Holiday Archives | Lateshipment.com

Leverage Existing Tech Stack To Build Exciting Post-Purchase Experiences This Holiday Season

Sashank Ravindranath — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 14:32:02 +0000

The holiday season is a critical time for e-commerce businesses, with the potential to attract new customers and drive significant sales.

To take things a notch further, you need to stand out in a competitive landscape and retain customers. The best way to do that is to deliver an outstanding post-purchase experience to build a loyal customer tribe and grow.

There’s an easier way to do this — leverage their existing tech stack to create seamless and delightful post-purchase experience without starting from scratch. Here’s how to do it effectively this holiday season.

Leverage Existing Tools to Enhance Your Customers' Holiday Post-Purchase Experience

Understanding how you can leverage technology to enhance the experience of your store ultimately comes down to picking the right set of tools to support your scaling efforts and improve your customers’ experiences at every stage of their journey.

With advanced shipment tracking, delivery, and returns management tech, brands big or small can easily provide great post-purchase experiences that drive fierce customer loyalty. The best part is, here are some ways for you to do that without making any changes to the existing tools that you’re using.

1. Leverage Email Marketing Tools for Post-Purchase Engagement

This is where you can leverage marketing automation tools such as Klaviyo, Attentive, Omnisend or Twilio by integrating with a post-purchase platform like LateShipment.com to:

Send post-purchase transactional emails and SMS notifications to keep your customers in the loop about their orders throughout the delivery and returns lifecycle and to keep customers informed when your customers’ parcels are facing uncommon delivery issues such as weather-related delays during the holiday season
Send follow-up emails requesting reviews or feedback about the purchased product.
Trigger personalized upsell or cross-sell emails featuring products that complement the customer’s recent purchase. For example, if a customer has recently purchased a camera, you can recommend accessories like lenses or tripods.

2. Enhance Your Customer Support Reps Tracking and Delivery Visibility Using Delivery Experience Platforms + Help desk Integration

Delivery experience platforms like LateShipment.com can transform the post-purchase journey by providing real-time tracking and predictive delivery alerts whenever something goes wrong with your customers’ orders.

You can extend this post-purchase visibility to your helpdesk platforms such as Zendesk, Gorgias, or Freshdesk to

Automate responses to common queries such as “Where is my order?” or “How do I return an item?” during peak shopping periods to enhance customer satisfaction and reduce support workload.
Automatically trigger delivery-related tickets for several common delivery issues and enable your customer support team to proactively resolve delivery issues by stepping in where necessary and taking necessary corrective measures.

Being proactive mitigates your customers’ worries and sets them on the path towards satisfaction. Moreover, it also reduces the burden on your support team during the busy season and lets them focus on product-related queries. Also, taking preemptive action results in your customers appreciating your efforts, which can prove to be fruitful during times like the Holiday season.

3. Streamline Your Returns Process Via Integrating Your E-commerce Platform/ OMS

An efficient returns process is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction, especially during the holiday season when return rates tend to spike. Returns management software, such as LateShipment.com, can help streamline this process.

Integrating your e-commerce store or Order Management Systems such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Linnworks, ShipStation, etc, can enable you to streamline your shipping processes and enhance the post-purchase experience.

This integration allows businesses to automatically sync order data, track shipments in real time, and proactively manage delivery exceptions. Additionally and more importantly, this integration also allows businesses to provide seamless returns experiences via:

Allowing customers to initiate returns, print labels, and track the status of their returns through a self-service portal and thereby reducing the manual workload for support teams
Leveraging returns data to identify common reasons for returns and make adjustments to product descriptions, quality control, or sizing information.
Improve revenue by incentivizing customers to opt for exchanges or store credit over refunds for each return

And ultimately make returns easy, frictionless, and an integral part of your post-purchase strategy.

One Simple Integration, a World of Retail Benefits

Pairing LateShipment.com with your existing e-commerce, order management, marketing automation, and helpdesk tools allows you to tap into all the great benefits that can take your business to the next level.

LateShipment.com integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and makes it possible to boost their capabilities in the following ways:

Additionally, LateShipment.com also can integrate with custom-built tools and platforms. Our API makes it easy to enable such integrations.

At LateShipment.com, we are committed to enabling your business to wrest control of the post-purchase experience you provide customers. Therefore, integrate your tech-stack with LateShipment.com and stand apart from your competitors by offering your customers near white-glove service in the post-purchase phase.

Ready to try out some of our integrations? – Get Started

Still have questions? – Talk to our integration expert

The post Leverage Existing Tech Stack To Build Exciting Post-Purchase Experiences This Holiday Season appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

BFCM 2024: How E-commerce Businesses Can Prepare for Success

Sashank Ravindranath — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 14:01:38 +0000

Just like how the Super Bowl is a day for sports enthusiasts or the re-release of a famous franchise movie is a treat for the fans, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) is a tailor-made event for e-commerce businesses to boost revenue, attract new customers, and build brand loyalty.

As BFCM 2024 approaches in less than two months, it’s time for you to be well-prepared to capitalize on the opportunities and stand out from the competition. To help you do that, we’ve come up with this BFCM special where we’ll explore preparation strategies and provide tips for a successful 2024 season, using insights from previous years and evolving trends.

What is BFCM and Why is it Special for E-commerce Businesses?

BFCM is a two–way street, customers have been following the tradition of shopping more than usual for Thanksgiving gifts from the brick-and-mortar days, and with the rise of e-commerce, customers who wanted to get their shopping done ASAP to prevent their favorite products from going out of stock, began shopping for Christmas right at the end of Thanksgiving. Businesses too saw this as an opportunity to spur them to spend more via sweet deals.

Technically BFCM is just Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the Friday and Monday following Thursday’s Thanksgiving). However, in the recent past, due to increased shopping sprees and businesses’ efforts to capture more sales, BFCM has become much more than just two days of deals and is now Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Businesses Saturday, and Cyber Monday, also dubbed as the Thanksgiving Weekend or Cyber Five.

There’s usually high demand for items such as toys, home furnishings, mattresses, and apparel on Black Friday. At the same time, Cyber Monday is known for low prices on tech-related merchandise, like smartphones, laptops, TVs, gaming consoles, and VR devices.

BFCM also marks the unofficial start of the peak holiday shopping season, where you have to come up with effective strategies to increase sales and prevent issues that might affect your goals.

Why BFCM stands out for e-commerce businesses

Largest shopping event of the year – BFCM has evolved into the biggest shopping event, generating billions of dollars in sales over a few days. Consumers actively seek deals, and businesses see record-breaking sales, often surpassing the entire quarter.
High customer acquisition potential – BFCM is synonymous with deep discounts and exclusive offers. Shoppers expect lucrative deals and are prepared to make more and more purchases during this time. For you, this is a prime time to reach a broader audience and acquire new customers.
Increase sales revenue – For many e-commerce businesses, BFCM accounts for a large portion of their annual sales. Some businesses say as much as 20-30% of their annual sales volume is generated during this short period. This makes it a crucial event for you to maximize revenue and meet your sales goals.
Boost brand awareness – With customers actively looking for deals, BFCM creates the opportunity for you to dramatically boost your brand’s visibility by running well-targeted marketing campaigns and increasing your share of voice in a competitive market.
Increased customer retention opportunities – If your retention game is as strong as your acquisition, then BFCM is the best time to build long-term relationships (through exceptional post-purchase experiences) and convert one-time holiday shoppers into repeat customers.

In summary, BFCM is special because it is a short window of opportunity to access a large pool of potential customers and set the tone for long-term business growth. It’s a crucial moment, where you need to capitalize on consumer demand and cement your presence in a crowded marketplace.

Key Preparation Strategies for BFCM 2024

Here are some tips and tricks for you to make the best out of BFCM 2024:

1. Start early: create buzz and build anticipation

The BFCM hype doesn’t start on the day — it builds over weeks or even months. Most customers have their top pick of purchase in mind as early as July while looking for the best deal to get them. If you’d like to make the most of this, you should begin teasing deals and promotions to build excitement. For starters, you can offer early access deals to create a sense of urgency or exclusive offers for loyal customers.

64% of consumers surveyed plan to take advantage of early promotions and discounts.

2. Optimize your website for traffic surges

BFCM attracts a massive influx of visitors, so it’s essential to ensure your website can handle the increased traffic without crashing or slowing down. Test your website’s performance and optimize page speed. Also, make sure that your store offers the same level of seamless experience on both desktop and mobile, as a large portion of BFCM shopping happens on mobile devices.

In 2023, a record 79% of Cyber Week e-commerce traffic originated from mobile phones.

3. Fine-tune your inventory and delivery processes

One of the worst things that can happen during BFCM is running out of stock or delayed orders. To avoid this, plan your inventory well in advance by analyzing data such as last year’s sales data and anticipated demand or predictions based on carrier delay rates. You can also consider strengthening your supply chain by coordinating with suppliers to have an accurate inventory or shipping with multiple carriers to ensure on-time deliveries.

4. Offer competitive promotions and deals

Discounts are the main attraction during BFCM, everybody’s doing it. So, how can you do things differently to beat the competition? The answer: think beyond basic percentage cuts. Offer bundles, free shipping, and limited-time flash sales to entice customers. A good ploy is to implement tiered discounts to increase the average order value, such as “Spend $100, save 20%.”

With the checklist or ‘must-haves’ for BFCM covered, we’ll move on to the next section: the list of items that will be the ‘talk of the town’ for this year’s BFCM.

E-commerce Trends for BFCM 2024

As mentioned, for e-commerce businesses, BFCM is a golden opportunity to boost sales and acquire new customers. It’s that time of the year when people have their wallets readily open.

Over the years, there’s been a lot of innovative trends and campaigns driving sales. Let’s look at some unique strategies that e-commerce brands must incorporate to stand out during BFCM 2024.

1. Personalization will be at the forefront

In 2024, customers expect more personalized shopping experiences. AI-powered personalization tools have become more accessible, allowing e-commerce businesses to tailor product recommendations and promotions based on individual customer behavior. By using data from previous interactions based on customer preferences or shopping history, you can create highly targeted email campaigns, show personalized offers on their website, and offer custom discount codes.

2. Omnichannel shopping experience

With shoppers engaging across multiple platforms (websites, apps, social media, and even physical stores), providing a seamless omnichannel experience is paramount. You need to leverage tools that unify customer data across channels and allow you to offer consistent and personalized experiences, regardless of how customers engage. For instance, promotions or items added to a cart on social media should sync with the e-commerce website or app for a smoother shopping journey.

3. Video commerce and live-streaming shopping

Video commerce has been on the rise, with platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube enabling brands to showcase their products through short-form videos or live shopping events. Integrating shoppable video content or hosting livestream events with exclusive BFCM deals and real-time discounts can help create a sense of urgency.

4. Social commerce

Social commerce has continued to grow in 2024, with platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook offering native shopping features. Brands should focus on creating direct shopping experiences within social platforms, making it easier for customers to purchase products without leaving the app. Using BFCM-specific hashtags, promoting exclusive deals, and leveraging user-generated content are some strategies that can enhance your reach and boost conversions.

Over 73% of people actively shop on social media for Black Friday in 2024.

5. Influencer and affiliate partnerships

In 2024, influencer and affiliate marketing remain powerful channels for BFCM promotions. Partnering with influencers who align with your brand allows you to tap into their engaged audiences, while affiliate programs can amplify your reach. Both approaches can help you reach new customers who might not have discovered your brand through traditional advertising.

Most businesses who give their all to implement the aforementioned strategies miss out on putting the same effort to optimize their post-purchase. One of the primary reasons behind this disparity is that businesses often assume that a BFCM sale ends with the customer’s purchase. While that’s partly true, your after-sale efforts such as offering a seamless post-purchase experience can improve repeat purchases and turn one-time BFCM shoppers into regular customers.

Here are some strategies to optimize your post-purchase right on time for this year’s BFCM.

Post-Purchase Strategies for BFCM 2024 Success

1.Handle WISMO (Where Is My Order) inquiries in advance

The surge in orders during BFCM inevitably leads to an increase in customer inquiries around order status. Implementing proactive communication with customers about their order status can drastically reduce these WISMO inquiries and improve customer satisfaction. For starters, you can automate shipping updates through email or SMS by using real-time tracking tools to keep customers informed of their orders at all times.

2. Automate post-purchase customer service for delivery issues

Delivery issues are frequent during times like BFCM due to high shipping volumes. In order to minimize their effect, you need to stay on top of them instead of relying on the carrier to take action. You can make use of automation to enable proactive customer service — such as notifying customers of potential delays. This can help prevent your support reps from getting overwhelmed while reducing frustrations by providing your customers with immediate assistance.

3. Ensure a seamless returns process

With higher order volumes comes the likelihood of more returns. Offering a clear, easy-to-navigate returns process can encourage hesitant customers to buy with confidence, knowing they can return or exchange items if necessary. Also, customers might already feel frustrated having to return their holiday purchases. So, make returns as easy as possible to mitigate their dissonance. Here’s how you can do it — provide a self-service returns portal that automates the entire process to streamline the experience.

4. Create loyalty programs and VIP access

Customer loyalty has become a top priority in 2024, and leveraging exclusive VIP programs or early access for your most loyal customers can significantly boost sales during BFCM. Offering special deals to existing customers before BFCM begins, along with reward points or exclusive perks, helps strengthen customer relationships and encourages repeat purchases. Additionally, VIP access can create a sense of exclusivity, driving early sales.

Think you’ve got it all figured out? We’ve got more. Here are some last-minute tips and tricks that can help you with your whole BFCM strategy.

Last-Minute Tips to Maximize BFCM 2024 Sales

Leverage Social Proof: Showcase customer reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content across your website and social platforms to build trust with new shoppers.
Ramp Up Customer Support: Prepare your customer support team for increased inquiries by adding extra hands or using automated tools to handle common questions. Ensure live chat options are readily available for quick assistance.
Abandoned Cart Recovery: Set up email reminders or retargeting ads for customers who leave items in their carts. Use incentives like free shipping or additional discounts to encourage them to complete their purchase.
Use Countdown Timers: Add urgency to your offers with countdown timers for flash sales, limited-time deals, or when stock is running low. This drives conversions and reduces cart abandonment.

BFCM can be one of the most profitable weekends you can have if you have the proper strategies in place. If the customer is impressed with your BFCM, if the customer is comfortable with the BFCM experience, they might revisit your website to buy something else for the holidays.

In the moments leading up to BFCM 2024, take a deep breath and trust in your thorough preparation. The potential for growth and success is significant, and your dedication to serving your customers and delivering value will be the foundation of your achievements.

Here’s to a successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday, filled with joy, growth, and memorable customer experiences.

Happy Holidays!

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E-Commerce Post-Purchase CX Playbook For The Up-And-Coming Holiday Season

Sashank Ravindranath — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 15:05:20 +0000

The Post-purchase CX Mandate

Knowing what’s coming and staying ahead of delivery and return-related issues is key to perfecting post-purchase.

However, e-commerce post-purchase issues are nothing out of the ordinary, especially during times like the Holiday Season. The impact they bring is catastrophic — wrecking customer experience, straining customer support teams, and ultimately threatening profit margins.

Regardless of who the shipping partner is, a leading carrier or a 3PL, some hard truths that you deal with are.

