Common Shipping Mistakes and Automation Fixes

Common Shipping Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Shipping products can be difficult and daunting. Today’s distributors, retailers, and manufacturers must manage customer expectations, carrier availability, compliance rules, labor constraints, and cost pressures while keeping orders moving accurately and on time.

Many of these pressures intensified during the pandemic, when brick-and-mortar stores closed, ecommerce demand escalated rapidly, and inventory-centric businesses had to fulfill higher order volumes amid strained supply chains, unpredictable shipping schedules, labor shortages, increasing costs, and mounting risk.

Those challenges have not disappeared. Fuel costs fluctuate. Documentation and compliance requirements change. Orders flow through more channels. Customers expect accurate delivery updates. And businesses that depend on paper-based processes, spreadsheets, or disconnected carrier systems can quickly lose visibility into what is happening across the warehouse, shipping dock, and back office.

Together with our partners at 3G Pacejet, Acumatica created the eBook, “Streamlined Shipments with Acumatica for Distributors, Retailers, and Manufacturers,” to help businesses navigate this changing landscape. This article highlights common shipping mistakes, explains how shipping automation helps avoid them, and outlines what to look for in an ERP-integrated shipping solution.

Why Are Shipping Mistakes Harder to Avoid Today?

The mistakes plaguing today’s inventory-centric businesses can be boiled down to a few categories, but they rarely happen in isolation. External pressures create uncertainty, and internal process gaps determine whether that uncertainty becomes a costly shipping problem.

External Shipping Pressures Businesses Must Manage

Fuel Costs, Inflation, and Carrier Capacity

Unstable fuel costs and inflation can make shipping expenses difficult to forecast. Carrier capacity can also shift quickly, leaving businesses with fewer options when order volume increases or expedited shipments become necessary.

Global Supply Chain Disruption

Global unrest, port delays, material shortages, and supplier disruptions can affect transportation timelines and availability. Businesses that ship across borders must also manage import, export, and documentation requirements that can change over time.

Labor Constraints and Operational Complexity

Skilled labor shortages can place added pressure on warehouse, fulfillment, and shipping teams. When employees must manually reenter order data, compare rates, prepare documents, and update customers, errors become more likely.

Changing Documentation and Compliance Requirements

Companies that ship goods must comply with carrier rules, regulatory requirements, customer requirements, and trading partner guidelines. Labeling, packaging, documentation, and retail compliance requirements can vary by customer, vendor, shipment type, and destination.

Common Internal Shipping Mistakes

Manual Processes

Don’t put your company’s success at the mercy of manual data entry. People are prone to mistakes. Relying on paper-based processes, manual spreadsheets, and disconnected business management software invites human error. And human error can lead to costly delays, returns, and unhappy customers.

Disconnected Shipping, Accounting, and Warehouse Systems

Don’t let critical shipping data live in separate applications. When shipping, accounting, inventory, order management, and warehouse processes are disconnected, employees may have to rely on manual workarounds. This can create gaps in data sharing, delayed updates, duplicate entry, and inconsistent information across departments.

Failure to Rate Shop

Don’t marry your business to a single shipment carrier. Doing so places you at risk of overspending and falling victim to capacity shortages. Diversifying your carrier network is the best way to consistently choose the best shipment options and rates for you and your customers.

One-Off Carrier Systems

Don’t rely on separate carrier systems that require teams to process shipments one carrier at a time. One-off carrier tools can make it harder to compare rates, standardize workflows, and maintain a clear record of every shipment. An integrated shipping system helps create streamlined shipments across carriers while keeping data in one place.

Picking and Packaging Mistakes

Don’t ship the right things in the wrong boxes—and vice versa. When customers place orders, they expect to receive the right items. Picking errors can cause complaints, returns, or lost business. Customers and trading partners also expect shipments to be packed and branded appropriately. For instance, if you dropship items for both Wayfair and Home Depot, you don’t want to ship a Home Depot order in a Wayfair box. This confuses customers and may cause trading partners to fine your company for not following retail compliance requirements.

Labeling Errors

Don’t ship items with substandard labels. The label must be legible for every package, and the address must be accurate. To avoid fines, every label should also follow trading partner and carrier formatting requirements. Since every trading partner may have different rules, that can mean juggling many requirements at once.

Missing or Incorrect Documents

Don’t lose track of your paperwork. Misplaced documents and incorrect data are a recipe for shipment disasters. You could ship items to the wrong places, label packages with undeliverable addresses, lose track of carrier and vendor requirements, and incur unnecessary costs in shipment delays and carrier penalties.

Poor Planning

Don’t act without rehearsing. Efficient shipping requires careful demand forecasting, efficient route planning, carrier contract negotiations, and accurate shipment data. It’s important to use good judgment and have the right technology in place to help you make accurate, business-enhancing decisions.

How Does Shipping Automation Help Prevent Costly Mistakes?

Implementing modern business management technology, like a cloud ERP solution with fully integrated shipping automation software, is key to avoiding shipping mistakes. Such a system empowers businesses with advanced automation capabilities, so they can stop relying on time-wasting, manual work and start enjoying important benefits.

Connected Processes

Eliminate steps and streamline shipping. The right business and shipping management system places companywide data at your fingertips anytime, anywhere. You’ll never have to wonder what’s happening, deal with missing documents or inaccurate data, or worry that retail compliance requirements are being tracked outside the system. Customer addresses, label requirements, packaging rules, order details, inventory information, and shipment records can all stay connected.

