Domestic shipping is shipping that’s done within the borders of where a country is, such as in the US, all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and DC. There are tons of shipping carriers for you to choose, including regional carriers that might be useful for your business needs. Domestic shipping carriers offer what’s called shipping options based on what’s sent, the volume, and how quickly the recipient needs these shipments back.
How to Choose the Best Carrier
The thing is, with these carriers, they have shipping options based on the size of the packages, the speed of delivery, and the contents of what is sent. For example, in the continental US, USPS is a service that offers a flat-rate shipping for all small items including documents within the country, and they also come with options to do overnight deliveries, overweight shipping, and heavy shipping too. There is also DHL which does offer domestic shipping for online goods, especially those that ship at a larger volume ever single month.
The Carriers and Rates
Every single country has their own domestic shipping carriers, and the more options there can be, the harder it might be for those to make decisions on what to use.
With USPS, they have different mail types, which is popular, since it’s more cost-effective.
In general though, the quicker you need it there, the higher the price. For example, up to 2 days it can be sometimes over 30 dollars! But if you’re willing to let it take a bit longer, up to 7 days or so, it can be less than $10 depending on the service. You also may have to factor in package weight, since the smaller the box, the cheaper it’ll be to ship.
The Best Practices for Shipping Domestically
There are so many different ways to ship these packages that are worth looking at too when you’re looking to understand.
These include:
Distance shipped
Contents of the package
Weight and size
The shipping carriers within this do use shipping zones which help to see where a package travels from one location to the next. It’s not based on zip codes though, but rather regions of areas. It can be tiresome to check this, but if you want to, you can use cloud shipping to properly look at different shipping carriers and weights for the products too.
When you’re shipping anything that you’re looking to ship, the goal is to keep the packaging size as low as possible. This is due to dimensional weight, which is used to help calculate the cost of shipping different items as well.
For example, this is calculated by multiplying the height times the length and then the width. This means, the bigger or heavier it is, the higher the shipping costs. If you do sell mostly items that are heavy or oversized, one of the best options may be to look for affordable round shipping, such as FedEx ground, which will get the product to the location within 5 days or less.
You should also make sure that you get shipping insurance when needed. If the package does become valuable enough it needs insurance, put it on there. That way, it can be protected in the event that something goes wrong with the product. Finally, consider using ground shipping when speed isn’t going to be a major factor. This takes longer, but has a much larger reach of distribution, and is offering now better ways to optimize this. There is also fulfillment centers too to help you figure this out.
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