E-commerce post-purchase is a missed opportunity in the current state

The ‘post-purchase customer experience (CX)’ is an integral but often overlooked function in any e-commerce business. When done right, it has the potential to ensure your customers have a hassle-free ‘order delivery’ and ‘return’ experience. In the long run, this can help you boost customer loyalty, efficiency, as well as profits.

That said, let’s see why post-purchase is a huge missed opportunity for most businesses out there.

Up to 20% of shipments face issues such as late delivery, attempted-failed delivery, lost or damaged in transit
30% of customer support team’s time and effort is wasted handling repetitive delivery and return related inquiries
12% of revenue is lost because businesses don’t encourage repeat purchases during order and return tracking moments
35% of all products purchased online are returned

The link between Post-Purchase CX and Customer Loyalty

As mentioned earlier, post-purchase CX has everything to do with what happens after the customer makes a purchase.

To make things more familiar, shipping updates, order tracking, or in some cases returns and exchanges. Either way, this is the last thing your customers are going to remember about their experience with your brand. Therefore, you have to ensure that it stays memorable.

Remember, a positive post-purchase experience can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, while a negative post-purchase experience can lead to customer churn.

78% of shoppers won’t buy from the brand again after just ONE bad delivery or return experience.

Now, one might ask: On whom does the onus of perfecting the post-purchase CX really fall?

The answer is: on everyone — from marketing to sales, to operations and customer service. By bringing all business functions together and working towards excelling in both, your post-purchase customer experience and operations at every stage of the process is vital.

To help you provide a great post-purchase experience and reap its benefits, we have developed a playbook covering everything you need to know about creating an e-commerce post-purchase strategy that will improve the customer experience and boost customer retention this Holiday Season and beyond.

6 Post-purchase Plays to Dominate Customer Experience During the Holiday Season

1. Enabling real-time tracking and delivery alerts

With unprecedented visibility into the status of their order in transit, you can stay in the know of all your packages at any given moment. This also gives you the ability to gain real-time alerts and be able to identify potential issues, such as delays much ahead of the customer.

You can leverage this data to proactively address problems, such as offering solutions or even just informing customers.

Such actions can ensure that customers’ frustration levels are significantly reduced and as a result, there is a positive brand perception.

2. Engaging in regular and personalized order status notifications

Even when things are going perfectly, you can keep your customers engaged with order updates and personalized conversations by making use of the customer and order information in your hand.

Send email and SMS shipping notifications at every stage of the post-purchase package journey, i.e., delivery and return status events such as in-transit, delivered, and returned, etc, to keep customers informed at all times. This makes them less prone to getting anxious regarding their parcels, reduces the volume of WISMO inquiries, and allows support teams to focus on more complex customer issues.

Such personalized conversations also let the customers know that you are committed to delivering them a positive post-purchase experience which leads to increased customer satisfaction.

3. Leveraging memorable tracking experiences

An extension of real-time tracking and proactive order communication is making use of a “branded” tracking page that is hosted on your website, from where your customers can track their orders whenever they want to.

Apart from tracking details, your tracking page can also include additional content such as an on-brand website design (color, font, etc), a complete order summary to let customers if they’ve entered the correct details, delivery satisfaction ratings to collect customer feedback, easy returns initiation and reaching out to customer support to provide hassle-free experiences, and so on.

The best part, you can add elements such as sale announcements and personalized product recommendations to ensure an increase in cross-selling. All of this helps in reinforcing your brand identity, leaving a lasting experience, improving your brand reputation, and ultimately driving more sales.

4. Enhancing packaging and unboxing experience

Receiving their orders might be the moment your customers have been expecting since they hit that ‘buy’ button. Make that moment etched into their memories with the right packaging and unboxing techniques.

Packaging plays a much bigger role than just covering your product. Firstly, a great-looking package creates a positive first impression, setting the stage for a great post-purchase experience. Following these are the branded elements that reinforce identity, good quality that ensures lower chances of damage and frustration, and sustainable materials used to improve brand image.

Following packaging, there comes the relatively new trend of unwrapping/ unboxing experience being capitalized by e-commerce brands. Ensure customers share their unboxing videos on social media as user-generated content to create larger brand awareness and attract new customers.

5. Handling returns and exchanges effectively

Your efforts to provide a positive post-purchase experience do not end with the delivery being made, as there are always chances of your customers returning their purchase.

But remember, customers don’t always look forward to returning their purchases — so, don’t make the experience frustrating for them. Keep things as seamless as you can via easy and quick returns, multiple return options (exchanges and store credits), clear returns policy, transparent return status communications, etc.

When handled effectively, returns can be an opportunity to demonstrate customer-centricity, resolve issues efficiently, build trust and loyalty, and enhance customer satisfaction and brand reputation.

6. Encouraging reviews and ratings

A great post-purchase experience is one that is constantly evolving. So, give room for it to grow and fasten the process by encouraging your customers to provide feedback on the post-purchase experience that they received.

You can start by making it easier for customers to leave their feedback — probably in the order delivered/ returned email or on the order tracking page, once the progress is completed. In case there’s a review and a place where you don’t want them leaving one, try to reach out to them at the earliest and offer a solution that they expect in order to change the emotion of the feedback from negative to positive. You can also take a step ahead and reward customers via incentives for their feedback to ensure that they leave more and spread good word-of-mouth.

By resolving their negative comments or displaying their positive review on your website or social media, you are conveying that their feedback matters and as a result builds strong customer relationships. Either way, reviews and ratings from customers provide an opportunity to make regular improvements and reach a wider audience.

How LateShipment.com Can Help Power your Post-purchase Success

LateShipment.com is the ultimate all-in-one post-purchase success platform for e-commerce retailers, D2C brands, and businesses shipping small parcels, regardless of their size or shipping volume.

Our Post-Purchase Success platform includes:

Delivery Experience Management (DEM): To build memorable order delivery experiences and boost recurring revenue during order tracking moments.
Returns Experience Management (REM): To make returns hassle-free with flexible return options and smart automations to help retain revenue.
Parcel Audit and Shipping Refunds: To save big on shipping costs through automated shipping refunds and drive supply-chain optimization with in-depth shipping analytics and insights.

Also, LateShipment.com seamlessly integrates with 600+ Shipping Carriers and Business Tools that include E-commerce platforms, Order Management Systems, Helpdesks, and Marketing Automation tools to help you drive post-purchase experiences and shipping cost savings at scale.

The post E-Commerce Post-Purchase CX Playbook For The Up-And-Coming Holiday Season appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

How To Handle The Holiday Rush With Post-Purchase Order Tracking

Sashank Ravindranath — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 07:50:15 +0000

The holiday shopping season means an entirely different thing for shoppers and merchants. For the latter, it’s not just about festivities, gift-giving, and visiting places but the busiest time of year, when they have to work amidst the incoming rush if they’re looking to stay ahead of the competition and maximize sales.

In the case of physical stores, the customer collecting their purchase and leaving the store marks the end of a sales cycle. However, with order delivery and the other aspects that follow, the order getting accepted is only half the battle done for e-commerce merchants. Moreover, with a surge in orders and customer inquiries, thanks to the holiday rush, managing order deliveries during the holiday season gets tougher than usual.

If you’re an e-commerce merchant who is looking to navigate the holiday rush with ease and efficiency, this article is for you.

But first, let’s get to the basics to understand the magnitude of what we’re dealing with.

Understanding the Holiday Rush

The holiday rush as a concept is pretty simple.

Witnessing a spike in consumer spending towards the end of the year, particularly on days like Thanksgiving and Christmas, stores decided to create special offers to spur existing customers to spend even more and to bring in more customers. This soon created a norm where customers rushed to stores to get things at the lowest rates before they went out of stock — leading to the coining of the term.

With time and technological advancements, the shopping trend continued with e-commerce, bringing in a huge revenue opportunity in the form of consumer spending. However, there exists one small problem. Shoppers expect the same level of experience from physical stores to e-commerce. What they don’t realize is the fact that e-commerce businesses and shipping carriers strain their capacity and resources during the peak season to deliver orders properly and on time.

E-commerce brands too, with the goal of staying profitable during the holiday season, strive to provide shoppers with a great experience. Their only catch? Prone to face multiple hurdles that make their efforts to provide quality post-purchase experiences difficult.

Frequent post-purchase challenges e-commerce businesses face during the holiday rush

Increased shipping delays: Increased order volume during the holiday season amplifies the odds of shipping delays, which in turn have the capability to frustrate customers and damage the business’s reputation.
Increased customer support inquiries: The holiday season is also a time when customers are more likely to have questions or problems with their orders. This can lead to an increase in customer support inquiries and consume all of the customer support team’s time.
Increased returns and refunds: When things go wrong with their orders, customers don’t hesitate to expect returns and refund requests. Issues like this further put pressure on the already strained capacity of shipping carriers and cost you efforts and money.

While these challenges are concerning enough on their own, they can also have adverse effects on your business in the form of operational inefficiency and potentially harm long-term customer relationships and brand reputation.

Prevention is better than cure. An old saying but holds true to this context. All these issues can be easily prevented by making use of an order-tracking software from placement to delivery.

How An Order Tracking Software Can Help You Tackle Post-Purchase Challenges With Respect To The Holiday Rush

A post-purchase order tracking software can help e-commerce businesses during the holiday rush in a number of ways, which we’ll take a look at each of them in the form of problem statements.

1. "I’m an e-commerce merchant. Like every other business owner out there, I always look forward to the holiday season to make the most out of it and improve profits. But for the past few years, my profit margins have been really looking low — thanks to delays and other shipping issues, which are causing my customers to drop off".

This is a really frustrating situation for e-commerce merchants.

Imagine having to face the consequences of something that happens due to no fault of your own.

With shipping carriers straining capacity as a result of the holiday rush, coordinating shipping logistics can be complex and error-prone. Hence, delivery incidents like late deliveries can become frequent and result in dissatisfied customers.

What makes the situation even worse is that disgruntled customers are quick to blame you for delays and other delivery errors, leading to increased costs such as customer acquisition and service recovery.

On average, 1 in 5 parcels shipped face delivery issues resulting in high customer frustration and negative shopping experiences.

Now imagine the whole scenario with an order tracking system in place.

Thanks to real-time tracking, you now have the ability to receive alerts for critical delivery failures and proactively notify customers when there’s an issue with their order. This way, you can practically ensure that your customers’ frustration levels are mitigated and thereby achieve CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores of 80+ even when delivery issues occur.

2. "As a customer support representative, I’ve always felt most of my time is being spent on answering customer queries, mainly related to their order status (WISMO). This is taking away from my ability to handle other customer inquiries and tasks and at the end of the day, customers too want a quicker resolution and often get frustrated when things get late. If only there was a way for me to improve the way that I handle WISMO inquiries…"

Customers get increasingly anxious in the post-purchase phase when they are left in the dark regarding their orders, making them prone to bombard your support reps with WISMO requests.

So much so that WISMO requests that they make approx. 50% of customer inquiries and overloaded customer support teams. This number is only going to shoot up during the holiday rush when order volumes are high and orders hold high emotional value for customers.

To prevent this from happening, you need to empower your support reps to properly address customer issues and display your strong commitment to the high standards of customer service you offer. Here’s how you can do just that:

As an extension of tracking your orders in real time — provide proactive delivery status updates to keep your customers in the loop about the whereabouts of their orders and free up your support time to focus on more pressing issues. This can help you reduce WISMO requests by up to 70% and also revive customers’ trust in your brand.

You can also take it one step further and let customers check the status of their deliveries at any time they need to by embedding a 24×7 order lookup widget on your website and chat tool to make tracking self-service.

TLDR;

Enhanced Customer Experience – By determining the status and location of their orders in real-time, you can now be transparent with your customers regarding delivery issues thereby enhancing the overall customer experience. Even if there are no issues, you can still share proactive order updates and reduce customer inquiries.
Reduced Customer Support Workload – When they’re informed throughout the order delivery process, customers are less likely to contact customer support for order status inquiries. This frees up customer support teams to focus on resolving more complex issues and providing exceptional service.

How Lateshipment.Com’s DEM Platform Can Help You With Post-Purchase Order Tracking Needs

1. Identify shipments facing issues at a glance

LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) makes it ridiculously easy for you to keep a watch on your packages in transit and identify issues around package deliveries. With the help of real-time parcel data:

Know what’s happening with your parcels
Take preemptive action before customer impact where needed

2. Resolve critical shipping incidents before they happen

Delivery issues are inevitable but that doesn’t mean you just watch as they happen. Instead, you can step in before customer impact by proactively addressing them.

Automatically have tickets triggered to your helpdesk system and
Send timely and customized notifications

For critical delivery events and thereby instill confidence in your customers.

3. Reduce delivery inquiries by 70% with real-time updates

Keep customers in the loop of their orders via:

Automated email and SMS notifications
Self-serve order tracking widget anywhere on your website

And Replace angry WISMO calls with seamless order tracking experiences

BONUS:

4. Boost revenue from repeat purchases by up to 12%

DEM also helps you provide ‘branded’ tracking experiences via tracking pages and emails. Not just to provide complete order tracking information, you can also use your tracking assets as a real-estate for marketing campaigns to double your chances at driving repeat sales

Final Word

That’s all from us for now. Preparing for the holiday rush is critical. By investing in an order tracking software, you can streamline your operations, enhance customer satisfaction, and set yourself up for success during this busy season.

With real-time order monitoring and proactive customer communication, you can navigate the holiday rush with ease, turn customer frustration into delight, and make the holiday season an enjoyable time of the year for your business.

The post How To Handle The Holiday Rush With Post-Purchase Order Tracking appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Guide for E-commerce Businesses to Thrive This Peak Season

Sashank Ravindranath — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 09:47:53 +0000

No more talking about this year’s holiday season in the future sense. It’s already up and running. Your fellow e-commerce businesses, shipping carriers, third-party logistic partners, etc have all geared up to handle the peak season’s shipping volume without succumbing to delivery issues and negative customer experiences.

But just because the times are busy doesn’t mean we run helter-skelter till the peak returns season in January. You can still work on your strategies to make improvements for last-minute shoppers.

We have compiled as much as peak season trends and metrics to help you make data-backed decisions to optimize your post-purchase during the critical Holiday season and beyond.

Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll be seeing in this article.

Peak season trends by the numbers
Forecast of peak season carrier performance rates
Frequent issues that e-commerce businesses might face during the peak season
Strategies to ensure post-purchase success

Without further ado, let’s get into things.

Peak Season Trends by the Numbers

We’ll start with the most important trend that is pretty much going to be a first for the peak delivery season in a while. Experts are predicting a lower shipping volume compared to the last two years, thanks to the pandemic-induced e-commerce boom slowing down and customers navigating high inflation.

Despite inflation and other concerns, e-commerce is projected to grow, at a slower rate of 6-8% YoY compared to 18% in the year before.

Also, it is expected that peak sales will happen only later in the holiday season this year with shoppers hoping to take advantage of discounts. Major brands too have anticipated such trends and are pushing early sales with lucrative deals. Amazon launched a second Prime Day, and stores like Target and Walmart followed suit with early fall holiday deals.

