Visit an e-commerce site, search for a product, find the right one, and proceed to checkout. That’s what you typically do on any e-commerce site. What if you find out that the site isn’t displaying the estimated delivery date but only the number of shipping days?
It may happen that you lose your initial interest in shopping because you wouldn’t want to calculate the delivery date yourself. Similarly, almost all online shoppers expect to know the delivery date and not the transit time.
Thus, an estimated delivery date is highly valuable for e-tailers. Customers don’t wish to consider factors like the date of order placement, number of working days, product availability, processing time, etc. to determine the delivery date manually. All they want is an estimated delivery date when they can get hold of their product. It’s for you to manage them all in the backend.
Estimated delivery dates have several benefits. First, an estimated delivery date drives more impulse purchases as the customer has a clear idea of when they will receive their order(s). Second, displaying a Magento 2 estimated delivery date helps build trust in customers and expand your loyal customer base. A close-to-accurate estimated delivery date along with regular real-time updates about the product’s whereabouts ensures better transparency. Third, the right delivery date estimation helps save the company’s resources as the incidences of order cancellations, returns, or repeat deliveries go down.
Now that you know how estimated delivery dates help your business build loyalty and grow sales, let’s move ahead to discuss one more aspect. Rather a more important aspect – customized delivery dates. Brands like Amazon, Flipkart, etc. provide this option to enable customers to schedule their delivery.
If you are also an e-tailer looking to allow your customers to schedule their deliveries, this post has everything you need. In this post, you’ll first learn about what a custom delivery date is. Next, you’ll learn the importance of offering the freedom of delivery date selection to customers. You’ll also learn how you can integrate this delivery scheduling feature into your e-store.
A custom delivery date is the delivery date that your customer chooses (instead of you, or your shipping partner) for the delivery of the product.
Benefits of Delivery Scheduling
1. Elevated Customer Experience
By and large, online shopping is all about convenience. Customers order online because they want to avoid crowded lines at the cash counters in big stores. However, if they have no control over when they can receive their order, it may lead to a poor customer experience.
It may drift even some of your loyal customers away to a company that provides this control in the long run. In other words, they may start looking for those companies that let them pick suitable delivery dates.
Hence, if you provide this freedom to choose a preferred delivery date, your customers can receive the order at their convenience. This helps you enrich their shopping experience, building your company’s image.
2. Reduces Your Overhead
When you know when your customer wants the product, it reduces your overall expenses on deliveries as you won’t deliver on a date or time slot they haven’t scheduled. This means that the customer will be there to receive the order at the time specified. This, in turn, will reduce your company’s transportation expenses for extra trips to complete the delivery.
3. Lower Repeat Deliveries
If you don’t enable the customer to decide the delivery date, you don’t have any means to find out whether they would be available or not at the time of delivery. Due to this lack of communication, your delivery people can end up returning with the order undelivered. Shipping undelivered orders back to the customer’s address two or more times increases repeat deliveries.
Nevertheless, delivery date scheduling is the easy way out. It not only lets your customers pick their suitable delivery date but also helps you plan your daily deliveries accordingly. Over time, your repeat deliveries reduce to a minimum, and your profitability soars.
4. Streamlines the Communication
In case you don’t let your customers pick a Magento 2 estimated delivery date of their choice, it may incur you more costs. You may have to spend a lot of time and money handling queries about orders and statuses. It also puts more burden on your and your support agents.
A delivery date scheduler in place not only reduces extra admin work but also takes your company’s productivity high. As customers can select their preferred date and time slot for delivery, there is more transparency and minimal chances of confusion or queries.
5. Builds Strong Brand Identity and Boosts Trust
Delivery scheduling and flexibility in delivery options help strengthen your customer’s trust in your brand. Timely deliveries along with flexible delivery scheduling encourages your first-time customers to return to your store for more purchases.
In fact, they may leave positive reviews on different platforms and contribute to your company’s publicity. Over time, customers start recognizing and picking you just by your name. More traffic, more visitors, and more customers!
Time to Upgrade Your Store – Time to Provide Delivery Date Scheduling
Now that you have a complete understanding of how you can take showing estimated delivery dates a step further with delivery date scheduling, it’s high time you offered that. If you have just started your business and aren’t sure where and how to start, stop looking around! AppJetty, has a solution that can serve the purpose well.
Our Magento 2 Delivery Date Extension offers customers the freedom to select a delivery date and time slot for their ordered products. Besides, it lets the admin configure non-working days and hours from the backend to avoid confusion and wrong calculation. It also helps the admin keep track of all the orders statuses and convey them to the customers. Furthermore, it features desired labels for delivery date, the option of comments for customers, delivery date scheduler customization options, and more – all that you seek in an ideal delivery date scheduler extension.
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