Your first fifty orders: a shipping setup checklist

The first fifty orders are where a seller finds out whether their shipping setup works. Fifty is enough to hit every failure mode once and small enough to fix them before they compound. Most of what goes wrong at five hundred orders was already visible at fifty and was treated as bad luck.

This is the checklist, in the order the work actually has to happen.

Before the first order: four decisions

1. 01Your COD amount policy. Is delivery charged to the customer, absorbed by you, or free above a threshold. Decide it now, because changing it later means telling customers their price went up
2. 02Your packaging sizes. Two or three box sizes that fit your range, chosen small. The box decides part of the charge, so this is a pricing decision as much as a packing one
3. 03Your attempt policy. Three attempts is the default and the right answer for most sellers. A fourth attempt on a customer who refused twice is usually a lost trip
4. 04Your pickup time. If you ship daily, an auto-pickup time means you never forget to forward orders. If you ship in bursts, forward them by hand

Getting your rates straight

Work out what three real parcels cost you before you price anything. Lahore City standard is PKR 180 for the first half kilo and PKR 40 for each additional half kilo, tax and fuel included. The extended area adds a flat PKR 50. Express is PKR 250 and PKR 50, with collection before 13:00.

Then do it for the parcel you actually ship most, including the box, on the pricing calculator. The figure that surprises people is the dimensional one: a 40 by 30 by 20 cm box at 3 kg bills as 5 kg and costs PKR 540. Chargeable weight versus actual weight explains why.

Orders one to ten: do everything by hand

Book each one individually, print each label, and watch each parcel through to delivery. You are not being inefficient, you are learning where your process leaks.

• Book the order and check the quote against what you expected
• Print the label and stick it on the largest flat face
• Forward the order to the pickup request. A booked order is not collectable until you do
• Watch the rider scan it. A parcel he does not scan bounces back to your booked list with a reason
• Follow it through warehouse arrival, out for delivery and delivery with proof

By order ten you will know which of your listings generate address problems and which of your boxes generate charge surprises.

Orders eleven to thirty: fix what order ten showed you

Three things usually need fixing here.

Your addresses

If any of the first ten needed a phone call to find, your address capture is the problem rather than the customer. Add block or phase and a landmark to the fields you collect. Writing a Lahore delivery address a rider can find covers what a findable one contains.

Your confirmation message

Tell the customer the exact COD amount, not a rounded one, and tell them which day to expect the parcel. A customer asked at the door for a figure they were not told refuses.

Your box sizes

If any parcel billed higher than its scale weight, your box is too big for the item. Halving the longest side halves the dimensional weight outright.

Orders thirty-one to fifty: start batching

By now the per-order work should be mechanical, so move to volume tools.

• Import in bulk with a CSV rather than booking one at a time. The import produces a validation report before anything is created, so bad rows are caught before they become parcels. Booking orders in bulk with a CSV covers it
• Print labels in a batch and generate a load sheet, so the rider handover is a count against a document rather than a conversation. Labels and load sheets covers the handover
• Keep repeat customers in the address book so a corrected address stays corrected
• If you run a Shopify or WooCommerce store, connect it so orders arrive without retyping. Connecting a Shopify store walks through it

The one number to watch from order one

Your return rate, broken down by reason. Not the total, the breakdown. Every hold, refusal and cancellation carries a reason code and evidence, so you can see whether you have a not-at-home problem, an expectation problem or an address problem. The fix for each is completely different and treating them as one number means fixing none of them. Cutting your return rate covers the levers.

What to have reconciled by order fifty

1. 01Every delivered parcel appears once on your statement, with COD minus charge equal to net
2. 02No undelivered parcel carries a charge
3. 03Your recorded weights match what you declared, or you know why they do not
4. 04Your payout account on your settings page is the account you actually want paid

Run that check once at fifty orders and it takes twenty minutes. Leave it until five hundred and it takes a day. Five checks that show whether a courier is short-paying you is the longer version of the same work.