be presented with a choice of postage options including untracked and tracked where available.
The postage base rate is calculated in real time by querying a vast amount of data to obtain relevant up to date costs based on what is in a customer's basket, their location and where stock is held. Each client's custom choice of postage markup is then added on top of the base rate and presented to the customer.
To customise your postage retail pricing please email operations@ochre-platform.com with the percentage or fixed amount you’d like to add onto the postage retail prices.
Smart Basket Tech
Wherever possible the basket technology will offer customers various options for their shipments.
For example, if a customer has a mixed basket containing a pre-order plus an item that is available immediately, Ochre will offer the option of split shipments in order to receive the items that are available straight away faster, or to combine into one shipment fulfilled on the release date of the pre-order saving the customer money.
Similarly, if there is stock in different locations but one item is sold out in the warehouse closest to the customers location, we’ll offer a choice of split shipments coming from different locations, or the option to combine into one shipment shipped from wherever both items are currently in stock. The price for both scenarios will be presented to the customer so that they can choose whichever option is preferred.
With multiple warehouses attached to a store you’ll probably have different postage costs dependent on the partner fulfilling items. No problem, Ochre manages this by implementing the partners rate card within our master postage data and the Ochre store will offer customers postage prices relative to where the stock will be shipped from.
You can read more information on multi-location stock here
Diving Deeper into the Detail
If you have valuable items and you want to restrict postage options to only tracked services then that’s possible. This is managed at the product level within Ochre and can be administered yourself.
If you’d like to implement a different pricing strategy for specific territories then this can be set up for you on a territory by territory basis.
Using data to make informed decisions is really important when it comes to e-commerce. When applying custom margins on postage options we always recommend reviewing your retail and fulfillment statements on a quarterly basis to make sure the overall margin is where you need it to be and that there’s been no negative impact on basket conversions.
You can then optimise your postage margins and tweak your strategy on an ongoing basis which gives you powerful levers to control and can make a significant difference to your retail business.