When it comes to the success of your ecommerce business, great customer experiences is a necessity. While it’s often overlooked, it’s order management that plays a key role in customer experience.
There’s a lot of different ways to add value to an order – thinking about giving an estimated delivery date, tracking number, or delivery notifications throughout the process – all of these can help build trust with your customers.
You have to call it what it is, there’s a lot of industry retail bosses out there, this has driven customer expectations and they’re always rising. When you look for patterns across retail, we’re seeing most are offering the opportunity to receive expedited shipping and with that, you’re going to know exactly when your shipment is coming.
Here we are, 2023 and customer expectations are always rising. Customers want their orders fast, so delivery options like free 2-day shipping can certainly help helps deliver a great experience. Giving your customers the opportunity to track orders is a solid value add-on. If that customer is excited about the order, they may use that feature multiple times before receiving the order.
Ecommerce order tracking is important to everyone involved, both retailers and customers.
What Is Ecommerce Order Tracking?
Order tracking in ecommerce gives you the ability to monitor online orders, shipments, and share real-time order status updates to customers. Ecommerce order tracking includes features like shipment tracking, estimated delivery dates, and frequent updates on the order status. When you consider all of these features working as one, it can play a key role in customer experience, allowing buyers the ability to track every step of the delivery process.
As you’re going to learn, it may matter more than you realize.
Can Online Orders Be Tracked?
Absolutely! Believe it or not, many business owners wonder about online order tracking, at least not knowing all the different shipping and delivery elements that can be tracked.
Ecommerce order tracking allows you to monitor all of your online orders and shipments and communicate the order status to your customers at any point in time. Ecommerce order tracking includes features like shipment tracking, estimated delivery dates, and frequent updates on the order status.
Why Should I Provide Order Tracking?
There’s a number of different reasons why you want to offer ecommerce order tracking to your customers. Not only that, for you direct to consumer companies, order tracking can be beneficial to you as well. We always recommend having online order tracking features.
Here’s why.
(1) Exceeding Customer Expectations
Some of you may be surprised by this, but over 90 percent of customers expect to have the ability to monitor their orders, not just once but through every step of the shipping process. Wow! That tells you all you need to know.
This proves that having order visibility to orders is the new normal for ecommerce shoppers. Online shopping basically demands it with such a competitive ecommerce landscape. Having an ecommerce order tracking system in place is mandatory if your brand doesn’t want to lose business to Amazon and other major retailers.
If you can’t provide the expected level of service, shoppers are going to notice it, you risk your bottom line. Is it worth that risk? No way, you don’t want customers not becoming repeat customers. Provide your customers with order tracking so they can stay up-to-date with their order, they want that feature. You want to give your customers the best experience possible.
Logistics can get crazy at times, it’s possible for an order to be far from its final destination. After an order leaves a warehouse or packing facility, it can go to a post office or sorting facility before it reaches the customer. Keeping customers in the loop will give them the clarity and ensure you meet expectations.
(2) Reducing Costs
As you’ve probably discovered firsthand, dealing with customer complaints or inquiries can cost your business longterm. At some point, you’re going to need to make changes. You’re limited at what you can do – you can hire staff, outsource customer service, or try using a bot to respond to complaints. If you do nothing, customer reviews are going to suffer and if you start getting bulk negative reviews, watch out! We live in an amazing time, cool things can go viral in an instant. On the other end, bad things can go viral just as quick.
This is just a known fact, but with ecommerce order tracking, you should see a lot fewer inquiries. Once the system is in place and dialed in, all the tracking information is automatically provided to your customer. Love that automation! If you do run into problems, you’re going to have immediate access to everything you need to fix an order or multiple orders.
Order tracking allows you to automate the process without the extra effort, that’s music to a business owner’s ears. You have enough on your plate, you already wear multiple hats, this is just another way order tracking can help. Customer support is important and you still need them there, but you’ll need them far less than now. It’s all about saving energy, time, and money, which will give you additional resources to use in other areas of your company.