Also, major retailers are expected to take extraordinary measures to tackle stockpiling by maximizing discounts in the month of December which will result in Holiday sales peaking a little bit later.

Happy sales numbers aside, there seems to be some doom and gloom, i.e new challenges for e-commerce shippers in the form of the supply chain, inventory, and fulfillment issues.

Despite the possibility of a lower shipping volume, record high shipping costs, shipping network congestion, and labor shortage will affect the 2022 Holiday Season. This can in turn hurt the operational efficiency of shipping carriers.

But shipping carriers would’ve taken proactive measures to stay ahead of these challenges or have they?

Forecast of Peak Season Carrier Performance Rates

Major carriers like UPS and FedEx are aware of the incoming peak season shipping volume and have taken appropriate measures to counter them.

All major carriers in the US, like FedEx, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) are equipped to handle about 110 million packages per day, and that could outpace peak season handling capacity by about 18 million packages per day. However, despite all of this, the on-time delivery performance is projected to significantly stay impacted.

In the 5th edition of our annual “2022 State of Holiday Shipping in the U.S.” report, we have forecasted that UPS is expected to outperform FedEx across all shipping types, going by on-time performance indicators from the past 12-24 months.

Also, when it comes to shipping services, packages shipped through both Ground and Express services offered by UPS and FedEx will remain affected.

That’s not all! The report focuses on understanding the impact of the surge in order volumes and supply chain disruptions on the on-time delivery performance of UPS & FedEx in the United States during the peak season, with actionable strategies to optimize post-purchase operations.

Undoubtedly, shipping carriers like UPS and FedEx will be stretched to the limits in order to meet on-time delivery promises this Holiday season, this will result in an unprecedented spike in delivery disruptions. Additionally, peak season surcharges will escalate shipping costs to fulfill Holiday orders.

Not just delays, there are further issues that can take a toll on the post-purchase experiences you provide. Let’s take a look at what they are and how they can affect your business.

Frequent Issues That E-commerce Businesses Might Face During the Peak Season

1. Shipping deadlines can be stressful if you’re not aware of them

UPS and FedEx have been following this necessary practice of setting deadlines for shipping because parcel volumes during the peak season are typically significantly higher.

If you are planning to send out a parcel at the 11th hour via expedited service to satisfy last-minute shoppers, you have no choice but to be aware of the deadlines in their carriers’ holiday schedules, or else, you may end up as a victim of peak surcharges and deplete your shipping budget.

Also, you can communicate holiday shipping deadlines with your customers to ensure that your customers are not set up for frustration over their holiday gifts getting delayed but instead will have a seamless order delivery experience.

Click here to access the special holiday-specific calendars drawn up by UPS and FedEx:

2. Tracking parcels with the shipping carrier can cause anxiety

An increase in the shipping volume can only mean the odds of your shipment going haywire getting higher. Apart from delays, your parcels can get lost, damaged, etc. Even when everything seems to go well, an anxious customer who is unaware of the parcel status can bombard your support reps with WISMO inquiries.

In either of the cases, the customers are quick to blame you, the retailer, instead of the shipping carrier, who is in charge of fulfilling their parcels.

This is because customers often consider that the onus is on retailers to make sure that their parcels are delivered according to their expectations and when they face a slight inconvenience, they feel aggrieved and helpless.

To mitigate your customers’ parcel anxiety and ensure they enjoy a delightful delivery and returns experience, you can make use of a post-purchase solution that tracks your parcels in real time and keeps your customers informed about the status of their parcels at all times.

3. Shipping carriers have levied surcharges and suspended money-back guarantees

With carriers putting higher efforts to improve one-time shipping performances, investments will be the need of the hour. To meet ends and see profits just like any other industry, shipping carriers like UPS and FedEx make levy additional surcharges on select parcels to select locations.

As a retailer, such costs can be a burden, especially if your shipping volume is high and your customer base is throughout the country. In such cases, if you are looking for temporary relief in the form of shipping refunds for service failures, then here’s another shocker. Shipping carriers suspend their money-back guarantee on certain dates in their holiday schedule.

UPS on the other hand, are continuing their suspension of Service Guarantee since the pandemic, except a few selected services. Click here to know what they are.

While this makes shipping more expensive and works to your disadvantage, you can take steps to make sure that you are relatively less affected by them.

The solution is really simple — take control of your post-purchase phase and reduce parcel issues from impacting your customers. This makes sure that you don’t have to compensate the customer who might stop doing business with you citing the bad experience. Also, a quality post-purchase experience from your end can increase repeat purchases. That’s two birds with one stone!

In the run-up to the holidays, the supply chain will take center stage and the winners are going to be those retailers who will take measures to mitigate the impact of delivery delays on customer experience and loyalty.

Strategies to Ensure Post-purchase CX Success This Peak Season and Beyond

Taking measures to close the post-purchase CX gap and provide customers with a frictionless delivery experience can cement you as their preferred brand to shop from. Adopting the following ways to improve your post-purchase CX will ensure a positive impact on both your customers’ lifetime value and the retention rate of your business.

This is where we come in.

LateShipment.com is the world’s only cloud-based Post-purchase Success platform built to enable retail parcel shippers of all sizes to provide memorable order delivery and returns experiences — besides reducing shipping costs by up to 20%.

Here’s how LateShipment.com can help ensure post-purchase CX success:

Proactively identify and resolve delivery related issues
Reduce customer anxiety with automated shipping notifications
Offer custom-built branded tracking experiences on your online store
Make order tracking self-service to reduce delivery related support tickets
Leverage order tracking moments to increase sales and reduce returns
Get customer feedback around order delivery experiences
Optimize your returns process to make it hassle-free while maintaining profitability

BONUS: Bring better performance accountability to shipping carrier services by recovering millions of dollars in refund claims.

That’s not all!

LateShipment.com seamlessly integrates with over 600 shipping carriers and business tools that include E-commerce platforms, Order Management Systems, CRM and Marketing Automation tools to help you craft delightful post-purchase experiences, at scale. Visit www.lateshipment.com to find out more.

The post Guide for E-commerce Businesses to Thrive This Peak Season appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Angry Customer Rants on Twitter for Common Post-purchase Issues

Sashank Ravindranath — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 07:49:28 +0000

Delivery issues are inevitable and particularly more frequent during the holiday season. But we can’t blame the shipping carriers for it. This is because the huge incoming volume of shipments really puts a strain on their capacity to deliver orders properly.

However, that doesn’t mean we let them get away with delivery issues because an angry customer doesn’t delve deep into the reasons behind the issue. They just want their orders intact and on time.

Being an e-commerce merchant, you may be accustomed to delays but for customers, they are always difficult to process, which may result in a burst of emotions. But we also can’t blame them for it.

As your customers’ shopping experience is completely virtual, they have gotten accustomed to getting relief only when a physical parcel shows up on their doorstep. Until then, they are constantly anxious. Even a minor inconvenience in their delivery waiting period will lead to your business paying a heavy price in terms of angry customer rants and poor online reviews.

Here’s the thing about these rants:

In most cases, they are directed towards you, the retailer, rather than the shipping carrier as customers hold the business they purchased from accountable rather than the carrier.
They have the power to demotivate potential customers who might be looking forward to shopping with the business by damaging the brand’s online reputation.

So, if you’re wondering what it is that you can do when facing such situations, this post is for you.

The reason for this post’s existence is: to let you know of the consequences of angry customer rants on social media, particularly the fan-favorite Twitter, and resolve them, to avoid them from becoming a headache.

Common Issues That an Angry Customer Takes to Social Media

While there are a long list errors that a package can face while making its way from the e-commerce store, there are just 5 major issues that an angry customer often takes to social media.

Where Is My Order? (WISMO)
My Order is Late
My Package is Lost
I have received a damaged package
I’m Not Satisfied with the Given Response

Let’s take a closer look at how angry customers expressed their ire over these issues on Twitter and what your business can do to prevent or handle such situations.

1. Where Is My Order? (WISMO)

Customers expect to be kept in the know of the whereabouts of their parcels as they eagerly await their delivery. When they are unable to see regular shipping event updates on the shipping carrier’s tracking page, they feel aggrieved and helpless. This in turn leads to repeated WISMO inquiries that consume all of your support reps’ time.

Now, imagine a scenario where there is a lack of response from support teams to such queries. In such cases, these anxious customers don’t hesitate to quickly take the issue to Twitter, where they simply call out the brand and get the attention of others, just like this.

@marksandspencer hi marks where is my order, as you have stolen my money and where is it???
— simon james (@simonja45479401) November 12, 2022

What You Can Do

To the modern consumer, it feels unnatural NOT to receive real-time updates on the status of their packages which in turn forces them to bombard your support teams with WISMO calls to alleviate their anxiety.

You can handle such situations by being proactive in engaging your customers with timely order updates even before they request one. You can also take this a notch further and make order tracking self-service so that your customers get their hands on all the details they are looking for and thus, don’t expect your support reps’ help.

2. My Order is Late

Let’s say your customers easily track their parcels and are aware of the status at all times. While their anxiety is eased a bit, it is still not yet fully resolved — thanks to the inevitable occurrence of order delays during times like the holiday season.

Delays are bad, sure. But what makes it worse is the situation when your angry customer informs you about them instead of the other way around.

Unattended delays lead to bad delivery experiences. And 78% of customers won’t shop with a brand after just one instance of a bad delivery experience.

What the hell is up with @amazon delivery? Package was supposed to be here today with the next day delivery. Now it says running late and it will be 15-17th for delivery. It’s not even the holiday season yet
— ℂ𝕒𝕣𝕝𝕒 𝔸 (@techsavvy68) November 15, 2022

What You Can Do

Gain complete visibility into your shipments in transit and send out a quick replacement via an expedited shipping option if you notice one of your customers’ parcels getting delayed. Additionally, you could provide affected customers with a coupon code offering a discount for their next purchase.

Not all delays are due to shipping carrier errors, there can be uncommon cases such as

The package facing a standstill because of bad weather, customs delays, roadblocks, etc
The package getting delivered late simply because there was no one at the location to collect it

In such cases, keep your customers informed if their parcels might be delayed. This way, your customers will be impressed with your commitment to provide them with a great delivery experience, and thus will give you another chance despite facing a delay.

3. My Package is Lost

Lost packages are worse than late deliveries and for obvious reasons, make your customers more infuriated. This is because, unlike delayed packages, the odds of lost packages finding their way back to the customer are very slim and statistically unlikely.

Sure, the customer gets refunded in such cases. But think about the frustrations they faced. It’s going to leave a scar on their delivery experience and makes things next to impossible to retain them.

Pet circle love to not deliver your stuff then when you email them they’re like “we are so sowwy what is your kitties name? we lost ur package again ~does ur kitty love a snuggle?” And I’m like “I will never shop here again! Yes pixie loves snuggles”
— kelsie (@randyshart) November 15, 2022

What You Can Do

A lost package can come in as a shock for a customer. Thus, the process to handle it must be done step by step.

Like all post-purchase issues, initiate the communication instead of expecting them to find out eventually or waiting for them to come up with a WISMO inquiry
Start by sending a “suspected lost package” notification as soon as you find a package going haywire while live tracking all your shipments
Have a support rep stay in touch with and periodically update the angry customer to placate them. Additionally, make sure to send a free replacement for the lost product by expedited shipping.

This way, you can demonstrate your commitment to the customer and possibly impress them enough to retain them moving forward.

4. I have received a damaged package

Just like getting lost, packages are delivered to customers in a damaged state more often than you might expect. The numbers are particularly high during the holiday season as parcel handlers are confronted with huge volumes and must work fast to clear them.

When an expensive order is found to be damaged, it causes a dent in your profit margin. But far greater is the resulting negative impact it has on the customer’s perception of your brand.

Remember that the now angry customer is likely to voice their ire on social media and deter others from shopping with you.

Hey @amazon that package I ordered arrived almost a month late and was completely destroyed. It is soaked through. I left a note asking the delivery driver to leave it inside the screen door. This was ignored. I would have fit fine as per photo 4. You really messed up here. pic.twitter.com/1FVF86lqAK
— Joe (@WorthASandwich) November 13, 2022

What You Can Do

As a first step, make sure to package right. Your parcel will likely undergo significant stress during handling and your packaging should be sufficient to protect the parcel.

As the next step, provide labels for return shipping within your parcel so that your customer can return-ship it back to you if required. Make sure to absorb the cost of this return shipping. Provide a replacement or a refund to the customer at the earliest.

5. I’m Not Satisfied with the Given Response

As we mentioned, delivery issues are common and inevitable. However, lackluster customer support from your end while handling these issues can be more damaging to your reputation than the issue itself.

61% of the customers will stop doing business with you after one bad customer service experience.

Even the other four issues can be contained with proper customer support but the lack of an effective support team can cause even frequent customers to shun your brand.

Hi Simon, thanks for your tweet. Would you be able to confirm your order number, email address, and postcode in a PM? Once we have that information, we'd be happy to look into this for you. Take care, Tonayah. https://t.co/FqaAto1Kxs
— M&S (@marksandspencer) November 12, 2022

Keep in mind that a “Thanks for your tweet” might not be the response to an angry customer ranting about a delivery issue with their package. Such a response can really infuriate the customer further, who would immediately get the notion of shopping with an insensitive brand. This would further lead to angry customers continuing their rants and tarnishing your brand’s reputation online.

What You Can Do

Make sure your customer support team is thoroughly trained to handle a variety of post-purchase customer queries ranging from late deliveries to damaged parcels and is always available to deal with issues when required.

Negligence or not fulfilling a customer’s expectations will be seen as bad customer service.

Empower your support reps to easily spot shipments that may require attention and work proactively to address delivery issues before being asked to by customers.

Additionally, if a customer has taken their issue to social media, take an empathetic approach and provide redressal at the earliest.

You can take it up a notch and try to make the customer post a satisfied feedback in their social media profiles. This can help in creating a positive opinion of your brand among prospective customers. You might even get a testimonial this way.

How LateShipment.com’s DEM Platform Can Help You

Angry customer rants due to issues like these can heavily damage your online reputation and lead your potential customers into believing that the post-purchase experience you offer is indeed flawed and deters them from shopping with you.

On the other hand, getting your customer’s delivery experience right is crucial to building a loyal customer base. This is because repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. And if you’re planning on simply replacing one lost customer with another, keep in mind that acquiring new customers is 5 times more expensive than retaining existing customers.

This is all the more reason to not overlook the post-purchase experience you offer and the need to take control of it to drive success.

These tweets are just the tip of the iceberg. You might face a gazillion more issues during the holiday season.

If you’re looking for a way to easily resolve all these issues, here it is.

The best way to handle post-purchase issues like these tweets is to put maximum effort to make sure that such a situation never arises.

A post-purchase automation platform like LateShipment.com can help you do just that by enabling you to provide superior CX throughout delivery & returns and make sure you drive customer delight. Also, LateShipment.com can help you effortlessly recover refunds for more than 50 shipping errors by carriers.

Thus, without further ado, get set up for post-purchase success this holiday season and beyond.

The post Angry Customer Rants on Twitter for Common Post-purchase Issues appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

BFCM 2022: 22 E-commerce Insights to Maximize Sales

Sashank Ravindranath — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 14:01:38 +0000

The holiday season encompasses the next three months in the form of Halloween by the end of next month to Christmas and New Year by the end of the year. But the most important or ‘peak’ holiday season lies between the two (in November this time) in the form of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM).

