02/09/2019
Most retailers relay customer notifications on delivery status to carriers
Running an online retailing business is a complex operation. It requires attention to detail on multiple levels, and each and every action should be customer oriented, in order for the retailer to become a successful one. Still, many of the retailers simply neglect one of the most important aspects of the customer service – notifying the customer on delivery status.
The research conducted by the Parcel Lab has shown that the UK retailers in some 28% of the cases leave notifying the customer and tracking the shipment to the carriers, while the situation in Germany is even worse – no less than 53% of the retailers follow this practice!
The downside
This approach has more than a single downside. First of all, the customer isn’t being served in the proper way and they will often face the situation that they can’t track their shipment at all unless they visit the carrier’s website. This splits the natural and organic chain in the sale cycle and customers never respond well on such treatment.
Secondly, when this practice is pursued, the customers are not returning to the retailer’s website in order to track the shipment, so they can’t come across something else they like. Basically, the retailers are in this way throwing away a lot of good and healthy traffic that could easily result in more sales. After all, in these cases, they deal only with the people who already made the purchase on their website.
The conclusion
Since all of the major marketplaces have the shipment tracking option integrated into their native systems, they are getting their shoppers back via this traffic source. If retailers wish to be competitive, especially now when the marketplaces are slowly but steadily carving out the better part of the market, they need to react and they need to react fast.
The logical solution is integrating the shipment tracking into their own systems. It is an operation that does cost some money and takes some time, but the returns are more than worth the investment.
Although the UK based retailers are obviously faring better than their German colleagues, the current situation is far from ideal and they need to do something about it, and they need to do it fast!