The lesson: don’t underestimate how beneficial ecommerce order tracking can be.
(3) Mastering Order Fulfillment
As we always say, “order fulfillment” will always be a core pillar in your ecommerce business. Ensuring items are picked, packed, and sent to the carrier is only the beginning. With order tracking in place, you get more control over your order fulfillment process – which allows you to address issues quickly and easy.
If you don’t have this system in place, you’re going to be asking for trouble. Order tracking ensures tracking data doesn’t get lost, orders are accurate and that keeps customers happy. As a retailer, having this at your fingertips is key to success.
While we haven’t touched on customer acquisition in this guide, you already know it’s always important to your company. You can’t grow without new customers. While we can’t argue with that, you can’t ignore the fact that it is returning customers that fuel your company’s growth.
The right ecommerce fulfillment strategy, which should include order tracking, can help minimize issues as well as increase the lifetime value of your customers and win more sales.
How To Implement Ecommerce Order Tracking With Thill Inc.
When it comes to managing fulfillment and ecommerce shipping solutions efficiently, you need an experienced partner to help you get the most out of fulfillment and shipping. More so, you can need a solution that works hand-in-hand with your ecommerce solution.
Here’s the thing, Thill Inc. can store your inventory in their network of fulfillment centers across the US, we can help with picking, packing, shipping, returns, and help you manage shipments. With access to Thill Inc. technology, you can integrate with your ecommerce platform – this is such a valuable tool set you get to harness partnering with Thill Inc.
Thill has dozens of ecommerce integration partners, here’s a few of the most common.
- Shopify Orders
- Amazon Orders
- Ebay Orders
- Magento Orders
- WooCommerce Orders
- CrateJoy Orders
If you want to learn more about our technology, data, and features, click here.
What our clients love the most about the tech is the real-time data and analytics. When you see orders moving in real-time, you’re going to see things you’ve never seen before. Sure, that’s cliche but it’s true – you do get order tracking but there’s way more than just that.
- Automate confirmation emails and share tracking numbers and tracking details with every customer
- Evaluate order status as it moves from processing to shipping (and any step in between) in real-time
- Handles complex multi-items orders
- Track cancelations and declined orders
- Product refurbishment
- Feature that allows order filtering by status
- Search options to find specific orders
- Edit shipping details in situations when customers make a mistake – (wrong P.O. Box number, street address, etc.)
Check out our order management to learn more.
Our ecommerce logistics solution gives your customers the ability to track orders and stay up-to-date. The best part, you don’t have to do anything!
The technology is easy to learn, easy to apply, but we’ll be there every step of the way to help you get familiar with all the features.
Customer Experiences Matter (Especially First Time Customers)
2023 – your customers expect to have the ability to track the progress of their orders. As we touched on above, over 90 percent of customers expect to have that feature. If you don’t have that option, you’re going to lose customers because your competition is likely running with that feature.
This simple Information is easy to add, but it’s absolutely powerful. This is just one way to make your customer experience top notch and in the age of social media, it’s vital to your growth. You don’t have to leave your customers out of the loop when it comes to their package delivery. Instead, you can make it feature they will appreciate and value.
Now that ecommerce order tracking has become a normal offer, your business can get harmed if you don’t provide this essential service. When you partner with Thill Inc., this is just one of the awesome benefits you’re going to be able to use.
Knowing where your product is from the time it is ordered until it reaches your customer is a sure fire way to take your customer’s experience to the next level. Most of us have used Ebay – how many times have you tracked your Ebay package?
This is a great way to take care of your customers and remember, we want to bring these customers back over and over again. Give them the best possible experience – and you shouldn’t have no trouble doing just that.
Want To Learn More – Check Us Out
Looking for a 3PL to handle retail fulfillment for you and help you meet customer expectations?
If you’re ready to take your company to the next level, be sure to reach out to our fulfillment team – you can reach us at 1-920-967-9210 – you can also reach us via our online website and fill out a form there – just click here to access our web contact form.