Since we’ll be talking extensively about these days in this article, we’ll use the acronym BFCM hereafter.

This article is not only for e-commerce experts but also for the e-commerce novice. So bear with us as we go through the details.

What is BFCM and Why is it so Special?

Thanksgiving is no longer a single-day event in the festive season. It is the start of a 5-day event dubbed Cyber Week or Cyber Five. The event consists of Thanksgiving followed by Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Super Sunday, and Cyber Monday. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the Friday and Monday following Thanksgiving.

Not just Cyber week, Thanksgiving also marks the official commencement of the holiday season itself. Talking about BFCM, the trend started when customers, who wanted to get their shopping done ASAP to prevent their favorite products from going out of stock, began shopping for Christmas right at the end of Thanksgiving.

With the growth of e-commerce, changing trends, and customers’ increasing shopping needs, BFCM 2022, just like the last couple of years, has become more than just a couple of days by starting weeks before and extending weeks after.

Therefore, the best opportunity to bring in more customers to your store, positively impact them, and ultimately increase profit margins is now.

Here are some tips and tricks for you to make the best out of BFCM 2022.

BFCM 2022: Insights for E-commerce Businesses

1. Set definitive BFCM KPIs

With less than 100 days to go for BFCM 2022, this is your time to finalize your drawing board plans and work on definitive KPIs that can set you up for success. Having a fixed set of goals helps you stay on track and provides room for improvements. For starters, you can include KPIs such as increasing conversion rate, net profit, website/ app traffic, reducing bounce rates, etc.

2. Make effective use of email and SMS

Assort your campaigns as pre-BFCM, BFCM, and post-BFCM to meaningfully engage with your customers and bring in more holiday sales. Let your customers know of your BFCM offers, follow up with campaigns tweaked based on segments, and end it with elements that add a sense of urgency for those who have abandoned their carts.

3. Personalize your marketing efforts

In today’s competitive e-commerce space, the key to differentiating yourself and streamlining customer experiences is personalization. Take time to understand your customers’ needs and direct your marketing efforts toward them. Personalizing can be as small as addressing customers with their names in your campaigns to sending them personalized recommendations based on their recent purchases.

4. Send out offers and promotions

Offers are a great way to attract your customers as they are something that no one can refuse. However, they aren’t just for new customers. From time to time, you can also direct your promotional efforts towards existing customers from time to time, as they tend to spend more with you than new ones. Here are some ideas for your offers and promotions:

Free shipping and returns
Exclusive early launch for special customers
Buy 1 Get 1 on products that go well together
Flat 25% on purchases above $150, etc.

5. Share holiday gift ideas

Apart from paid promotions, there are other promotional ideas to bring in sales for your store this BFCM. For example, share gift ideas for customers looking to buy products for their loved ones. To make the best use of your gift ideas, you can create a landing page with specific gift guides for different customer demographics like gift baskets, toy collections, etc.

6. Create visually appealing product pages

Your prospects’ email and SMS inboxes can get crowded during the BFCM with deals from many businesses they follow. In such scenarios, your product pages are your best chance to attract and convert them into a customer. Make your product pages a treat to the eyes — Include colors that go well together, images and videos, a clear Call-to-Action (CTA), enough white space, etc.

7. Include clear product descriptions

Once you’ve caught your customers’ attention, the next step is to ensure they stay long enough to purchase your product. That’s where your content can come in handy. Optimize your product pages with accurate product descriptions, sizing charts, SKUs, etc. This can help them make informed shipping decisions and help you reduce unwanted returns.

8. Add User-Generated Content

Add User-Generated Content (UGCs) to your product pages in the form of product reviews from customers and ‘how to use’ guides. A single customer review can act as a better influencer of your prospects’ purchasing decisions than paragraphs of content from your end. That’s not all! Apart from increasing your brand credibility, UGCs can also considerably reduce your marketing costs.

9. Simplify your checkout process

About 70% of carts get abandoned at the checkout stage. All because of one main reason — It was too complicated. After everything you’ve done, you don’t want your customers to drop the purchasing idea at the very final stage. Ergo, follow these pointers to optimize your checkout process and make it simple:

Make checkout easy for customers by enabling the guest checkout option, displaying product availability, summary, etc.
Improve checkout design with proper usage of CTA (Call-To-Action) buttons.

10. Enable multiple and secure payment options

Integrate with multiple payment gateways such as Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, etc, and enable your customers to pay via their preferred method instead of forcing them to choose from limited options. This works great when it comes to satisfying your customers’ checkout needs. Also, display trust badges and certifications during payment to increase their trust.

11.Optimize your UI/UX

Did you know that nearly 90% of online shoppers will never return to a website after a bad user experience? Therefore, optimize your e-commerce store’s UI/UX (User Interface and Experience) to ensure that your customers easily find what they’re looking for. One of the best ways to do that is to create a responsive template that automatically adapts to the visitor’s device — mobile, PC, laptop, etc.

12. Keep your inventory in check

Holidays like BFCM usually come with a huge inventory problem. Either your products grow high in demand and frustrate your customers by getting “out-of-stock” or fall in demand and cost your business heavily by getting overstocked. To avoid such scenarios, frequently manage your inventories and gain the ability to predict the items that would surge in demand.

13. Have a multi-channel approach to selling

Reach your customers where they spend most of their time. Sell your products on multiple channels such as marketplaces and social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram apart from your e-commerce store. Multi-channel selling helps you maximize sales by opening doors to new markets and greatly improves brand recognition.

14. Add a live chat feature

Support queries and issues can be too much during times like the BFCM. In such cases, look to enable a live chat option all round the clock for distressed customers who want their issues resolved instantly. This is a much better way to improve your customer satisfaction metrics than asking them to send an email to your support team and wait for a response.

15. Include a FAQ section

The lack of appropriate information may look trivial. But it can frustrate your customer and lead to a loss of sales and loyal customers. Include a FAQ section on your e-commerce website that contains all the relevant questions about the product, shipping, payments, etc. FAQs can also help you in the post-purchase phase by reducing customer support queries and unwanted returns.

16. Embrace sustainability practices

Over 80% of customers feel sustainability is important when shopping online. For this BFCM, take the opportunity to introduce eco-friendly measures primarily in your packaging by using biodegradable ingredients. You can also do the same by partnering with carriers who strive to reduce their carbon footprint. Keep in mind that in the current scenario where people look forward to shopping with environmentally conscious businesses, sustainability can be an opportunity to build your brand and drive sales.

17. Get creative with packaging

Much like eco-friendly materials, you can use holiday-themed packaging items such as stickers, gift tags, handwritten notes, etc to make the unboxing experience special. Creative packaging techniques also help you improve brand recognition and display your brand’s commitment to staying relevant for the holiday season.

18. Inform shipping deadlines in advance

Delays are almost inevitable and common during BFCM when shipping volumes are too much for carriers to handle. But you can ensure that they are no longer a problem for your business. Keep your customers updated on holiday shipping deadlines and increasing parcel traffic to warn them about and prevent possible delays.

19. Proactively resolve potential delivery issues

The best way to resolve issues is to deal with them before your customers become aware of such issues. With the help of modern support-friendly technologies, you can empower your support team to proactively resolve issues and take preemptive action before discrepancies impact your customers.

20. Send regular order status notifications

Reduce your customers’ anxiety in the post-purchase phase by sending post-purchase transactional Emails, SMS, and WhatsApp notifications to keep them in the loop of their orders throughout the delivery lifecycle.

21. Push the boundaries of order tracking

Apart from enabling your customers to just track their orders, it is time for you to delight them and double your chances of driving repeat sales. You can do the same by providing on-brand order delivery experiences via shipping notifications and tracking pages by following these steps:

Include brand elements such as fonts, color schemes, design templates, etc (that align with the rest of your website and holiday theme).
Cross-sell your products via personalized promotions and recommendations that go well together as holiday combos and intrigue your customers.

22. Prepare to handle increased returns

With high order volume during BFCM, you can also expect the returns volume to go higher than usual. To effectively handle them without causing them to become a nightmare and a cost-center for your business, you need to make sure your returns strategy is easy to process for the customer while not compromising on revenue. Here’s how you can do it:

Have a holiday-specific return policy.
Make it easy for customers to initiate returns.
Incentivize customers to opt for exchanges and store credits over refunds.
Automate your returns management process to drastically reduce time spent per return request.

Common FAQs around BFCM

1. What is BFCM?

BFCM stands for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two of the most anticipated holiday season days, where retailers look to maximize profits by spurring customers to shop with the help of great deals on their product offerings.

2. When is BFCM 2022?

Cyber Weekend, a.k.a BFCM 2022 is set to take place between the 25th and 28th of November. E-commerce retailers can expect a humongous wave of traffic and if all things go well, witness unprecedented sales compared to the rest of the year.

3. How to prepare for BFCM?

As an e-commerce retailer, the best to get prepared for BFCM is to plan ahead and start executing your plans. With less than a month to go from now, make sure you follow these insights to turn the tide in your favor and make the best out of BFCM 2022.

Bottom Line

Well, that’s it from us. It is now your turn.

Follow these steps to stay a step ahead of your competitors and work your level best to maximize your BFCM sales and enjoy holiday season success.

Here’s a small downloadable checklist to stay on track with all the things on your to-do list for BFCM this year. Feel we’ve missed out on something? Let us know in the comments so that we’ll include it as well.

Happy Holidays!

The post BFCM 2022: 22 E-commerce Insights to Maximize Sales appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

How E-commerce Businesses Can Have a Great Festive Season in 2022

Sashank Ravindranath — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 13:15:27 +0000

For shoppers, the festive season comprises the much-needed break they deserve from their daily lives to spend quality time meeting friends, family, and colleagues; traveling; buying gifts for their loved ones; etc.

However, for e-commerce retail businesses the next 3 months (From Halloween to New Year) are pretty hectic, as they have to come up with new initiatives to sell more products, delight all customers, and most importantly have a season to remember.

To help them save time and effort. We have come up with some ideas that can help them get prepared in advance and increase revenue opportunities this festive season.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at what they are.

But before that, we at LateShipment.com have prepared a downloadable checklist comprising 30+ actionable ways to help you boost holiday sales. Feel free to check it out.

How E-commerce Businesses Can Have a Great Festive Season in 2022

1. Anticipate higher than regular seasonal visitors/potential shoppers

Holiday sales are usually 3x or even 4x than the rest of the year. Also, this year, experts are still hopeful of holiday retail and e-commerce sales increasing over 2021 numbers despite inflation putting a burden on customers’ spending.

Thus, it is clear that e-commerce businesses will have to deal with a higher number of shoppers than usual. However, more shoppers won’t equal more sales if businesses have not anticipated this holiday season trend.

For example,

A website/ application that is not optimized to handle the incoming traffic and crashes often
A lack of inventory at hand that there are frequent ‘out-of-stock’ labels on fast-selling products
Insecure site and payment gateways
A lack of personalized experience

All of it can cause customer dissatisfaction and discourages sales and repeat purchases.

Therefore, businesses must start with an optimized shopping experience to enjoy festive season success before the incoming rush.

2. Get into the festive mood

A great way to display trustworthiness in today’s scenario is staying relevant to the current trends and frequently updating business practices to suit the customers’ trends.

Let’s take a look at the former for now.

Imagine customers with the festive mood flowing through them, looking for holiday gifts for a very important person in their life. But to their shock, the website looks the same old — without a holiday theme, no special season offers, no special product launches, etc. This gives them the feeling that they might be shopping for the holiday season in March and June. And this might be bad for businesses.

To avoid this scenario, businesses must extend the holiday theme across social media promotions, landing pages, and the website (primarily the home page and product pages) to display that they’re just as excited about the festive season as their customers.

3. Provide a lot of seasonal offers and giveaways

Attracting customers’ attention by getting into the festive mood is just half the job done. There’s more to do if businesses are actively looking to increase their conversion rates. All of it involves providing offers and giveaways.

Run limited-time offers such as “Flat 25% on combos”, “Buy 1 Get 1”, etc.
Include giveaway elements such as a countdown timer or a limited-period discount spin-wheel on your landing pages
Share special offers for customers who are sitting on the fence
Use non-product marketing techniques such as “Free shipping and returns”, “Cash-on-Delivery”, “BOPIS, etc.
Begin a customer loyalty program and share personalized recommendations during order tracking moments (products that go well together)

Such offers can help businesses to bring in new customers by catching their attention, preventing cart abandonment, and also encouraging repeat shoppers.

However, businesses must keep in mind that offers must be treated as the last arrow in the quiver. Therefore, they must be strategically placed across campaign funnel stages, so that they’re not overlapped and result in higher acquisition costs.

4. Expand your sales channels to boom festive season sales

One of the great ways for businesses to maximize sales during the festive season is considering making use of multiple channels other than their e-commerce store, such as:

Online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy.
Social commerce: sell your products directly on social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
Brick-and-mortar shops: Ensure your efforts are consistent across online and offline channels.

The idea of selling your products on multiple channels, particularly social media platforms is a great way to improve the CX as customers now enjoy better convenience by shopping from the place where they spend most of their time.

All brands have to do now is not stop with just introducing different channels but integrating them to offer the same level of experience across channels.

5. Update your seasonal merchandising strategy

The festive season is also a great way to introduce new products to your showcase. It might be too late to start with it now. But I’m guessing you, as an e-commerce retailer, would’ve had that figured out.

Interacting with customers can give brands an idea of what their customers expect from them. If a major demographic of them desire specific seasonal products, then brands have no choice but to sell them as holiday specials.

Even if brands aren’t keen on introducing new products to their shelves, they can still make use of their merchandising strategy by categorizing seasonal items into holiday gift bundles and creating upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Quick pro tip: ensure that the product pages have clear and accurate product descriptions, sizing charts, etc. This creates a win-win situation for both customers and merchants as the former is now the recipient of a great customer experience while the latter can reduce cart abandonment.

6. Focus on providing memorable post-purchase experiences

All brands are hell-bent on making their customers hit that ‘buy’ button. But most of them unwillingly leave out what happens later as they feel the post-purchase phase to be the responsibility of a third-party shipping carrier (who does not share the same level of commitment to it as you do).

However, what must be kept in mind is that the post-purchase experience is just as (if not more) important than every other step in the customer journey. It’s the last touchpoint your customer will have with your brand, and if, God forbid, it goes haywire, it could be what your customers remember most about your brand.

For starters, here are some ways e-commerce businesses can focus on providing memorable CX in the post-purchase phase:

Proactively resolve delivery issues before they impact your customer.
Keep customers updated on their order status to mitigate customer anxiety about late deliveries and lost/damaged shipments.
Provide an on-brand and seamless order tracking experiences.
Regularly collect customer feedback and make better shipping decisions to optimize the shipping experience.
Make the returns process easy and frictionless for your customers.
Make the packaging and unboxing experience special via personal and seasonal messaging.

Remember, don’t just stop with making a one-time sale. Also focus on providing memorable post-purchase experiences, as they are key to customer delight and long-lasting relationships.

Final Word

We’ve just scratched the surface here.

