Shipping 101 Pt. 1 The “Work Share” Program – what to do about it and how to save!

If you have a growing business in the e-commerce space and your customers are demanding low cost or no cost expedited shipping solutions you are not alone.

We have mentioned before that Amazon prime has reset expectations for millions of online shoppers. Ecommerce retailers need to keep up or lose share to Amazon and others. Many sell on Amazon and need to offer competitive shipping solutions to keep up.

There are many services who offer excellent transit times with their expedited offerings from Next Day to three day and those options are often too expensive for many ecommerce shippers. There are other solutions that are more cost effective and offer competitive transit times but it feels ‘too good to be true.’

Minimum charges, fuel and accessorial charges like residential delivery fees can make the effective entry price for these solutions in the range of $7 while other solutions can be as low as $2.50 with no additional charges like fuel and delivery fee’s.

There are definitely some challenges for ecommerce shippers, pickups may not be offered at all or only offered at the time of mail drop off, typically around noon, each day. The early pick up window creates challenges for business owners as they want to be able to ship orders that come through the end of each day the same day the orders are received. By default, most shippers need to hold orders until the next day due to pick up constraints.

In response to these issues as well as a desire to find additional efficiencies, the US Post Office created what is commonly referred to as “Work Share” programs to attract outside companies into partnerships with the Post Office. These USPS discount shipping work share programs allow the post office to offer postal rate discounts to third parties that do some of the work for the Post Office. This work can be sorting, weighing and scanning mail, providing pick up and other transportation services for the Post Office and so on. The abbreviated version of this is: The more work a third party does, the better their USPS shipping discount rate. The volumes need to warrant the discounts as with any pricing and work share agreement.

What does this all mean to the average small shipper? Not much…until now. Most work share partners have concentrated on finding ways to wrangle very large shippers into postal service contracts, leaving the small to mid-size customer out in the cold with very few options. FirstMile has changed that dynamic with its Postal Programs. Now shippers with as few as 50 packages a day can qualify for more competitive pricing than what they would traditionally see through others in the market place.

FirstMile has new technologies in the game, we can print labels at your location seamlessly and what is even more important is we can pick up at the end of the day for you. This allows the shipper to pull, pack and ship more product and improve your performance on Amazon and other marketplace sales channels.

Now the average small to mid-size ecommerce shipper can access a myriad of USPS workshare programs all with one simple point of interface and a single pick up! We can induct your packages into the carrier network, including USPS directly all while offering you customer savings.

To learn more about solutions visit our home page or call us directly at 1-855-Go1stmile