Faster Shipping = Better Customer Experience

June 11, 2020

Many companies are struggling to keep up with higher consumer expectations around shipping. If a retailer or brand can’t deliver products within two days, customers will just hop over to another retailer or marketplace that can (ahem, Amazon). And the window is growing even tighter as next-day shipping becomes the norm. All of which means lots of companies are facing the stark choice of either squeezing margins further to improve delivery times or disappointing their customers.

Here are a few suggestions for improving delivery times and lowering costs:

Use inventory by location to choose stores, DCs, FCs, 3PLs, or trading partners with items closer to your customers
Offer SFS or BOPIS to enable same day or next day pickup or delivery
Use optimized shipping algorithms that can choose the most cost-effective shipping company and method for on-time delivery

Implementing the above will allow you to offer faster and more cost effective shipping without having to invest millions in expanding your fulfillment capabilities. It’ll also make your ecommerce ecosystem more agile in responding to supply chain disruptions and market conditions. Best of all, you’ll unlock the ability to let your customers choose where, when, and how to receive their items while lowering overall fulfillment costs.

Here’s to achieving faster shipping times without breaking the bank!

PS: I also suggest using a wide variety of SLAs such as ASN and time to ship, to gather accurate data on your fulfillment processes. Use these data points to have constructive conversations with your own teams as well as trading partners on where you can make your ecommerce fulfillment more efficient.

Azad Sadr

Azad Sadr heads up Dsco’s Communications department. He loves telling stories and boiling complex topics down to digestible content for non-specialist readers. Over the course of his career he’s worked in academia, the oil and gas industry, and most recently, supply chain research and analysis. In his free time he enjoys walking around the town, drinking coffee, and writing fantasy novellas.