Split Shipping on Buying Groups Sites and Portals

That’s why it’s crucial to offer an easy-to-use split shipping option on your group buying platform. Your users don’t want to have to spend time getting in touch with a staff member when they could be entering the information themselves. It eliminates miscommunication and reduces errors when users can view what they’re putting into the entry fields.

On a buying group site or portal, don’t think you can get away with offering subpar split shipping, either. It needs to be seamless and intuitive if you want your customers to use it rather than hopping to other group buying platforms.

Using Split Shipping in Buying Group eCommerce

As mentioned, split shipping is crucial to success in the buying group market. Buying groups may have multiple warehouses, office buildings, etc., that they want to ship to. Split shipping is therefore a common expectation.

For best results, you’ll want to integrate your split shipping feature with your backend systems, such as your ERP or warehouse management system. Also, here are three common situations where split-shipping would be essential:

B2B (Business to Business)

It’s important to remember that split shipping doesn’t just make life easier for you; it also makes life easier on your customer. They’re looking for the most efficient way possible to do their job. Price can be a secondary concern if ordering is easier and saves them time.

Split shipping works so well in B2B eCommerce because of the way that many businesses are set up. Multiple offices are common for businesses, whether they need toner and paper clips split across the country or across town. Franchises will also use this feature to order products on behalf of their franchisees, and this might be the only way that franchisees have access to the items.

Buying Group

A buying group is a collection of businesses within the same industry that have pooled their resources in order to increase buying power. One hundred bookstores buying at the same time will have more power to negotiate better prices than each individual bookstore.

Buying groups may place orders on behalf of each bookstore, and each order will be shipped to a different address. It is more likely, however, that each bookstore will order by themselves as part of a goal to reach a discount on a particular product. It is a single order for the group but requires separate billing and shipment for each store.

How Split Shipping Can Help Buying Groups

As we mentioned above, split shipping is something most customers have come to expect. While split shipping is incredibly versatile and can be designed around the needs of your business, here are some tips that can improve customer engagement and performance.

Keep It Clean

Your entire website should be streamlined and easy to use, but it’s worth mentioning the importance of a clean split shipment experience. It’s one of the newer parts of the checkout experience, so some developers don’t have the experience to put the proper care into creating it. We’ve found that the easiest place to incorporate it is as part of the checkout screen. The mini cart on the checkout page can even go away while they’re splitting their order so that they have more room and less clutter.

Find the Best Place to Stop Changes

It’s important that you don’t get in the way of customers clicking that “Order Now” button. In general, you should allow them to make changes while at their shopping cart, while the split shipping option is saved for the checkout screen. You don’t want to inundate them with confusing options just before they finalize their order.

Make the Split Option Obvious

The multiple address option can be hidden behind a toggling button or always appear on the checkout screen. This will be determined by your business model and how many of your customers are making use of the option.

Add Address in the Moment

Once again, you never want your customer to move away from their cart when they’re about to purchase. Make sure they can add an address during checkout so that they don’t have to navigate away to their account details to add one.

Quantities Don’t Have to Be the Same

Split shipping gives your customers the chance to change the number of each item they’re sending to each location. In other words, they might be ordering 20 items, but it doesn’t have to be split evenly. 14 can go to Brooklyn, 6 to Queens.