Shipping Process & Scaling Your Business
Automated Integrations for Shipping Process Management
One of the biggest things that we will do and will recommend is incorporate automated integration to your ERP system or CRM system, or a third-party provider like Avalara or TaxJar.
In addition to these integrations, there are also situations where the shipping gets split out, and the region we’re dealing with has specific rules. It may be necessary to go through a really robust process for certain product types, for example, like really sensitive chemicals or certain IP that the government is protecting from export.
These are things we can also incorporate into our tax provider and our customs, duties, and shipping provider, where we’re incorporating additional checks to see if a country that we’re shipping to is on the banned country list. Then we need to see if we need to provide a message to the user for that particular item and let them know that an item is banned in the country indicated for shipping.
We may want to flag that IP so that if they save their shipping to another country then they'll just go and pick it up and take it over. Or they might have it forwarded or something of that nature. We need to make sure that we have a log of those things, to manage the customs, duties, and other legalities of certain product types.
Similarly, for prescriptions and other medical devices, these might be particularly challenging to regulate within the marketplace if we're not tying back to a central source of what are banned items and what are banned countries, and what medical products need a certain level of authorization from the government, medical system, or doctor to purchase a certain product.
Some medical products might be eligible for a significant discount from Medicare or Medicaid, so we need to know that as well to act accordingly.
These are aspects that we recommend, including integrations for customs, duties, and taxes, as well as additional business rules because they tend to be related to where the items are from and where they are going. This logic needs to tie into those physical components of each line item, and possibly the splitting of those line items to different locations.