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Owning a small business can be challenging, especially when you’re making just enough profit to scrape by. The cost of shipping your products to customers around the country or across the world can feel like a financial burden. To get some relief, small businesses can access big shipping discounts.

Why should small businesses care about shipping costs?

The reason why small businesses need to care about shipping costs is that more customers want free shipping. Some shoppers abandon their digital shopping carts when they’re surprised by shipping fees. Even if they have already agreed to pay exorbitant prices for the products, they don’t want the additional costs after they reach the check-out page.

The customer expectation of free shipping likely comes from shopping on popular e-commerce sites like Amazon, which offers members free or extremely-cheap shipping options. Amazon can afford to make these types of offers because they are valued as a trillion-dollar company — small losses from shipping fees won’t put a significant dent in their profits. Most online stores can’t take the same losses without going under.

So, small businesses are in a bind. They don’t want to lose money from scaring off customers, but they also don’t want to lose money from offering free shipping and creating an unsustainable situation.

Why are small business discounts not enough?

Smaller businesses try to cut costs by signing up for small business discounts with certain couriers. It’s a good incentive to trim down payments, but the discounts might not be good enough to give them a leg-up.

For instance, Canada Post’s shipping discounts don’t get higher than 35% for small businesses sending product orders to locations across Canada. If a business spends $7,500 or more on Priority shipping, it can receive up to 30% in savings. If they use Xpresspost after spending $7,500 or more, that savings jumps up to 34%.

If that same small business wanted to ship internationally, their savings could be beneficial depending on the type of shipping they use. After spending $7,500 or more, they could save up to 5% on Priority Worldwide shipping. But for the same amount of spending, they could save up to 47% on tracked packet international shipping.

If your business is genuinely small and doesn’t meet this high spending standard, your discounts will be much lower. An online store that has only a handful of people might not find the savings to be that helpful in the long-run.

What can small businesses do?

If a small business wants to save more money, they can find excellent shipping discounts for small businesses that will make a big difference with their budget. They can access deeply-discounted shipping rates from trusted couriers, saving up to 70% on domestic and international orders. That’s more than double of what you can save using Canada Post’s Level 4 shipping discounts for domestic orders.

Businesses can find shipping services that cater to different types of delivery needs, like small parcel delivery, LTL and volume consolidation. By taking shipment volume into account, netParcel can help people find the cheapest and most convenient rates for deliveries.

If you are the representative of a small business, you should contact us today to find out how you can use this tool to get significant savings for product shipments. You can always sign up on the website or download the mobile app.

A 5%, 10% or even 30% discount may not be enough to relieve a small business when it comes to shipping costs. When they turn to a tool like netParcel, they can get massive discounts that will put tons of money back into their pockets.