Do you know why some brands are always on top of the leaderboard? Why do customers choose them compared to competitors offering similar products?
One of the major reasons that can make or break an ecommerce business is shipping. There are a lot of factors like on-time deliveries, allowing customers to choose delivery dates, multiple delivery options, etc., that play a significant role in making your shipping policy customer friendly and of the best amongst the competitors.
If you are a Shopify store owner wishing to improve delivery date management, this article is for you!
Best Shipping Practices
1. Make appropriate teams
One person cannot do it all. It is important to divide the task in order to have clarity in work, reduce errors and avoid burnout.
You can have a marketing team who takes care of all the promotions, highlighting the USP of your brand. From analyzing the incoming leads to final conversions, they analyze all the statistics and take action accordingly.
The major part of the ecommerce business is handling shipping. It includes order confirmations, packing, and shipping. Some brands deliver with the help of in-house delivery teams, while some pass it on to courier services, who take care of it from there.
The most important team to include, without fail, is the customer care team. You must have someone who can resolve customer queries as fast as possible. They must have knowledge of all the processes and access to customer orders in order to resolve customer queries.
2. Shipping Dates
Online shopping is all about convenience. Customers can purchase a product at 3 at night from the comfort of the bed. The delivery date is the one reason that can stop them from completing the checkout process.
There can be various reasons for a customer not to buy the product and mostly, it is the delivery date. Some brands refrain from giving a confirmed delivery date by giving general statements like “Your product will be delivered in 15 days.” Even if you are not going to take half a month to deliver a product, giving such generic statements will stop customers from purchasing the order. Why would someone wait 15 days when Amazon can deliver it the next day?
Either you can show them the delivery date based on the shipping location, or you can allow customers to choose the delivery date. Yes, both of these are possible with the help of Shopify apps.
With our Shopify Delivery Date and Shipping Rates app, you can allow customers to choose delivery time as well. When you integrate the app with your store, it means you add the delivery date and time picker functionality to your store. You can configure the non-working days, restrict days you need to prepare the order, delivery slots, order limit, and much more to have a smooth experience for customers and yourself with the app. You will never miss a delivery or overwork to complete the delivery target.
3. Shipping Rates
If I were a customer buying a gift online, I would happily pay $50 + free shipping for a product than buy a product at $40 + $10 shipping.
Free shipping is the most used term to attract customers to buy products. It is easy to convenience them as it shows there are no other charges that will add during checkout. When customers buy a product at $40 and see the cart value has increased due to shipping charges, they might give purchasing a second thought.
It is not that you should offer free shipping reducing your profit margins. There are different methods to convenience customers to buy more in order to avail free shipping. You can set an order value. If customers match that number, they can avail free shipping or a discount.
All these shipping rate profiles can be created within the Shopify Delivery Date and Shipping Rates app. It allows you to set static and dynamic rates for all orders.
4. Delivery Option
Customers like options, and our app can help you with that. Most businesses only offer standard shipping, but there are other delivery options like local delivery and store pickup that can help you serve your customers better and faster.
For customers, store pickup takes away the shipping charges, and for you, the hassles of passing it to courier services and tracking until it’s delivered safely.
Conclusion
Shopify store owners can do such little changes to their store which can make a lot of difference in terms of customer service. Some of the changes can be done by you in terms of planning and strategizing while our app can help you with other changes related to features. If you don’t want to feel lost in between thousands of ecommerce stores, try implementing the suggested changes to your store.
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