For deeper insights, feel free to check out our downloadable holiday sales checklist for the 2022 season.

The checklist provides you 30+ actionable ways to help you boost your holiday sales and ultimately have a successful 2022 holiday season.

The post How E-commerce Businesses Can Have a Great Festive Season in 2022 appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

8 Tips to Handle the E-commerce Holiday Rush

Sashank Ravindranath — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 14:00:23 +0000

Less than 2 months to go for the holiday season to officially kick off — which means as an e-commerce retailer, you have to make use of the little prep time left to get better equipped at handling the holiday rush. Here are some tips categorized via different stages of the customer journey to help you do just that.

Pre-purchase: Awareness and Exploration

1. Plan your promotional strategies in advance

The holiday season is the best time to spread the word about your product and e-commerce business. However, it can be difficult amidst your competitors trying the same thing. This is why you need to be unique with your promotional campaigns.

For starters,

Bring the whole holiday spirit across your website and marketing campaigns to let customers know that you’re relevant.
Keep posting interactive content on your Social channels to catch the viewers’ attention
Add a touch of personalization in your conversations to make sure that your brand is at the top of their minds.
Provide timely offers and discounts across different funnel stages to increase your chances of sales and repeat sales and reduce cart abandonment.
Influencer partnerships and event marketing to spread the word about your product on a larger scale and increase your lead base.

2. Optimize your online store

If your online store’s website or application is ineffective to handle the holiday rush, then all your promotional efforts just go down the drain. Therefore, keep in mind to optimize your website and motivate shoppers to get converted as customers.

Here’s how you can do it right before the holiday season:

Increase website load speed
Optimize the User Interface and Experience (UI, UX)
Enable seamless checkout
Proper and interactive content.

3. Talk great content

One of the things that go well with a great-looking website or application is content — which needs to complement each other to enhance brand content and widen reach.

Your content is your key to the locked doors of holiday shoppers’ hearts. Therefore, take care of it before the holiday rush gets into action.

Here are some suggestions that you can keep in mind:

Fill your content with relevant holiday-aligned keywords to increase your ecommerce site’s traffic.
Include User-Generated Content (UGC) in your content strategy to cement social proof for your e-commerce business.
Add product reviews and customer testimonies to make your brand seem trustworthy.
Keep your content holiday-themed and make it interactive to engage with shoppers who visit your online store.

Purchase: Conversion

4. Enhance your sales game

The holiday season is your chance to make more sales than the rest of the year combined. Therefore, look out for strategies that help you make use of the holiday rush and maximize revenue.

When it comes to your sales strategies, here are some areas that you can cover:

Open doors to new sales channels like marketplaces, to reach customers where they spend most of their time (Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, etc).
Make effective use of social commerce to improve brand recognition and increase incoming order rates.
Identify your industry products that are the “buzz” or “sensation” for this year’s holiday season, ensure you have proper stock of them, and promote them as your bestsellers.
Use the holiday rush as an opportunity to cross-sell products that might go along great with their recent purchases.

5. Automate whatever you can

In the retail e-commerce space, it is always wise to stay relevant and implement technological advancements if you need to keep up with the ever-growing competition. One of such technology trends is to automate specific areas of your existing business operations to make your process efficient.

Here are different business areas where you can introduce automation:

Automate email and SMS notifications for different transactional shipping events such as order shipped, in transit, delivered, etc.
Keep track of your inventories and avoid over-stock and out-of-stock issues with the help of an Inventory Management solution or a Third-party logistics (3PL) partner, who can help automate logistics.
Automate customer support by incorporating chatbots into your mix and make issue resolution self-service.
Make returns management automated by integrating with a system that centralizes returns and enables easy configuration, management, and tracking.

Post-purchase: Loyalty

6. Empower your support reps

The holiday rush makes your customers increasingly anxious regarding their orders. This leads them to bombard your support reps with repeated order status inquiries and consumes all of your team’s time.

Therefore, it is time to empower your support reps to properly address customer issues and display your strong commitment to the high standard of customer service you offer. Here’s how you can do just that:

Enable a live chat option 24/7 to ensure faster issue resolution with low or even zero support interactions.
Empower your support team to proactively resolve issues and take preemptive action before discrepancies impact your customers.

7. Provide delightful shipping and delivery experiences

Your customers hitting the ‘buy’ button is only half of the job done. There’s an entire phase of the customer journey called ‘the post-purchase experience (shipping, delivery, and returns)’ left that plays a great role in your CX efforts.

Focusing on your post-purchase experiences, particularly during the holiday rush is not just an option because 1-in-3 customers will stop shopping with a brand after just ONE instance of a bad post-purchase experience.

Here are some ways for you to optimize your shipping and delivery experiences. We’ll focus specifically on returns later:

Partner with multiple shipping carriers (FedEx, UPS) and provide multiple delivery options (two-day, BOPIS) to manage incoming shipping volumes and reduce the odds of delivery delays.
Employ real-time shipment tracking to enable customers to seamlessly track their orders via order tracking pages and know what’s happening at a glance.
Keep your customers in the loop of their orders throughout the delivery lifecycle and mitigate their anxiety.
Delight your customers by providing on-brand order tracking experiences via shipping notifications and tracking pages.
Regularly collect delivery feedback from your customers to make better shipping decisions and improve customer loyalty.

8. Create a frictionless returns strategy

Up to 30% of eCommerce orders are returned and 96% of the customers will shop with a store again if it offers seamless returns and exchanges. Therefore, make sure your returns strategy is easy to process for the customer, while also not compromising your revenue.

Here’s how you can do it:

Draft a clear-cut returns policy that is neither too strict to repel customers nor too lenient to encourage fraudulent returns.
Make returns easy and seamless for your customers with faster returns initiation and frictionless returns status tracking.
Provide flexible return methods such as exchanges and store credits to convert returns into repeat purchases.

Bottom Line

As we mentioned earlier, the holiday season is a time when the rush is high and you can bring in more sales.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon you to focus on the tips, highlighting different areas of the customer journey to provide memorable experiences (CX) this Holiday season.

Preparing for the upcoming holiday rush is just one part of the Holiday season. There’s more to do if you’re looking to get your hands on a great holiday season sale.

Make use of our e-commerce holiday sales checklist — a collection of strategies, along with relevant factual and unbiased insights that help you maximize holiday sales in 2022, at a time when inflation is having an impact on consumer spending.

Download, read through, and let us know your feedback on how helpful it was for your business. Feel like we’ve missed something? Share that as well, so that we can make improvements.

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The post 8 Tips to Handle the E-commerce Holiday Rush appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

14 Holiday Insights for E-commerce in 2022

Sashank Ravindranath — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 14:25:47 +0000

The holiday season is the time when businesses need fresh insights to draw their plans so that they could make the most sales. But, coming up with holiday plans has been an wildride — thanks to recent global events.

E-commerce, particularly shipping and delivery has taken a toll since the 2020 holiday season. First, there was a widespread infection of COVID-19 prompting a surge in online shopping. In the 2021 season and 2022 so far, we’ve seen supply chain disruptions, followed by the geopolitical conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

However, experts are hopeful that things are changing for the better yet we still need to keep an eye out to have a better understanding of how this season might turn out to stay ahead of potential issues.

Here are some critical e-commerce holiday insights such as time-tested predictions and trends to help you do just that.

1. How Will the 2022 Holiday Season Be Different?

1.1. Inflation will pose a problem

The annual inflation rate in the US accelerated to 9.1% as of June 2022, the worst since November of 1981, leading to resources such as oil and gas getting really expensive. However, as of now, there is a considerable decrease in gas prices, compared to a couple of months ago.

On the other hand, the global annual inflation rate is predicted to be around 6% by Christmas, making the holiday season inflation higher than its counterpart in 2021.

1.2. The impact of supply chain disruptions

Adding to the woes of inflation will be the increased odds of holiday gifts arriving late or getting out of stock for the worse. While not severe compared to last year’s holiday season, the supply chain constraints still very much exist and will pose a threat to e-commerce production and deliveries.

Experts are also adding that the efforts taken to improve the supply chain via strategies such as technological and workforce investments will make holiday items expensive as well.

1.3. We will see an extended holiday shopping season

As the holidays near, customers will be looking to start their shopping earlier, even as early as June for their Christmas gifts, to not fall prey to the increased costs and possible shipping delays.

Businesses too would be eager to capitalize on this opportunity and start extending their deals for BFCM (Black Friday – Cyber Monday) for more than a week. Thus, similar to the last two years, we can expect the holiday season to start sooner and go on for a few more days rather than just being single-day slots.

1.4. E-commerce will evolve and dominate the shopping space

E-commerce sales have been rapidly growing for the last couple of years and this time as well, one can see a 15.5% increase over 2021 and reach $236 billion. However, the worry of inflated costs on holiday gifts will lead to shoppers using marketplaces to buy many gifts at once.

Also, the need for convenience will put shoppers to buy their holiday gifts via mobile devices thus predicting mobile commerce sales to grow 20% over 2021 to $115 billion.

1.5. The competition between brands will be higher than ever

With e-commerce and consumer demand constantly on the rise, retail businesses that have not yet jumped on the online bandwagon will now take the opportunity to get started.

This makes it difficult for existing businesses to turn visitors into customers amidst the fierce competition during the holiday battlefield.

1.6. CX will be the key differentiator for holiday success

New marketing strategies such as discounts and offers are cool but remember — a lot of businesses might be doing the same thing thus, making you easily forgettable.

Therefore, if you really want to improve conversions and maximize sales during the peak season, you will have to provide personalized customer experiences that work as a differentiator for your brand. Also, in an experience economy, that is exactly what customers expect from you as well.

To help you get started, here are some ways to prepare your business for the holiday season by making use of Customer Experience (CX) as a competitive advantage.

2. How You Can Prepare for The 2022 Holiday Season

The customer’s journey with your brand consists of touch points between the two of you. From product discovery to post-purchase communication and returns, all touchpoints should be leveraged if you’re looking forward to offering the best possible experience for your customers.

If you are indeed looking to do just that, you need to keep up with these holiday insights in the form of handy trends in different areas of your business.

2.1. Make the website and checkout experience seamless

Despite lower COVID-19 cases and almost entire restrictions lifted, 57% of shoppers still planned to do their shopping online, with only 43% heading in-store in 2021.

If this number increases based on projections, the chances of your online store getting traffic also increase. However, all this opportunity is lost when your website is not optimized to gain or handle the holiday traffic, especially during peak shopping days like BFCM.

Website optimization can improve conversions by 70%.

So, what is that you should be focusing on to make sure that your website visitors convert into customers?

Outdated websites and social media campaigns can lead your customers to question the authenticity of your e-commerce store. Therefore, keep your website and social media pages holiday-aligned with new products and promotions for them to stay relevant.
Boring websites cause customers to drop off and heavily increase bounce rates. To avoid that scenario, produce content that is both educational and engaging. This can encourage visitors to stay long enough to hit that ‘buy’ button.
Slow and sloppy websites can lead to frequent crashing and result in frustrated visitors. So, frequently check and optimize your website’s loading speed and design leads to keep it user-friendly and reduce cart abandonment.

Following the above steps can ensure that you provide customers with a seamless experience and exceed their expectations when it comes to the checkout process.

2.2. Personalize the experience

Marketing campaigns aren’t just for making your customers shop with you for once. You can also use them wisely to increase your satisfaction metrics such as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or CLTV).

One way to do that is to make sure their experiences with your brand are personalized. Suggesting new products based on your customers’ recent purchases can spur them to spend more with your brand. For more personalized recommendations, you can collect information from them via feedback or ask them to fill out surveys such as questionnaires.

Remember, taking efforts to provide personalized experiences also impresses customers, who are delighted by your level of service to them.

2.3 Explore new ways to fulfill orders

A great customer experience strategy requires a time-tested strategy for multiple shipping and fulfillment options. And one way you can do that is by expanding your sales channels across your website.

Your customers use multiple devices while looking for convenient purchasing. Extend the same convenience for them while reaching out to them where they spend most of their time. P.S. You also get to make more sales this way.

When it comes to selling, try considering multiple sales channels such as marketplaces and social commerce. All you have to do is make sure you have the same level of user experience across these channels.

For fulfilling orders, make sure to explore convenient and customer-friendly ways like BOPIS (Buy Online & Pickup In-Store) and curbside pickups to enable your customers to collect their orders at the earliest without succumbing to delays.

You can also follow the same when it comes to shipping and delivery by offering multiple shipping options ranging from same-day delivery, overnight delivery, 2-day delivery, etc.

Providing your customers a list of options to choose what best suits them rather than putting them in a corner with a lack of choice, assures them of decision-making authority and boosts their confidence to keep shopping with you.

2.4. Be aware of shipping carrier deadlines & possible delays

Check here to see the FedEx holiday operations schedule for 2022 that can help you plan your shipments for the holiday season without succumbing to delays.

Click here to view the UPS holiday schedule that can give you tips for managing your shipping calendar and costs.

Being aware of the various timelines associated with shipping carriers can help you stay a step ahead of possible delays.

Major carriers like FedEx and UPS draw up special holiday-specific calendars each year. These contain important dates during the season as well as the last days for parcels to be handed off to the carrier to be delivered on time for key days like Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Carriers have been following this necessary practice of setting deadlines for shipping because parcel volumes during the Holidays are typically significantly higher than during the rest of the year. In the past few years (and this year) it is bound to be even busier as more people choose online shopping than brick and mortar.

As an e-commerce retailer, you need to keep these deadlines in mind and be prepared to ship out your parcels on time to avoid your customers’ parcels getting delivered late on account of the considerably high volume that shipping carriers deal with at this time of the year. This assures, even in the slightest way, that your customers are not set up for frustration over their holiday gifts getting delayed but instead will have a seamless order delivery experience.

2.5. Give precedence to post-purchase CX

No matter how hard you try, delays are inevitable and can certainly hurt your customers’ happiness when it comes to order deliveries.

Worry not! That’s where the CX efforts you continue to take in the post-purchase phase come in handy.

Some of the best practices to optimize your post-purchase CX are:

Resolving delivery issues such as delays before customer impact
Keeping customers regularly informed of their order status
Increasing customer delight via tracking experiences that are on-brand
Improving delivery experiences by taking customer feedback into consideration
Making your returns process hassle-free, etc

All of this can improve your retention rate and particularly during a time like the Holiday season, can bring in more sales.

2.6. Clearly define & display your return policy & make returns easier

Having a clearly-defined and frictionless returns policy prominently displayed on your website makes your brand seem less risky for shoppers. In fact, the generous returns policy is one of the aspects that makes e-commerce giants like Amazon tick as a business.

Tailor your returns policy in a way that best suits your customers’ experiences as well as your business’ interests. For example, being too strict with your returns can repel customers from shopping with you a second time due to a lack of convenience.

At the same time, being too lenient can encourage unwanted and fraudulent returns that can be expensive for your business. Therefore, the best ploy would be to keep it balanced when it comes to the time window as well as the product condition.

Also, make returns easier for your customers, who already are not happy with returning a holiday gift that they longed for. You can do just that by making returns initiation frictionless via self-serve methods and keeping customers in the loop of their returns effortlessly.

