As an eCommerce business, your success is built on your ability to get the items your customers order to their doorsteps quickly. The items need to be on time and in good shape when they arrive, but this is not always an easy feat.
If you can streamline and speed up the shipping process, it will improve your brand image and your customer loyalty. You can increase your repeat customers, and it’s going to reduce your costs as well.
So how can you work toward avoiding delivery delays?
Know What Causes Delays In the First Place
It’s difficult to work to combat something if you don’t understand its root causes. Delays in shipping can be due to many things, including logistical problems, weather, and mistakes in documentation. System failure can be another reason.
An increase in delivery volume can cause delays, which can be out of your control, but there are still things you can do to speed up deliveries on your end. The COVID-19 pandemic is a good example. At the start of the pandemic, online spending soared, so retailers saw more revenue, but that meant that there were shipping delays. While some of those delays were the fault of USPS and carriers, not all were.
A lot of retailers weren’t prepared to process an influx of orders. They weren’t ready to scale the delivery volumes the pandemic brought but had they been, they could have reduced a lot of their shipping delays.
Do some research in your specific business to see what most commonly contributes to delivery delays for your customers.
Automate Shipping
Automation offers eCommerce businesses a lot of solutions to some of the most common problems they experience. Automated shipping is no exception.
There are inherent challenges in eCommerce shipping, and one of the biggest reasons people abandon their carts is due to high shipping costs. If you use automation, you can avoid this.
Other challenges related to shipping involve poor return policies, a lack of communication with suppliers, and processing orders incorrectly. All of these can be addressed at some level through shipping automation.
With automated shipping, your employees can work with more accuracy and efficiency. That means that the right orders are picked up and shipped from the start, leaving fewer places for errors that could delay delivery.
Look for an automated shipping solution that integrates with other platforms, prints shipping labels, and compares shipping rates in real-time.
You can also choose a solution with international shipping automation if you sell to customers overseas.
Another way that automated shipping can reduce delays is through address verification. If your platform automates address verification when a customer is placing an order, this is one less reason they’ll get a delayed shipment.
The customer may inadvertently enter incorrect addresses, or the delivery company might not have enough information to deliver the package, meaning delays and the package might not be delivered at all.
Audit and, If Necessary, Update Your Order Processing System
We talked a bit about the impacts of your order processing system on the potential for there to be shipping delays above.
If there’s no connection between who’s picking orders and who’s packing them, you’re going to see inefficiencies in the entire process that can lead to delays.
When you have an efficient processing system in place that’s automated, you can make sure everyone’s on the same page, and you can also ensure that you’re not missing carrier deadlines because of your own issues.
Offer Shipment Tracking
All-in-one automation solutions let customers track their packages and get updates in real-time. This might not necessarily keep something from being delayed if there’s a situation that’s outside of your control. What it does do is reduce the frustration your customers might otherwise feel if they don’t know the progress of their purchase.
Your employees can check on the delivery status themselves, improving satisfaction. It also reduces the number of calls or emails your team might have to field to check on the status of something.
Offer Free Shipping
You might be wondering how offering free shipping reduces delays. It doesn’t, but what it can do is be appealing to customers to the point that they’re willing to accept slower shipping rather than pay extra.
When a customer doesn’t have to pay extra for shipping, they will be less frustrated by a delivery delay.
If you can’t offer free shipping for some reason, but an order does get delayed, what you can do is be retroactive with the offering. If a customer experiences a delay, you can reimburse them for the cost of shipping, or you could offer them store credit.
In general, if it seems that something isn’t going to get to a customer on time and you can’t figure out a way around it, discounts will almost always help.
Be Upfront About Your Shipping Process
Outline your shipping process and expected timelines transparently on your website, including your checkout page. You might also want to detail your shipping process and the expected time items arrive in the confirmation email once an order is purchased.
The more someone knows what to expect, the more forgiving they are.
Prepare for Surges
The COVID-19 situation wasn’t necessarily a surge most eCommerce companies could have prepared for, but there are some you can. For example, when the holiday season comes, you need to be on your toes to get things and make sure your processes are streamlined to avoid delays.
Have some contingency plans in place if you’re a relatively new business and aren’t sure how to forecast the holidays just yet.
Keep your eye on current events too. As a business owner, it’s important. You don’t have a crystal ball, but you can notice if there are any things on the horizon with even the potential to disrupt shipping, so you can prepare accordingly.
Always be mindful of what’s going on in your industry and the economy and country as a whole because of the many factors that can affect shipping.