Real-Time Data Sharing

When shipping software is integrated with ERP, applications communicate with each other in real time. This reduces siloed data, delayed information, and breakdowns in data sharing between warehouse teams, finance teams, customer service teams, and company leaders. Everyone can work from the same information, whether they are processing an order, checking inventory, reviewing costs, or responding to a customer.

Accurate Financials

Keep track of every cent. With a cloud ERP shipment automation solution, you’ll have instant access to a robust accounting suite, through which you can automate freight invoice payments and dunning letters, streamline expense management and sales commission processing, and efficiently oversee every cent that flows into and out of your business.

Business Insights

Monitor results and make business-enhancing decisions. With access to configurable reports and inquiries, you’ll be able to keep up with every nuance of your business in real time. Automated data capture also helps you analyze shipping costs, carrier performance, delivery timelines, and fulfillment trends, so you can make better decisions about carrier diversification, market expansion, and customer service.

Streamlined Omnichannel Order Fulfillment

Set it and forget it. With automated shipping, barcoding, picking processes, and retail compliance monitoring, you’ll be able to trust that orders are being fulfilled accurately and on time.

This matters even more in omnichannel commerce. Orders may come from ecommerce stores, marketplaces, in-store sales, mobile apps, customer service teams, sales reps, or other channels. A connected system helps each order flow smoothly into the warehouse, giving teams organized and precise information as they move from picking and packing to scheduling and shipping.

Serial and Lot Tracking

For businesses that rely on serial and lot number tracking, automation helps reduce shipping and labeling mistakes. Teams can verify that the right products are picked, packed, labeled, and shipped to the right customers while maintaining compliance with customer, carrier, and regulatory requirements.

Customer Satisfaction

A happy customer is a loyal, returning customer. Automated email notifications and easy-to-use self-service portals encourage customers to place their confidence in your business’s shipping processes. When streamlined order fulfillment procedures help you get orders to the right place at the right time, that confidence increases. This is a powerful way to build customer loyalty and bolster future sales.

Improved Profits

Minimize effort while boosting the bottom line. A cloud ERP shipping automation system reduces staffing, recruitment, and training costs by placing everything you need to quickly process shipments at your fingertips. It also streamlines the rate shopping process, so you can quickly and easily see which carriers in your network are offering the best rates, speeds, and packaging options for your company and your customers. Choose the best rates, pass accurate shipping costs along to customers, and watch the bottom line grow.

What Should You Look for in Shipping Automation Software?

You must choose the right software for your business to reap the benefits of shipping automation. There are many options on the market. As you research them, remember that you will need a system that supports both day-to-day fulfillment and long-term growth.

A Configurable System That Can Scale with You

Your shipping processes should not be locked into rigid workflows. Look for a configurable system that can be tuned to your business processes, adjusted as order volume changes, and scaled as you add locations, channels, product lines, or carriers.

Powerful Order and Warehouse Management Capabilities

Shipping accuracy starts before the carrier label is created. Your system should support order management, warehouse workflows, inventory visibility, barcoding, picking, packing, putting away, counting, and fulfillment coordination.

Shipment Processing and Carrier Coordination Tools

Your shipping software should help speed up order fulfillment and facilitate rate shopping. This includes the ability to compare carrier rates, speeds, service levels, and packaging options without moving between separate carrier systems.

Retail Compliance Features

Retail compliance requirements can affect labeling, documentation, packaging, branding, and shipment formatting. Your system should help teams manage these requirements consistently, especially when shipping for multiple trading partners or dropshipping on behalf of other brands.

Real-Time ERP Integration

Shipping automation is most useful when it is fully integrated with the rest of the business. A connected ERP and shipping solution helps ensure that order, inventory, customer, financial, and shipment data are updated across the organization in real time.

Powerful Analytics Tools

Shipping data should help you understand more than whether a package left the warehouse. Look for analytics tools that help you make sense of shipping costs, carrier performance, fulfillment speed, compliance issues, and customer service trends, so you can align your business trajectory accordingly.

Acumatica Cloud ERP and 3G Pacejet Shipping provide all of this—and much more.

How Do Acumatica and 3G Pacejet Shipping Streamline Shipments?

Acumatica and 3G Pacejet Shipping help businesses navigate the pitfalls of modern shipping by connecting ERP, warehouse, financial, order, and carrier processes. Together, they help distributors, retailers, and manufacturers reduce manual work, improve data visibility, and manage shipping complexity with greater consistency.

Acumatica Cloud ERP

Acumatica Cloud ERP is a modern business management system built to connect your entire organization and put data and information at your fingertips. With Acumatica, teams can manage financials, inventory, orders, warehouse workflows, reporting, and customer information from a connected system.

3G Pacejet Shipping

3G Pacejet Shipping, integrated with Acumatica, supports carrier coordination, rate shopping, shipment processing, labeling, compliance, and fulfillment workflows. This helps businesses compare carrier options, reduce one-off carrier system reliance, and keep shipment data connected to the rest of the business.

The Combined Value

In combination, Acumatica and 3G Pacejet help businesses automate routine picking, packing, shipping, and fulfillment steps; improve serial and lot tracking; support retail and regulatory compliance; and provide real-time visibility into operational and financial data.

For more information and details on the shipping pitfalls you need to avoid and the benefits of shipping automation, check out the eBook, “Navigate Shipping Challenges Using Modern ERP Platform.” You can also watch the full webinar, “Streamlined Shipments: Why Acumatica and 3G Pacejet are an Essential Combination for Distributors, Retailers, and Manufacturers,” to explore native Acumatica shipping features and view a deep-dive Pacejet demo showing how the platform supports streamlined shipments.