Have you ever decided to not buy anything from a brand due to a poor delivery experience? Or have you ever opted out of an online purchase due to high delivery charges? If you never have, it’s exceptional. And if you have, you aren’t alone.
Long delivery periods, late deliveries, high delivery charges, and lack of choice of ecommerce delivery options, top the list of online shoppers’ pain points.
If you are also an online store owner looking to eliminate the bottlenecks in deliveries, you are at the right place. This post is about the ecommerce delivery solutions or tips that can help create an infallible delivery strategy.
Importance of a Strong Delivery Strategy
A strong delivery strategy holds importance in numerous ways.
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Brand Loyalty – Customers are spoiled for choice. If you can’t stay ahead of your competitors and ensure fast deliveries, your customers may drift away. Also, if you charge higher shipping costs, they won’t stay for long. Fast and nominal ecommerce delivery options will help boost your brand loyalty and repeat business.
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Lower Cart Abandonment – If customers have to pay higher shipping charges or wait longer for deliveries, they may abandon the cart. Instead, using efficient ecommerce delivery solutions can help ensure fast and low-cost deliveries. This will eventually help take conversion rates high.
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Enhanced Upselling – Flexible and efficient ecommerce delivery options to give customers more freedom to control delivery dates or timings can help. You can win their trust and pitch for sale of products other than what they are looking for.
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Helps Stand Out – Offering faster and nominal ecommerce delivery options can help you stand out from your competitors. Over time, it can help expand your customer base and rule the market.
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Enhanced Delivery Experience – More control over deliveries means a better delivery experience. Ecommerce delivery options like package rerouting, shipping address validation and correction, etc. can help enhance customers’ delivery experience.
A Peep into Fast-Changing Customers’ Expectations from Deliveries
E-commerce has been there for around two decades. Earlier, the business owner could be the decision-maker and pick the ecommerce delivery solutions that suited them more than the customers. Well, things are no longer the same.
The global e-retail giants like Amazon, eBay, Walmart have pushed the envelope of ecommerce. They have introduced customer-centric approaches and made ecommerce delivery options better and flexible.
There is one more big reason you can’t afford to ignore. The Covid-19 pandemic. Situations have started improving now with people going out for in-store shopping. But yes, the shopping habits of people won’t ever be the same as in the pre-Covid era. More people than earlier have embraced online shopping and will continue to do so.
In fact, eMarketer forecasted an increase by 32.4% in ecommerce sales in 2020 and a fall by 3.2% in brick-and-mortar sales.
National Retail Federation, the world’s largest retail trade organization, recently conducted a survey on customers’ shopping preferences.
Here are the insights into surveyed customers’ preferences.
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97% opted out of the final purchase as shopping wasn’t convenient to them.
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83% state that convenience matters more to them now than 5 years ago.
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52% say that convenience while shopping influences half or more of their purchases.
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38% of online shoppers want shopping experience to be convenient at the very beginning in the research phase, 20% right before check-out, 18% at check-out, and the rest 23% post-purchase.
In yet another survey by NRF two years ago, (one of those years was when the pandemic affected everything) 65% online shoppers surveyed said that they search for free-shipping thresholds before even adding items to their carts. 39% want the two-day shipping to be free of cost, and 29% have opted out of a purchase because two-day shipping wasn’t free.
As evident from the stats, customer-centric solutions are the need of the hour.
If you analyze the stats more carefully, you can see that the delivery aspect has been crucial even before Covid. And with Covid-19, it has become even more crucial with 18% who want convenience at check-out.
This “convenience” spans every single aspect of delivery. Be it ecommerce delivery options, delivery charges, payment methods, or anything else; everything should be convenient. From a small online store owner to a big enterprise, nobody can survive without “customer-first” ecommerce delivery solutions.
Thus, a strong delivery strategy is a potential game-changer for the e-commerce industry today.
Ecommerce Delivery Solutions and Ideas to Boost Deliveries
1. Multiple Ecommerce Delivery Options
Offer your customers multiple shipping options including same-day, next-day, two-day, or standard shipping. This will give them a better control over their delivery charge and speed of the delivery.
2. Offer Free Shipping
If your budget allows, offer free shipping for a purchase exceeding a certain amount. For non-urgent purchases that your customers can wait longer, this tactic can help engage them. If you want, you can compensate your delivery charges by adjusting them somewhere in your selling prices.
3. Avail of Delivery Incentives
Utilize time and price delivery incentives to attract sales – especially during festivals. For instance, a time-sensitive incentive like “Order by New Year Eve to win a freebie” or a price-sensitive incentive like “Free shipping for purchases above $200” can drive conversions.
4. Display Delivery Dates
To ensure customers’ convenience, always display delivery timelines and prices on the checkout page. It will help them pick the most suitable shipping option according to the delivery period and price.
5. Share Tracking Info
Enabling your customers to track their packages is a sure-fire way to win their trust. There are a number of ecommerce delivery solutions or services that you can pick from to auto-send tracking info of packages. Real-time tracking of packages will enhance transparency and brand loyalty.
6. Adopt BOPIS – The Popular Hybrid
Over 90% of customers surveyed by NRF rated BOPIS as convenient. Buy-Online-Pick-In-Store blends the experience of online shopping and in-store shopping. If you have N number of physical stores, you can integrate in-store pickup using one of ecommerce delivery solutions for that.
Our AppJetty Magento 2 Store Locator Extension is also one such next-gen ecommerce delivery solution. It enables customers to pick up their products from a nearby store easily. It lets the admin configure N number of stores, provide curbside pickup option, display available stores on the product page, and allows selection of a preferred date and time slot.
7. Offer Zip Code Validation
Let your customers check for the product deliverability to their address before checkout by entering their zip codes. It will help prevent unwanted order cancellations later and maintain complete transparency.
Our Magento 2 Zip Code Validator is one of the next-gen ecommerce delivery solutions that enable customers to check for the deliverability of products to their addresses through zip codes. It lets you whitelist or blacklist zip codes to allow or restrict deliveries respectively to them. You can also customize the zip code check label and button, availability/unavailability messages to engage customers better.
8. Let the Customers Be in the Driver’s Seat
Allow your customers to take the reins of the delivery process. Give them the freedom to choose delivery date and time slot. This will make them feel more connected with more flexibility in scheduling their deliveries. As a result, they will look forward to returning to your store for repeat purchases. You can also display cut-off time to customers – the time beyond which any order won’t qualify as the order on a particular day. Besides, you can specify non-working days and time-slots for your customers to view and decide when to order.
Our Magento 2 Delivery Date extension is one of the feature-rich ecommerce delivery solutions that help customers choose a preferable delivery date and time slot. It helps configure same-day delivery and custom delivery options for special customers. You can also choose to display the scheduler on Product Page or Checkout Page.
9. Communicate More and Better
No matter how advanced ecommerce delivery solutions become, you still can’t ignore the importance of effective communication. If a delivery goes amiss despite all measures, be ready to accept and handle your customers’ complaints. Convey the reason for the delivery issue and the effort you are making to resolve the issue, politely. Let them know that you value them and that you are ready to take every step possible to not let the issue repeat.
Ready to Have a Strong Delivery Strategy in Place?
A strong delivery strategy is indispensable for an online business. With the right ecommerce delivery solutions and strategies, you can make your delivery strategy highly productive.
With 14 years of experience in tech integrations, we offer the most suitable ecommerce delivery solutions to suit your business requirements. You can also get the best advice from our industry experts on how to formulate a strong delivery strategy. Looking forward to hearing from you.
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