estimated delivery

Making a customer wait clueless when their ordered products will reach their doorstep, is a big turn off, especially in the time of COVID crisis. Not exact but, if you can give them an estimated time of delivery, won’t that be a big relief?  

Not just due to the coronavirus pandemic, but generally, one must not let customers wait for anything. We all very well know that the competition is killing out there and the customers have a fleet of options so they don’t have to wait for you. Due to the pandemic, customers began to panic buy and stock essential items, in short, migrated in large numbers to the online shopping. Why? Because of the safety and speed of services. Now, if your multi-vendor ecommerce marketplace solutionlacks the key point i.e. the excellent delivery service, then there’s no doubt you are going to lose the eCommerce game. 

When the pandemic forced us to maintain social distancing, the online stores began to grab the opportunity to deliver goods and services to the customers at their doorstep as efficiently as possible. While some started the contactless delivery – where the ordered products are left at the doorstep by the delivery person instead of handing it over to the customer, some began drone delivery. Now, no matter what method you are using to deliver the order to the customer, the service behind it matters the most. 

By service we mean, keeping your customers in the loop about the delivery of their order. As a lot of roadblocks can appear in the delivery process like the order gets damaged or lost, the delivery person fails to deliver it on time, heavy traffic, rain or other misfortune events, logistics issues, location problem, and some common challenges faced during the pandemic like – a sudden surge in orders, disruption in the supply chain, running out-of-stock etc., therefore, it is very important for you as a store owner to let your waiting, as well as the potential customers, know the estimated time and date of the delivery of their products to keep them hooked to your store. 

So, what is the ‘Estimated Delivery’ Module? 

One of the major effects the Coronavirus pandemic has caused is in employment. Majority of them are now working from home which has in turn given rise to online shopping. But, before making the purchase, one thing that they check is the time estimate of delivery as only if it is suitable, they proceed to payment. There, if your online store shows them an ‘ estimated delivery’ module on the product page or during the order process, or even in the order email informing customers everything about the delivery process from the estimated date and time of delivery, imagine the conversion rate you get and trust the customers will have upon you. 

How to Set Up One on Your Store? 

Getting an ‘estimated delivery’ module on your store is no big deal. It is something you can ask your marketplace solution provider to do it for you or you can also configure yourself without an expert’s supervision. What this module does is – it uses the geolocation to locate the visitors of your store and then display the carriers that are available to them. So, when the visitor browses your online store, the geolocation will automatically pick up the user’s location to display the estimated delivery time for the carriers that make delivery, with a high level of accuracy. And if the visitor registers an account with your online store, then you have nothing to worry about, the module will itself take the registered address of the user to display an even more accurate delivery date. 

How will it benefit? 

If yours is a multivendor eCommerce marketplace solution then setting up an ‘estimated delivery’ module is worth. As it comes with quite several advanced carrier options that will give you the control to efficiently manage your carriers like: 

  • You can enable or disable them whenever you want and assign them specific names, as per your choice. 
  • You can modify the delivery dates as many times as you want because due to the increased online orders the shipping delays happen a lot and hence, the delivery date and time can keep on fluctuating. Hence, using this module you can keep your customers informed about their delivery. 
  • You can configure parameters like style, time format, position, and colour of the “estimated delivery” box without having to edit any line of code. 
  • When orders overflow, it becomes difficult to manage and deliver all on the same day, thus, in such cases, ‘estimated delivery’ module will allow you to prepare for your orders. Meaning, you can add some preparation days to any product by category, brand, and supplier or to each product or even by combination to manage and deliver them perfectly. 
  • Customers often forget about the out of stock products and may look into your competitors’ shop to get it. Now, what if you can deliver the products which were ‘out of stock’ by adding additional days to restock them if sold without having them in stock? In this way, your sales won’t get affected. 
  • You can set up delivery dates globally, by category or product itself.
  • You can modify delivery days if you are very much burdened with orders and will be unable to process delivery of orders or are going on a vacation and have to inform customers about the period the closure will last, as vacations and the delivery date will be expanded during that period. 
  • You can inform your customers about the available date of delivery, means if a product with a regular delivery date is going to be available on a certain date, you can simply configure and update the new delivery date for them. 

 Wrapping up 

Customers today expect everything to be instant or as fast as possible as they have no time to wait for anything. Hence, if you want your multi-vendor ecommerce marketplace solution to delivery in the best form possible, especially in this period of COVID-19, you need to approach the best multivendor marketplace development company inUAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar to set up the Estimated Delivery module on your store with such finesse that your sales record keeps on growing.

By Anurag Rathod

Anurag Rathod is an Editor of Appclonescript.com, who is passionate for app-based startup solutions and on-demand business ideas. He believes in spreading tech trends. He is an avid reader and loves thinking out of the box to promote new technologies.