2.7. Empower your customer-support executives

Regularly tending to customer queries such as delivery issues or WISMO inquiries takes up all of your support reps’ time thus, preventing them from tending to other important queries that can turn out costly for your business.

On the other hand, empowering your support reps to stay in the know of your customer’s parcels which are error-prone, and proactively resolving them before they impact your customer saves your reps’ time and also helps you forge strong relationships with your customer.

You can also provide omnichannel support on your website, social media, etc to avoid issues being escalated and reduce the number of support tickets being created.

2.8. Update your tracking pages with relevant campaigns

Beautiful-looking product pages with relevant holiday content set the customer on the path towards making that purchasing decision. So why not try the same strategy to target repeat shoppers?

Make your tracking experience more than just transactional by having personalized product recommendations for every customer and further encourage them by giving them special offers such as discounts on their upcoming purchase.

Customers engaged via tracking pages and delivery-related notifications have drastically reduced anxiety levels and would be glad to shop with you again given the experience you’ve provided them. Such personalized ads can truly ace the motivating factor and double your chances of driving repeat sales.

Implementing all of these might seem too much to do right before the holiday season. But trust me, they’re not.

These holiday insights set to provide the best possible experience for your customers can ultimately help you in making more sales, especially in an environment where your CX can work as a differentiator for your brand.

3. How LateShipment.com Can Help

LateShipment.com’s post-purchase suite, helps you focus on the post-purchase touchpoints of the customer journey and boost retention and lifetime value through memorable delivery and returns experiences this Holiday season, all while improving carrier performances and reducing shipping costs by up to 20%.

Our feature-packed Delivery Experience Management platform helps improve shipment visibility and drive customer delight post-purchase.
Our customer-first Returns Experience Management platform makes returns effortless and efficient — all while retaining revenue.
Our Automated Parcel Audit and Shipping Refunds solution recovers dollars in the refund claims and enables you to make data-backed shipping choices.

LateShipment.com also seamlessly integrates with over 600 shipping carriers and business tools that include E-commerce platforms, Order Management Systems, CRM, and Marketing Automation tools to help you craft delightful post-purchase experiences, at scale.

Consider trying out LateShipment.com as well as these trends and let us know how well things worked out for you. Have any other trends that you would like to share with fellow e-commerce retailers? Let us know in the comments.

The post 14 Holiday Insights for E-commerce in 2022 appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

10 Ways to Turn a Holiday Shopper into a Lifetime Customer

Sashank Ravindranath — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 13:47:04 +0000

Did you know that the chances of you doing business with a shopper is close to 4x more during the holiday season than on regular days?

That means, the holidays are the perfect time for you to make a strong impact on prospective customers and increase sales. But think about this, what if you could do more than just finishing a sale? What if you could improve your retention rates and turn a one-time holiday shopper into a lifetime customer?

Running an online business, you must already be aware of the impact of retention on your profit margins but let me reiterate the fact that increasing retention rates by just 5% can increase your profits by 25-95%.

One of the best ways to retain your customers is to offer them a great customer experience. This can ensure they will be coming back as regular customers, even after holiday sales. However, it is not as easy as it looks. This is because your CX efforts are often hindered by the existing post-purchase gap. And can turn out worse during busy times like the holiday season.

Post-purchase CX Challenges That Can Deter Holiday Shoppers

The control of customer experiences is strong with you until you direct all efforts to make your customers hit ‘buy’. But what happens beyond the buy button?

All of this can lead to severe issues for your business in the form of:

10% of all parcels shipped are either delayed, lost, or damaged
Customers blame and penalize the brand they shop from and NOT the shipping carriers for delivery failures
1-in-3 consumers will switch to a competitor after just ONE bad post-purchase experience with a brand
> 40% of all customer support tickets created are either shipping, delivery, or returns related.

Taking measures to close this post-purchase CX gap will ensure a positive impact on your customers’ lifetime value and the retention rate of your business. Here are the following ways you can adopt to improve your post-purchase CX and turn a one-time holiday shopper into a lifetime customer.

10 Post-purchase Strategies to Turn a Holiday Shopper into a Lifetime Customers

1. Optimize delivery experiences

1.1 Proactively identify and resolve delivery-related issues

Order deliveries during busy times like the holiday season are highly error-prone. Therefore, start monitoring your in-transit parcels in real-time and stay in the know about parcels facing delivery issues. This ensures proactive and faster resolution of delivery-related customer issues and ergo, sets the stage for your holiday shopper to enjoy a great post-purchase experience.

1.2 Reduce customer anxiety with automated shipping notifications

Customers are always anxious regarding their parcel status. This is only worsened during the holiday season. Use this opportunity to turn the tide in your favor and effectively engage with your customers throughout the order delivery lifecycle. Keeping your holiday shoppers informed via timely email and SMS alerts about their delivery status helps you reduce their anxiety levels and revives their trust in your brand.

1.3 Make order tracking self-serve to reduce delivery-related support tickets

Significantly reduce time-consuming (and expensive!) ticket volume raised by anxious holiday shoppers. Enable self-serve order tracking for your holiday shoppers directly from within your website or app. Your support reps will now have time to focus on more pressing issues that could hurt customer satisfaction. Your support reps can also give you a hand on product usage guidance or boosting sales via upselling.

1.4 Offer custom-built branded tracking experiences

To ensure seamless brand experiences in the order delivery phase, start taking complete control over every customer interaction. Offer brand consistent order tracking pages over the dull and off-brand tracking pages provided by the shipping carrier. Such beautiful and branded tracking experiences drive customer delight and keep your brand on the top of the supposedly one-time holiday shopper’s mind.

1.5 Leverage order tracking moments to increase sales and reduce unwanted returns

Make the tracking experience more than just transactional. Run post-purchase marketing campaigns on order tracking pages and double your chances of driving repeat sales. You can also consider featuring relevant product usage information and support channels to reduce the burden of unwanted returns for both holiday shoppers and yourself.

1.6 Get customer feedback around delivery experiences

Capture customer feedback after every order delivery to know how your holiday shoppers feel about their delivery experiences. This can help you understand the detractors of a great CX and make necessary changes to perfect your post-purchase strategy. Also, using this data to consistently direct efforts to improve your CX largely promotes brand credibility.

2. Enhance your returns process to make it hassle-free

2.1 Offer easy-to-initiate returns

The first step to hassle-free returns is to be transparent and establish trust with a clear returns policy. The best ploy is to keep it balanced between being holiday shopper-friendly and meeting your objectives. You can extend your customers’ confidence to keep shopping with you by making returns effortless via fast and easy initiation.

2.2 Communicate throughout every step of the returns process

Similar to deliveries, send proactive updates on returns requests, via automated status notifications and a live returns tracking page. This eliminates customer anxiety and keeps holiday shoppers in the loop of their returns effortlessly.

2.3 Reduce returns by encouraging repeat purchases

70% of all returns are size and fit related — meaning you don’t have to give your holiday shopper a refund for almost three-fourths of returns initiated by them. Get smart by incentivizing customers to opt for exchanges and store credit options rather than refunds. Encouraging your customers to shop with you again instead of cutting them off with refunds helps you retain both holiday shoppers and the revenue they bring in.

3. Keep a close watch on delivery issues

Make sure your deliveries are on-time by keeping a close watch on possible issues during the holiday season. This can help you captivate a regular holiday shopper to spend more with your business in the coming days by reducing their frustrations. Also, this data at hand works as a bonus in evaluating your carriers’ performance and making informed shipping decisions, which can ultimately lead to lower shipping costs during the already expensive holiday season.

Implementing these ways might seem too much to do right before the holiday season. But trust me, they’re not. Delivering these stunning post-purchase experiences for your shoppers ultimately helps you strengthen customer relationships and foster brand loyalty.

And if you’re looking to be an early bird and get this all done even before the holiday shopping season arrives, here comes an all-in-one platform built to deliver phenomenal post-purchase CX and measurable results.

Provide CX Excellence Beyond the Buy Button with Lateshipment.Com

Our feature-packed Delivery Experience Management platform helps improve shipment visibility and drive customer delight post-purchase.
Our customer-first Returns Experience Management platform makes returns effortless and efficient — all while retaining revenue.
Our Automated Parcel Audit and Shipping Refunds solution recovers dollars in the refund claims and enables you to make data-backed shipping choices.

Bottom Line

Holidays are the time of the year when companies try to maximize their profits from one-time shoppers and gain loyal customers for the rest of the following year. If you play your cards well with your post-purchase at this time, you will be able to increase the satisfaction of your customers and keep them happy with every order.

Which of these ways are you looking forward to implementing for your own online business to turn a holiday shopper into a lifetime customer? Let us know in the comments section!

Meanwhile, feel free to check out LateShipment.com or write to us at sales@lateshipment.com

The post 10 Ways to Turn a Holiday Shopper into a Lifetime Customer appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Porch Pirates: How to Handle Them and Prevent Package Theft

Rohan Rinaldo Felix — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 00:00:56 +0000

Imagine if a product you’ve longed to collect for years gets stolen from you. And guess what? It was stolen right at your doorstep by fellow people dubbed ‘the porch pirates.’

Package thefts are so frustrating for the customer because of the fact that they can’t hold anyone responsible for the mishap of not being able to get their hands on their much awaited purchases except themselves and the “pirates” who scooted away with their package.

But you as an ecommerce business owner can save your customers from such bad times and stop package theft by porch pirates or if not even drastically reduce them to a great extent.

However, before we get to know the ‘how’ part, let’s take a further look at porch pirates and their impact on your business.

Who Are Porch Pirates and How They Can Affect Your Business?

Porch pirates are average individuals or a group who steal packages off customers’ doorstep or porches when it is left unattended.

Much like kleptomaniacs, Porch pirates are simply opportunists who cannot resist an opportunity to pick up packages they see lying on doorsteps or porches.

A recent study by Safewise found that a staggering 210 million packages vanished from porches across the US over the past 12 months.

The scale of the problem is only getting worse as more people begin to shop online. The problem gets exacerbated during the holiday season because it’s at this time of the year that people shop online the most. And it is common for people to leave on holiday while ordered packages lie on their doorstep.

Worry not! The situation is not out of hand. There are measures your business can take to stay safe from the scourge of package thieves that America is facing. Here are some things you could do.

What Retailers Can Do to Prevent Package Theft by Porch Pirates

There are a lot of ways in which retailers and shoppers can work together to prevent a theft attempt by porch pirates. Let’s take a look at the ways in the timeline of the order delivery cycle even before it gets shipped.

1. Package discreetly

When a package is dropped off on the porch of a house, it can sit up like a duck waiting to be shot. Porch pirates dream about just such a situation. Packaging discreetly can help avoid this situation.

There are many ways to make a package discreet. One way is to avoid excessive branding. Another way to make a package less noticeable is to reduce the amount of product-descriptive text on it.

Larger boxes are more attractive to porch pirates because they give the impression of a larger pay-off. Using a box that fits the size of the product will help make the package less noticeable while also helping to reduce the cost of shipping.

2. Provide your customers with flexible delivery options

It is best to start by leaving things to the judgment of your customers and the utmost importance for them would be the delivery.

There is a multitude of choices when it comes to making your delivery options flexible.

For example: you can provide multiple shipping and delivery options like Same-day delivery, BOPIS, etc to let your customers choose their own delivery time and follow up with offering 4-5 time windows throughout the day.

Apart from package safety, such flexibility in delivery options can also help you increase conversions, lower cart abandonment, and improve brand loyalty in general.

3. Keep your customers updated about the status of shipments

Proper communication is key to eliminating many of the pain points of the post-purchase shipping experience. This is a good way to deal with the risk of package theft as well.

The first aspect of proper communication with customers is to provide them with the right estimate of the delivery date and time.
The next step to be taken is to give them periodic updates on the status of the parcel in transit. These updates can be provided via SMS or e-mail or both. This will help customers be prepared at the time of delivery.
The final step in this process of communication is to drop a message once the actual delivery is about to be/has been performed. A helpline number can be provided to assist in case of discrepancies.

4. Use emerging technologies to ensure safe delivery

Using emerging technologies can help you stay one step ahead of porch pirates.

A lot of businesses today have come up with package guarding technologies that can come in handy for your customers. You can suggest any of these technologies to your customers and play a role in providing a safe delivery. This, in turn, can help in improving their post-purchase experience.

Amazon has come up with the Amazon Key, a smart lock that allows delivery persons to place packages not only at homes but also in garages and cars when the customer isn’t available at home.
There’s also the Amazon locker at select locations, that customers can make use of to pick up their packages with a unique code.
Suggest using package guarding services such as The Package Guard or Door Box to protect your packages via secure locks and anti- theft alarms, etc.
Encourage customers to install doorbell cameras and home security systems to deter porch pirates in most cases.

Such technologies can be especially useful when shoppers are away on a short trip or a long holiday vacation.

That’s not all! If you’re still concerned about your customers’ packages being stolen, know that there are many measures available to them to deter package thieves.

What Shoppers Can Do to Prevent Package Theft by Porch Pirates

1. Route Packages to Office Addresses

Home deliveries are fraught with problems: package thieves looting drop-off deliveries, irresponsible mailmen or carriers leaving packages on the front door without even knocking or ringing the door, pre-signing delivery without consent, or delaying home delivery by sending notifications too early.

All this can be avoided by routing packages to office addresses where they are processed officially. The probability of losing packages to package thieves is much less with office deliveries. This is also why FedEx/UPS charges more to deliver to residential zip codes than to office zip codes.

2. Mandate signatures on delivery

A mandated signature delivery can help in preventing package theft in most cases. An arrangement can be signed off with mutual consent from the sender and the receiver (you, that is). If a package is lost and there is no signature of delivery, a legal procedure can ensure that you receive a replacement or full refund.

3. Place packages on hold when on holiday

If you are away on holiday, you can opt to place your pending packages on hold. While USPS and FedEx offer a free service to hold packages for a certain period, UPS charges for every rescheduling.

4. Opt for in-store pickup

Click-and-collect is increasingly becoming a trend. Using this mode of delivery, you can order online and collect the ordered parcel from an outlet located near your home. This mode is particularly useful for ordering a larger number of items.

Bottom Line

While the threat of package theft continues to increase year on year, some measures can be taken by both retailers and customers to ensure package safety and a smooth last-mile experience. Retailers, shipping carriers, and end customers need to work hand in hand to stay ahead of package thieves.

A Little about LateShipment.com

We at LateShipment.com work hard to make “parcel shipping & delivery” transparent and help businesses be fully in control of their last-mile success.

Here are some ways in which LateShipment.com can help you regarding packages getting lost or stolen:

With our real-time tracking solution, you can step in before customer impact and proactively address them, thereby instilling confidence in your customers.
With automated and customized shipping notifications, keep your customers in the loop about the whereabouts of their order with proactive communication and free up your support time to focus on more pressing issues.

That’s not all! In case of packages that get lost due to carrier negligence, LateShipment.com can also help you automate refund claims from your shipping carriers for service failures to help you save up to 20% on shipping costs.

The value we add to businesses is most evident when experienced first-hand. Learn more about our solution here.

The post Porch Pirates: How to Handle Them and Prevent Package Theft appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Enhance Holiday Post-Purchase Experience with Existing Tools

Sashank Ravindranath — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 14:32:02 +0000

eCommerce brands are constantly looking forward to improve their services at every touchpoint to build a loyal customer tribe and grow. And one way they are advancing in their said vision is by constantly adopting newer technology in every area of operations — such as product discovery and website optimization.

All of this boils down to providing immaculate CX and increasing their operational efficiency, given we as a market are moving towards an experience-based economy from the previous price-based economy.

Over 45% of business professionals say that CX is the number one priority for them (rather than price and the product itself) when it comes to repeat shopping.

Understanding how you can leverage technology to enhance the experience on your store is pivotal in picking the right tool to support your scaling efforts and improve your customers’ experiences at every stage of their journey.

However, the grim reality is that most businesses today are ready to invest in pre-purchase and purchase phases of the customer journey, but often oversee the post-purchase phase. In fact, it is the post-purchase phase that truly builds trust and confidence in customers before they choose to shop from you again.

The post-purchase experience takes up 50% of the overall order experience and is key to boosting repeat purchases.

With advanced shipment tracking, delivery, and returns management tech, brands big or small can easily provide great post-purchase experiences that drive fierce customer loyalty.

But before we dive into that, let’s understand the need for a great post-purchase experience.

Why Do Brands Need to Provide Their Customers with a Great Post-Purchase Experience?

Offering a great post-purchase customer experience is not an option but more of a necessity. The CX in the post-purchase phase makes up 50% of the overall order experience. Not paying attention to your customers at this phase, creates a big CX gap that comes with a lot of consequences in the form of:

1-in-3 customers abandon a brand after just one bad delivery or returns experience
30% of customers share negative experiences with close ones and on social media, demotivating other prospects from shopping with you
Up to 40% of customer support tickets created are shipping, delivery, or returns related
8 to 10 customer engagement and revenue growth opportunities are lost during the post-purchase customer journey
Average NPS scores are 4 or below for customers facing delivery or returns issues.

An alarming 22% – 30% of your Holiday parcels will face delivery issues due to shipping network congestions.

This is more than enough to show that you are entitled to miss out on lot of things by not paying attention to your post-purchase experience.

Worry not!

This is the right time to kick off your journey to providing a stellar post-purchase experience, given that he holiday season is a time when eCommerce witnesses a spike in orders.

So, here’s how you can enhance your customers’ post-purchase experience. And for the best part, here are some ways for you to do that without making any changes to the existing tools that you’re using.

Leverage Existing Tools to Enhance Your Customers' Holiday Post-Purchase Experience

Offering your customers a great post-purchase experience was never out of your grasp. All you needed to do was to extend your capabilities of delivery and returns management. This Holiday season, take control of how your customers interact with your brand post-purchase without changing the tools you use.

Drive post-purchase CX success with tools to:

1. Gain real-time visibility into shipments in transit

Delivery issues such as delays are 1.5x – 2x during the Holiday season.

Having a third-party real-time tracking solution and integrating your shipping carriers and delivery partners such as USPS, DHL, FedEx, or UPS, Canada Post, Purolator, etc gives you an unbiased, unprecedented visibility into your shipments in transit (across carriers, services, and geographies).

A mere look at your dashboard can now provide you an immediate idea about how many of your parcels will be delivered during the day and how many are likely to face delivery issues.

2. Identify delivery failures/issues before customers are affected by them

Receiving predictive alerts whenever your parcels are more inclined to fail, lets you step in where necessary and take necessary corrective measures.

By getting delivery delays identified for you well before they happen, you can take preemptive action before the issues impact your customer. Such actions display would result in your customers appreciating your efforts, which can prove to be fruitful during times like the Holiday season.

3. Empower your support reps to proactively resolve shipping-related issues

Extend post-purchase visibility to your helpdesk platform such as Freshdesk, Gorgias, Zendesk, etc to take preemptive action on parcels facing issues this Holiday season.

Automatically trigger delivery-related tickets for several common delivery issues and enable your customer support team to take quick action.

Proactively resolve delivery issues by informing your customers of the issue and offer them a solution for the same.

Being proactive mitigates your customers’ worries and sets them on the path towards satisfaction. Moreover, It also reduces the burden on your support team during the busy season and lets them focus on product-related queries.

4. Effectively engage and communicate with customers post checkout

Once you have proactively resolved issues, you must look forward to meaningfully communicate with your customers.

Integrating your email marketing automation tools such as Klaviyo, Mailchimp and CRM platforms such as Zoho CRM and Freshsales, etc, and take customer engagement in the post-purchase phase to an all-new level.

Communicating relevant information at the right time to customers makes a whole world of difference for a customer anticipating their order (especially during the Holiday season when their parcels are prone to delays). Therefore, lookout to send post-purchase transactional Emails and SMS notifications to keep your customers in the loop of their orders throughout the delivery lifecycle.

Not just shipping transactional notifications, you can also effectively use customer engagement when your customers’ parcels are facing uncommon delivery issues such as weather-related delays during the Holiday season.

5. Delight your customers with branded order tracking experiences

After proactive issue resolution and meaningful customer communication, comes hyper-engagement.

Connect your eCommerce platform such as Shopify, Shift4Shop, etc and hyper-engage your customers via branded order tracking experiences in order to delight them and increase your customers’ retention rates and lifetime value.

Apart from enabling your customers to seamlessly track their orders, you can also use this post-purchase touchpoint as a means to drive sales via product recommendations and marketing campaigns.

6. Enable easy and frictionless returns for your customers

Integrate your eCommerce store or Order Management Systems such as Linnworks, GoShippo, etc, and provide your customers with a seamless returns experience along with rewarding delivery experiences.

Having a clear-cut returns policy
Offering free and flexible returns
Automating your returns process and make order returns as easy as shopping, etc

Can all help you make returns easy, frictionless, and an integral part of your post-purchase strategy.

One Simple Integration, a World of Retail Benefits

Pairing LateShipment.com to your existing CRM, eCommerce, order management and helpdesk tools allow you to tap into all the great benefits that can take your business to the next level.

LateShipment.com integrates seamlessly with your existing tools and makes it possible to boost their capabilities in the following ways:

Additionally, LateShipment.com also can integrate with custom-built tools and platforms. Our API makes it easy to enable such integrations.

At LateShipment.com, we are committed to enabling your business to wrest control of the post-purchase experience you provide customers. Therefore, integrate your tech-stacks with LateShipment.com and stand apart from your competitors by offering your customers near white-glove service in the post-purchase phase.

Ready to try out some of our integrations? – Get Started

Still, having doubts? – Talk to our integration expert

The post Enhance Holiday Post-Purchase Experience with Existing Tools appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

Differentiate Your Brand with CX for the Modern Holiday Shopper

Sashank Ravindranath — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 07:41:04 +0000

Why Ecommerce Brands Must Double-down on CX

Today’s eCommerce landscape has become highly competitive. There are tens and hundreds of brands with the same product and price ranges, leaving customers with a multitude of options.

But how can a brand grow in this scenario? How can a brand differentiate itself from its competitors and cement itself in customers’ minds for a long time to come?

That’s where retention comes into play. Brands must realize that it is expensive (5x) to acquire a new customer and on the other hand, retained customers bring in additional revenue (25%).

Talking about the current landscape, customers themselves are rating customer experience ahead of the price or even the product itself when it comes to shopping with a brand for the second time. And 67% of them cite bad customer experience as their reason to stop shopping with a brand.

Therefore, it is high time that brands started focusing on optimizing their customer experience (CX) especially for the holiday season, when they can anticipate more sales.

But first, there are a set of challenges that your brand might face concerning CX during the Holiday season. Let’s take a look at what they are and how you can face them.

CX Challenges During the Holiday Season

1. Website isn't optimized for conversions and handling high traffic

Website optimization can improve conversions by 70%.

When your website isn’t optimized to handle the high Holiday season traffic, it can lead to frequent crashing, and as a result, frustrated customers

Cite poor CX to abandon their carts
Rate the CX received as low and demotivate other prospects from shopping with you.

Either of which ultimately leads to a drop in your Holiday sales revenue.

2. Shipping carriers will struggle to meet delivery promises

Over 15% of the parcels shipped with major carriers including FedEx, UPS, and DHL faced delivery delays during the 2020 Holiday season.

Even with social distancing restrictions being eased and more temporary workers being hired, shipping carriers will find it hard to meet their delivery promises during the Holidays. This leads to your customers’ parcels face delivery issues such as delays.

Carriers themselves are aware of their capabilities YoY. That’s why they are keen to temporarily suspend their money-back guarantee policy during the Holiday season.

3. Your customers will hold you accountable for delivery issues

1-in-3 customers will stop shopping with you after just one bad delivery incident.

When shipping carriers are struggling to meet ends during the Holiday season, your customers’ orders are always prone to face delivery issues in the form of delays and more.

Delivery issues are the #1 reason behind customer frustration, particularly during the Holidays. And to make it worse, customers hold YOU accountable for these more than the shipping carrier — straining your relationship with them.

4. Support teams will be overwhelmed with delivery and returns related issues

Over 40% of the support tickets created are shipping, delivery, and returns related.

Customers who are anticipating their orders frequently bombard your customer support reps with WISMO (Where IS My Order?) inquiries.

Repeatedly resolving shipping and delivery issues consumes all of your support team’s time and prevents them from doing their other tasks such as product-related queries.

You support team members being just reactive to your customers’ delivery issues also reduces your CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores.

5. A high volume of order returns

30% of all products ordered online are returned.

With increasing order delivery volume, you can naturally expect the number of order returns to get high as well.

Gaps in your returns management system such as

An opaque returns policy and
An exhaustive returns approval process, etc.

Will result in customer dissatisfaction and also hurt your buyer’s confidence when it comes to the purchasing decision.

The verdict is clear. Customer experience is the key differentiator between today’s brands. But how can brands make use of CX as a competitive advantage? How can they optimize their CX across all touchpoints to deliver an outstanding experience particularly during the holiday season?

Here’s how.

How Brands Can Use CX to Differentiate Themselves During the Holiday Season

The modern customer’s journey with your brand is not just a single journey. It is made up of multiple smaller journeys that consist of multiple points of interaction or touchpoints between the two of you.

You need to make an opportunity with all these touchpoints and keep them personalized in order to stay ahead of your competitors and have a memorable holiday season run.

Here are 9 tips on how brands can leverage these touchpoints and improve their CX.

For better understanding, we’ve segregated these touchpoints based on where they take place in your customer’s journey.

Pre-purchase

#1 Personalize your marketing campaigns

By the time you promote your brand on social media, you will have an idea of what products your customers are looking for.

Enable your market research team to get more information about them and send personalized campaigns. If that doesn’t seem to be enough, you can engage them with offers and giveaways to motivate them enough to make that purchase.

#2 Optimize your website

Source

Your future customers have made their way into your eCommerce store. The next step involves making them stay in it until they hit that ‘buy’ button. Optimize your website enough to offer them a seamless browsing and checkout experience. You can do just that by:

Make your website holiday-aligned with designs and highlight special offers to stay relevant.
Make your site’s loading speed a priority
Populate your product pages with AR, videos, GIFs, etc to make them engaging and interactive
Make your checkout process simple, etc

All of this can improve the outlook and usability of your website and motivate shoppers to convert as buyers.

Purchase

The purchase phase is the part of the customer journey when the customers have decided on their purchase and are in the process of making it. However, there can still be detractors at this phase if you miss out on memorable interactions during these touchpoints.

#3 Offer multiple channels for fulfillment

If you’re looking to maximize sales this Holiday season, a multi-channel fulfillment strategy is a way to go. Provide multiple shipping options ranging from same-day delivery, overnight delivery, 2-day delivery, BOPIS, curbside pickup, etc. This enables your customers to choose the option that best suits them instead of putting them in a corner with a lack of choice.

#4 Send out order confirmation notifications

As soon as the order gets shipped out, send out an order shipped notification with a realistic estimated delivery timeline so that they keep their expectations in check and refrain from blaming you in case it gets extended by a day or two.

The order confirmation is the most awaited shipping notification by the customer, as this is the first checkpoint in the race of the order reaching them on time. Therefore, make sure this is sent at the earliest.

Congratulations! They’ve hit that ‘buy’ button and you have earned yourself a customer.

However, hold your celebrations as there are still more to come.

Post-purchase

The post-purchase customer experience constitutes 50% of the overall customer experience.

However, major businesses unwillingly don’t pay attention to their customers after they hit buy as they consider their job done after they’ve handed over their customer’s package to the shipping carrier.

Don’t make the same mistake as them but instead double down on your post-purchase customer experience and stand out from the crowd.

The following steps will help you build trust & reliability to retain hard-earned customers and grow:

#5 Enable your customer support team to proactively resolve customer issues

With the help of real-time tracking, you can empower your support reps to stay in the know of your customer’s parcels which are error-prone, and proactively resolve them before they impact your customer. This will forge strong customer relationships and foster brand loyalty.

You can also provide omnichannel support on their website, social media, etc, to avoid the issue being escalated and reduce the number of support tickets being created.

#6 Keep your customers updated on their order status

Send post-purchase transactional Emails and SMS notifications to keep your customers in the loop of their orders throughout the delivery lifecycle. This can help in reducing your customers’ anticipations in the most anxious stage of their journey.

Start with an ‘out-for-delivery’ notification containing a tracking button for the customers to track their orders periodically
Not just regular transactional notifications, also inform your customers when something goes wrong with their orders such as orders being ‘in-transit with delays’ or ‘suspected lost’, etc.

#7 Delight your customers with brand-consistent order tracking experiences

Providing post-purchase experiences that are on-brand can help you take a step further in your path towards meeting customer expectations and delight them.

Make order tracking an extension of your brand experience by creating your own branded tracking pages that are both beautiful and brand-consistent. You can also consider making order tracking self-serve with an ‘order track’ button on your website or in your notifications.

After delighting your customers with branded tracking experiences, you can also use the opportunity to boost repeat purchases with upsell and cross-sell campaigns during order tracking moments.

#8 Get your customers ’ feedback to improve the delivery experience

Once your customers receive their orders, you can ask for their feedback on how their delivery experience was.

You can then use this information to make better shipping decisions and optimize your delivery experience as well. This way, your customers will be impressed with your efforts and will prefer you to your competitors.

#9 Make your returns process hassle-free

When returns are done right, they can mean a whole lot of repeat sales and long-lasting customer relationships. Here are some important tips to keep in mind for when you make returns an integral part of your post-purchase strategy.

Have a clear-cut returns policy
Offer free and flexible returns
Automate your returns process and make order returns as easy as shopping, etc

All of this can enhance your customers’ returns experience with your brand.

Final Word

Customer experience (CX) is a critical component improve your retention rate particularly during a time like the Holiday season, when it can bring in more sales.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon you to focus on the all the touchpoints of the customer journey and boost retention and lifetime value through memorable experiences this Holiday season.

Improving your CX to boost retention rates are just one part of the Holiday season, which includes a fool-proof strategy across all areas of your business.

Make use of our holiday eCommerce checklist to stay updated with the holiday season trends boost sales.

The post Differentiate Your Brand with CX for the Modern Holiday Shopper appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

How to Leverage Automation for Holiday Season Sales

Ian — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 07:46:16 +0000

The holiday sales season is often the most important for retailers. Researchers predict holiday ecommerce retail sales to make up 18.9% of total holiday sales this year, up from the year before. In 2020, retail ecommerce made up 17.5% of total holiday sales.

If retailers do not want to miss out on these sales, they must be in the selling channels where customers are spending their time.

It has never been more important for retailers and brands to be wherever the customer is, on their terms. Linnworks calls this Total Commerce.

Total Commerce means going to the customer rather than having the customer come to you. It means staying current on what channels customers are making their purchasing decisions. It’s difficult to constantly manage and keep up with these multiple sales channels. This is where automation comes in, putting Total Commerce control at the center of your business this holiday season.

The Power of Automating Inventory Management for Peak Season

One of the challenges high-growth retailers face is managing logistics through ever-expanding complex channels. Retailers must manage the orders, inventory, and shipping in multiple selling channels. The risk of human error greatly increases the more selling channels a business has when managing commerce manually.

Automation takes care of the management of these areas. Automation is especially important when you have high order volumes during the holiday season. For example, automation helps to solve one of the biggest problems retailers face: inventory management.

Successful inventory management is key to navigating the high-demand holiday season. Inventory management prevents stock-outs.

Stock-outs occur when retailers oversell their inventory. This can lead to a negative customer experience, lost revenue, and a permanently damaged reputation. Stock-outs are most likely to occur during sales surges, which is a common occurrence during the holiday season. This is where automation can be an invaluable asset to manage the stock levels of your inventory across all selling channels.

Get Your Products to Customers Easier and Faster With Shipping Management Automation

A shipping management system helps retailers decide what fulfillment method to use, and designate carrier services based on filtered criteria such as location or product information.

A system also allows you to manage the delivery experience of all of your orders, including being able to identify any delivery issues well before they happen. When you have this kind of insight, it helps you build long-lasting relationships with your customers by providing a positive delivery experience.

Moreover, a good shipping management system integrates well with third-party logistics companies to provide an immersive overall experience. 3PLs can handle the distribution, warehousing, and fulfillment of products.

3PLs can be extremely valuable to retailers because these companies have multiple fulfillment centers that are close to your customers, therefore decreasing the amount of time it takes to ship your products to your customers. Being closer to customers provides a huge advantage for retailers because it allows retailers to get their products to customers faster. 3PLs also save you money because you do not need to buy or rent warehouse space.

Manage Multiple Sales Channels in One Place with Automation

Automation helps retailers implement a successful sales channels strategy. Marketplaces are one type of sales channel and include well-known names like Walmart, eBay, and Amazon in an ever-growing area.

According to Linnworks, 90% of customers start their search for a product on a marketplace. In a consumer market where the winning retailers are wherever their customers are, wherever may seem like everywhere.

Each new marketplace is a possible selling channel to consider for a retailer. Marketplaces can be great for sales and also for more customers to find out about your brand. Automation helps you sell on all possible channels where your customers are spending their time, like marketplaces.

Accomplishing Total Commerce, being where your customers are, on their terms, is difficult to manage without automation. It has never been more important for retailers to be wherever their customers are, such as marketplaces.

Leverage the Power of Automation for the Holiday Sales Surge

Automation helps with your commerce operations while also helping you create a seamless, convenient customer experience.

Automation can consolidate selling channels, manage inventory across those channels, and coordinate shipping. Automation is the key to connecting your business to customers where they already spend their time, in a way that provides them a seamless experience, so that they will return again and again.

This article is a guest contribution from Linnworks

The post How to Leverage Automation for Holiday Season Sales appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

[eCommerce 2021] Social Commerce for Businesses

Ian — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 09:35:46 +0000

Running an eCommerce business is hectic, no doubt. However, there are certain aspects that make it interesting. One such being the relatively new but growing trend of social commerce.

eCommerce business owners can greatly benefit from this trend. All you need to do is to increase your brand visibility and build an effective social commerce campaign.

But before that, let’s talk about social commerce in more detail.

What is Social Commerce?

Social commerce is the use of social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for marketing and sales purposes.

Social commerce campaigns aim to boost social interactions such as retweets, likes, link clicks, and shares and to drive sales.

Social commerce is the use of social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for marketing and sales purposes.

The Benefits of Social Commerce to eCommerce Businesses

If you craft an effective social commerce campaign, you will achieve the following goals:

Reach a wide audience
Improve brand awareness
Increase sales
Build customer loyalty

The Best Social Media Platforms for Social Commerce

There are three platforms that work perfectly for social commerce:

Instagram. This social media network has more than one billion users. It allows you to create a business account and sell your products directly from the app.

Facebook provides a set of tools necessary to design an effective social commerce campaign. If you create a Facebook Shop and build a smart Chatbot Messenger, you will engage your target audience and double your sales.

Pinterest is not as popular as Facebook and Instagram. But still, it provides great marketing opportunities for eCommerce businesses. You can use it to improve your brand discoverability and direct new visitors to your website.

Basically, any social media platform can be used for social commerce. If you want to maximize your efforts, you should choose a platform that is popular amongst your customers. For instance, if your target audience is millennial vegans, the best platform for you is Instagram. Or, if your target audience is Baby Boomers, Facebook is the best choice for you.

Social Commerce Best Practices

The vast majority of modern businesses leverage social commerce. Let’s take a look at the best examples.

Swatch

Swatch uses gamification to engage users and create buzz around a new product launch. The company has recently announced the start of a game “M.I.Q The Secret Mission” on Instagram to present Swatch X 007 Tribute Collection.

Every second day, Swatch publishes a new post and asks followers to complete a new task like “to find a part of a secret code.” In such a way, the brand motivates users to check new posts and visit the company’s website while also attracting more interest in new products.

Under Armour

Under Armour has more than 10.9 million followers on Facebook and for a good reason. This sports equipment company creates content that resonates with the target audience while also reflects the brand’s values.

Take a look at the following post – it was shared almost 2K times. It’s a great example of how one social media post can help the company to reach more customers than a paid ad.

Forever 21

If you don’t know how to use Instagram shopping features, take a look at Forever 21’s Instagram account – it’s a great example to follow.

Forever21 runs one of the most successful user-generated content strategies among fashion brands. The company encourages customers to share their photos and tag @forever21 for the chance to be featured. It motivates customers to buy more clothes and share more photos, which helps Forever21 increase reach and engagement.

4 Tips on How to Leverage Social Commerce for Your eCommerce Business

Finally, let’s talk about what steps you should take to build an effective social commerce campaign this holiday season.

1. Focus on quality

If you want to grab the attention of picky social media users, you should create high-quality content. All your photos and videos must have a high resolution. All your posts must include relevant, meaningful captions.

Why is content quality so important? Customers associate content quality with product quality. Therefore, if the quality of your content is not excellent, your prospective customers will doubt the quality of your products and the trustworthiness of your brand.

If you are not an expert in content creation, consider getting writing help. Check top rated sites and find professional writers who know how to craft outstanding social media posts.

2. Start a social media challenge

Modern users like to participate in different social media challenges. And today, when most people get bored in the houses because of the pandemic, social media challenges are getting even more popular. So why don’t you start a social media challenge to draw users’ attention to your brand?

The idea of a social media challenge should be relevant to your brand and appeal to your target audience.

Also, your challenge must have a name and a memorable hashtag. The use of hashtags will allow you to track posts created by your followers and analyze the effectiveness of your campaign.

3. Create Interactive Content

If ordinary social media posts don’t help you achieve the desired results, try to create interactive content. Invite your followers to participate in fun quizzes, polls, and Q&A sessions on Facebook and Instagram Stories.

The more users will interact with your content, the more likely they will buy from you. So use your creativity skills to come up with engaging content ideas. If you feel like you need help with this task, check the TopEssayWriting review, and find creative writers and content creators who can help you.

4. Collaborate with influencers

Social commerce goes hand in hand with influencer marketing. So if you want to get your brand noticed, reach out to the top influencers in your niche and offer them to promote your product.

Just keep in mind that top influencers get dozens of collaboration requests every day but accept only the best offers that include something more than just a paycheck. If you want to partner with influencers, you should provide a special reward, for instance, tickets to a big industry event or participation in an ambassadorship program.

In Conclusion

2021 has been a tough year, so far. And today, people are anticipating the rest of the year more than ever. They are ready to start shopping and enjoy the vibes while still staying at home or social distancing. And you should take this fact into account and adjust your marketing strategy.

Today is the perfect moment to start a social commerce campaign for boosting sales. Use this article for inspiration and create social media content that will take your eCommerce business to the next level.

This article is a contribution by Leona Henryson

About the author: Leona Henryson is a freelance blogger and marketing specialist at TopWritersReview, a website for top college writers’ reviews. She is constantly looking for new ways to improve customer experience and help businesses reach out to their target audience.

The post [eCommerce 2021] Social Commerce for Businesses appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

How eCommerce Businesses Can Conquer the Biggest Holiday Sales Days

Ian — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 11:45:21 +0000

The holiday season is just around the corner and, pandemic or not, these special days could make things extra hectic for businesses within the eCommerce industry. After all, the Christmas shopping season entails a variety of big “holiday sales” such as Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. According to Statista’s latest study, this five-day period translated to an estimated $28.5 billion in sales during the 2019 holiday season.

Taking an even closer look, Forbes also suggests how online sales for retailers in popular gifting categories are set to get a significant boost this coming season. For instance, health and beauty sales are projected to go up by 23%, consumer electronics by 20%, fashion by 19%, and home furnishings by 16%.

This holiday season, health and beauty sales are projected to go up by 23%, consumer electronics by 20%, fashion by 19%, and home furnishings by 16%.

These dramatic spikes make it imperative for businesses to try their hardest to come up with the right strategies that could help them make the most out of the season. With that in mind, here are some of the ways eCommerce businesses can be successful during the holidays:

3 Ways eCommerce Businesses Can Conquer the Biggest Sales Days

1. Review Your Product Listings

An article on Inc outlines how competing with the likes of the big eCommerce businesses such as Amazon and Walmart will be extremely difficult in the coming months.

So to give yourself a better chance, the first thing you have to do is to ensure that your products are readily available, in stock, and visible to consumers searching for them online. For instance, you could try listing your products on Google Shopping for free. This simple trick will not only strengthen your digital presence but also make your products more accessible to the millions who shop through Google Shopping every single day. It would also be a good idea for you to use a variety of point-of-sale systems like Shopify.

2. Make the Most of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing can be very complex and generally incorporates a number of different disciplines. For most eCommerce businesses, digital marketing campaigns will either be done in-house or if you don’t have the expertise, it will need to be outsourced to an experienced agency or consultant.

Ayima Kickstart highlights how your digital marketing is often made up of three key aspects: technical SEO, content SEO, and Link Development. Technical SEO involves making sure your website is up to scratch. Meanwhile, content SEO involves publishing content that is relevant to your target market’s search queries, and turning visitors into potential customers. And finally, link development involves improving your brand reputation by creating a strong backlink profile. All these efforts put together will help ensure that your site ranks for your main keywords during the holiday season when you can generate the bulk of your annual sales.

3. Establish Clear Return Policies

With the pandemic forcing many of us to shift into the digital space, a high percentage of shopping is expected to happen online. This reality makes it crucial for eCommerce businesses to re-evaluate and re-establish not just their shipping policies but also their return procedures.

In one of our previous posts ‘How Businesses Can Handle Holiday Returns’, we mentioned how over 21% of online shoppers consider return policies as the biggest hurdles to shopping online. It is for this very reason why the first consideration you have to take into account when establishing return policies is simplicity. As much as possible, stick with clear and concise English, and avoid verbose language or complicated sentences. It would also be a good idea to offer flexible returns as well as a free return policy for specific items.

Things You Should Avoid

Of course, if there are things you have to do, there are also things you have to watch out for. These are as follows:

1. Starting Too Late and Having No Marketing Plan

As mentioned, the holiday season is expected to be longer this time around because much of today’s shopping will happen online. If you start out too late and with no solid marketing plan, catching up with your competitors would be far too difficult.

2. Neglecting Mobile Experiences

As smartphones continue to advance through the years, more and more consumers are relying on their phones for a multitude of things, including shopping. This makes it vital for eCommerce businesses to focus on what will make their sites more compatible with mobile.

3. Ignoring Loyal Customers & Last-Minute Shoppers

The holiday season may be the perfect time to appeal to new clients but it shouldn’t be a reason for you to neglect past and loyal customers. Make sure to introduce campaigns that will make them think about you and your brand once the shopping mood hits them.

4. Failing to Prepare Your Site

The shopping season is about to begin and the worst thing you can do is to fail to prepare your site for the wave of traffic the holidays will bring. As early as now, try to understand the load capability of your eCommerce platform, as it will be stretched to the limit in the coming months. It is also important that you understand the limits by checking-in with your hosting company and seeing if your plan supports the amount of traffic any seasonal campaigns could bring in.

This article is a contribution by Roxie Joyce.

How LateShipment.com’s DEM Platform Can Help You

Issues in the holiday season can seriously damage your online reputation and lead your potential customers into believing that the post-purchase experience you offer is flawed and deter them from shopping with you again.

On the other hand, getting your customer’s delivery experience right is crucial to building a loyal customer base. And repeat customers spend 65% more than new customers. Acquiring new customers is 5 times more expensive than retaining existing customers.

This is all the more reason to not overlook the post-purchase experience you offer by handing it over entirely to the shipping carrier but instead taking control of it to drive success.

Having a one-stop solution for all post-purchase issues would be great, wouldn’t it?

That solution is LateShipment.com.

LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management (DEM) platform helps businesses like yours effortlessly bridge the post-purchase CX gap and discover new ways to delight and retain customers by enabling them to:

Stay on top of order deliveries, particularly those facing delays

Track in-transit shipments in real-time across carriers you use on a single dashboard.
Get predictive alerts for shipments facing delays & proactively take corrective action.

Over Communicate and reduce customer anxiety post-purchase

Proactively identify and communicate with customers facing critical delivery issues.
Automate order status notifications via email or SMS throughout the delivery lifecycle.

Impress customers with brand-consistent order-tracking experiences

Build brand-consistent and beautiful order/tracking pages for your customers; on your custom domain.
Embed “Track My Order” widgets on your website and shipping emails to make parcel tracking self-service.

Leverage order-tracking moments to increase sales and reduce returns

Increase sales with marketing campaigns & product recommendations on tracking pages.
Reduce returns by providing relevant product usage information on order tracking pages.

Know how good or bad your customers’ delivery experiences were by collecting delivery experience feedback

Capture your customers’ Delivery Satisfaction (DSAT) rating after every order delivery.
Monitor the average DSAT scores of customers to optimize shipping & delivery processes.

Additionally, LateShipment.com allows you to have your monthly shipping invoices automatically audited for 50+ shipping carrier service failures and claims refunds on your behalf.

The claimed amount is directly deposited into your account. This can save you up to 20% of your overall shipping spend.

Our automated refunds solution

Audits your monthly shipping invoices
Submits refund claims to your carrier(s) on your behalf
Deposits the refunded amount directly into your account

How good is that?

The best part is, it takes less than 2 minutes to see LateShipment.com in action without any change to your existing workflow.

The value we add to businesses is most evident when experienced first-hand. Try LateShipment.com now.

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