The customer experience in e-commerce does not end when a user clicks “place order” on your website. Beyond the website UX and the shopping cart, customers need visibility, control, and communication throughout the purchasing process. They also want visibility into the tracking of their packages from the distribution centre to their front door. Additionally complicating matters, customers expect free, quick delivery and will shop at other stores if these boxes are not checked. Receiving and processing orders, selecting and packing the purchased item at a warehouse, generating shipping labels, and even managing returns are all included in ecommerce delivery. It could seem straightforward enough. It might even appear clear if you’ve seen a well-run warehouse. However, the complexity that results from all the moving parts depends on some factors, including the sorts and sizes of the products you sell, the locations to which you’ll ship, the delivery options and shipping rates you decide to provide, and more. The entire e-commerce delivery process is covered, from receiving and processing an order through packing, shipping, and delivering it to the customer’s door. When your company receives an order, you should check your inventory levels and double-check the customer’s shipping address and other vital details. The items will then be chosen, packed, and ready for shipping.

eCommerce Delivery Benefits

1.    Streamline Delivery Processes

While any shipper’s ultimate goal is to deliver goods to customers on schedule, undamaged, for the least amount of money, and as efficiently as possible. The recent surge in e-commerce has also increased customers’ ability to customise their shipping options, and companies must be able to support this delivery personalisation. The merchant can fulfil the customer’s shipping needs from within the shop’s system thanks to e-commerce delivery solution. They ensure that every shipment complies with each carrier’s labelling and communication standards and applicable trade restrictions by automatically determining the carrier that can offer the best prices to a specific region and per the retailer’s business rules. E-commerce shipping options also make it simple for retailers to use “zone skipping” (sometimes called “hub induction”) to enhance customer service and cut back on transportation expenses. When numerous customers’ orders are combined for the first leg of the delivery trip and then added to a package carrier network for the last mile of the delivery, zone skipping happens. Because it dramatically reduces expenses associated with customs clearance and streamlines end-to-end operations. This is especially advantageous for cross-border shipments. Since merchants can choose local carriers in many nations and regions with the best delivery networks for supplying their clients, the technique also offers more flexibility.

2.    Track Shipments and Resolve Problems in Real-Time

End-to-end package tracking is a feature that the ideal e-commerce delivery solution will have, giving retailers two significant advantages:

• Retailers can quickly fix processing or delivery problems by tracking packages from the warehouse or distribution centre to the customer’s door.
• It enhances the customer experience by giving clients access to personalised delivery options and timely updates.

Customer care teams can proactively troubleshoot delivery exception occurrences and provide delivery updates to customers in real-time by gathering all tracking data and producing delivery event notifications that integrate into the CRM system. For instance, it could be possible to ship the item from a different distribution point so that it arrives on schedule. Or maybe the consumer is prepared to pick up the item from a nearby shop or storage. Customers can even track and trace shipments on business websites without going to the carrier’s website, which decreases incoming calls to customer service about shipment status and increases browsing activity on the retailer’s website, which may result in more purchases. Also, monitoring delivery exception events enables merchants to gather precise carrier performance information, enhancing carrier service measurement and better assisting carrier contract negotiations. ​

3.    Gain Accurate Invoices and Negotiate Carrier Contracts

Both the numbers on the carriers’ invoices and the carriers themselves are not usually accurate. While carriers’ surcharges and other costs are frequently misapplied, e-commerce providers of all sizes have come to accept them. However, manual invoice auditing is unable to uncover these errors. Thankfully, retailers can find these savings opportunities once they integrate an e-commerce shipping solution with freight audit and analytics capabilities into their shipping operations. By automating carrier invoice matching to find invoice anomalies, freight audit and analytics technologies would simplify the financial management of delivery costs. Additionally, if the system has a strong ERP link, it will provide advanced cost accruals and account allocation. ​

4.    Make Data-Driven Decisions

Without the capacity to evaluate real-time shipping data in a business intelligence platform, retailers cannot comprehend how variables like distance, delivery speed, package size, and density affect spending across their landscape of transportation carriers. They are disadvantaged in carrier talks because they cannot see how and where changes are intended to or will take place. Understanding how these changes affect zone and carrier service-level downgrade possibilities is crucial, for instance, if a retailer implements changes in fulfilment to improve ship-from-store or locate a new DC. Additionally, without real-time data and the business intelligence to use it, retailers cannot respond to inquiries like:

• How will a proposed carrier rate change affect spending?
• What are transportation savings possible with the recently suggested carrier options?
• How would new DC placement or ship-from-store influence spending?

Retailers can extrapolate transportation expense effects over significant data sets and display the results across variables such as weight breaks, zones, geographies, service levels, etc., by utilising this data and the Business Intelligence tools provided in an e-commerce shipping solution. Thanks to this depiction, retailers will be empowered to make cost-effective supply chain decisions that align with their company strategy by quickly identifying areas for further negotiation.