Avoiding failed deliveries

In ecommerce, it can be all-too easy to focus only on making your website more efficient, while leaving the actual delivery of your goods in the hands of the Gods.

By Guy Mucklow, CEO of Postcode Anywhere

But the buying process doesn’t finish when the customer leaves your website. It ends when the customer has received their product, and more importantly, is happy with what they’ve ordered and the service they’ve received.

Even if your delivery processes are fast, it may not be enough. Receiving a missed delivery slip instead of the goods you ordered can seem more of a taunt than an assurance that the driver got there while you were out. Of course, these issues become even more important now the industry is gearing up for the Christmas rush.

Read On:
Postage checklist
How to delivery quickly and accurately
Upping your shipping

According to the Independent, during December 2012, 225k parcels failed to arrive each day when promised. Beyond postage costs, this undelivered mail means extra cost and a damaged reputation for your company.

Whether or not you believe the accuracy of that number, failed delivery is still a key problem for retailers at Christmas.

Items get lost as creaking fulfilment processes struggle with the increase in demand, failed deliveries occur as people are busy and not at home when the parcel arrives. So what can you do?

A proven solution is to build delivery flexibility into the checkout so customers can tap into local delivery outlets, usually convenience stores, using a local delivery service like Collect+.

The advantage here is that the customer doesn’t have to be in to receive the delivery, it’s sent to a local outlet where the parcel is kept for up to 7 days and the customer can pop in at their convenience. Many of the local outlets are open until 8pm, making it easy to pop-in after work.

Although this isn’t unique to peak trading, often I’ve found the driver to implement local collection services is the chaos from the previous Christmas cycle when failed deliveries and irate customers cost the business money and a loss of customer goodwill.

The Royal Mail highlights incorrect and outdated addresses are one of the main reasons for post not reaching its intended destination.

Therefore my next recommendation for retailers would be to invest in intelligent form validation. In a test conducted with Usability experts Etre, Luke Wroblewski found that real-time validation caused a 22% increase in success rates and 31% increase in satisfaction rating.

For more visit: www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk