Packaging

Mark Forrester blogged recently about his experience in buying T-Shirts from Oddica.com, a US-based online store. The package arrived along with free stickers, badges and postcards. He was so impressed that he wanted to tell the world.

Contrast this with two online purchases we have made recently in South Africa

Shane bought a laptop bag from PCMall. Can you imagine his excitement opening this delivery? Me neither.

And today I received my new shiny iPod Nano from ZA Store:

Inventory of the contents:

- 1 x Large Jiffy Bag.
- 1 x Crumpled Invoice, titled "ZA Apple Online Store". That's not who I bought from?
- 1 x iPod Box and iTunes CD.

That's it. I checked the corners of the Jiffy Bag twice, just to be sure.

What a wasted opportunity for ZA Store and PC Mall. They made the shopping experiences completely unmemorable for us. The products themselves are great, and the price was fine, but in the future when I need a fancy widget to plug in to my iPod, I would have completely forgotten who I originally bought from.

Where was the ZA Store fridge magnet? The voucher to give to a friend? The hand-written note from the guy who packed my order, saying how jealous he was of my new iPod? The invitation to join the exclusive club of ZA Store customers who get regular freebies and first option on new products?

When 10 different online stores are selling iPods and Laptop Bags in South Africa, you have to differentiate yourself, and the only real way you can do this is when the package arrives at the customer's door. He will tolerate clumsy, poorly designed websites, but unless you blow him away when the product arrives you've lost a potential repeat customer. E-commerce doesn't end with "Thank you for placing your order with us". It continues long after that.

I just hope the SA E-commerce Awards judges take this aspect into account when they dish out the prizes later this month.

Last week I was sent a gift through NetFlorist. I thought maybe it was in response to my recent post about their exorbitant spend on systems, but alas, this blog is not that famous yet. 

There was an outer brown box that took the brunt of the journey here (they use RAM, and everything seemed fine. We haven't tried them yet). Inside the brown box was a classy black box with lid, ribbon printed with the NetFlorist logo, and a handwritten card that presumably the sender had composed online.

Inside the box was a Sally Williams nougat extravaganza. Don't click the thumbnail on an empty stomache! The nougat boxes and loose items fitted snugly in the black box and were interspersed with raffia and tissue paper. In summary, it was a delight to open.

We are still working on our packaging situation, as shown by this picture where our fulfillment department is cutting a bigger box down to size. We've said it before and we'll say it again - there is a big opportunity for a box/packaging company to clean up the SA e-commerce market. We would go online today and order a bunch of different sized boxes, and we'd pay to get them here. Surely we're not the only ones who are battling?

Trying to find the right packaging for your products may be harder than you think.

I spent the last two days phoning around and visiting packaging stores, trying (with very little success) to find suitable boxes for our YuppieChef orders. There is no one in SA that specialises in packaging for e-commerce (so there's a great business idea) and if you are a small business requiring a few variations without buying a huge amounts of each size - you will be in for a fight. In the end, we bought a R 12 ($ 1.50) box from PostNet and cut it down to half the size which took about 30 minutes. This is not how we want to be spending our time!

Looking abroad, Uline has a great range of boxes that can be ordered online and delivered. Here is exactly what we are looking for. So now we are investigating importing boxes, seeing as South Africa is barely coming to the party. We'll also be trying Johannesburg as we would like to keep it local.

If you know of anyone in SA who could help us with suitable packaging, please let us know. 

As an example of how great a company can be at customer service, before I finished writing this post, I received a response from Uline.

Dear Shane:

Thank you for contacting Uline Customer Service.

We do not ship internationally.

We would be happy to ship your order to a freight forwarder in the U.S.A so that they may forward your order to you.

Should your billing address be outside the U.S.A., please understand that we do request payment in advance with an electronic funds transfer.  

Please feel free to contact us if we can assist with anything else.

Thank you,

Diane
Uline

Wow!

Big Bad Brad has been helping us fulfill our Flag Kit and Bug Zapper orders over the past two months before he starts Varsity in February. Today he's been extremey busy!

Would be nice to say that these are the kind of volumes we do on a daily basis, but the truth is, our new stock arrived yesterday and we are a little behind on our orders. To complete an order, each zapper is tested (we prefer finger testing, but not everyone can handle this), boxed, strapped and then finally 'waybilled'. All in a days work for BBB.

(In the background you can see our new 19" LCD flat screen that we picked up today.)

Last week we received payment for an order that was placed in September 2006 for 3 x 6m ground mounted flag poles. Since then we have decided to not sell flag poles because they’re not the most convenient things to package and deliver, but we had to honour this quote because back then we also didn’t specifiy that quotes were valid for 30 days! Poles are particularly tricky if they’re headed for the middle of the Transkei (which we did last year).

We’re still undecided about whether to put poles back on the site. There is a demand, and customers often want a pole and flags at the same time. If we only offer flags they might go somewhere else for the whole order. We need to decide whether to stay absolutely focused (”country flags to your door in a hurry”), or to keep our range wider and appeal to a bigger market. A wider range will mean modifying the ordering system to allow for different delivery times and charges for different products, which is not ideal.

We had a nice bunch of orders to get out today - you can see we didn’t quite get the knack of crease free stickers first time round, but hey, we’re new at this.

Also, we always liked the white nylon stuff that was wrapped around all our Kalahari.net deliveries; it sends a message that the goods are securely packaged. Does anyone know what this stuff is called? We didn’t and after quite a bit of calling around we managed to get to the bottom of it. You heard it here first - its called Strapping and it comes in 2 kilometer rolls. You don’t need any fancy machines (they are available, but at a cost); just a bag of buckles. Its takes a bit of working out, but once you’ve got it you should be on your way.

.

We had known for sometime that our packaging for Flag Kit needed some serious attention. Up until now, flags were delivered to our customers packaged in very unexciting clear plastic bags. Not that remarkable! We wanted to WOW the client with a clever packaging idea; something fun and non flag related that has word-of-mouth potential. So off to the drawing board we went.

Flag Kit is about quality flags delivered to your door - we came up with the idea of flags packaged in pizza boxes delivered to your door on time and piping hot! We had some labels printed with a 100% Fresh concept. This is our first freshly packaged flag, ready to go.