Ways to Improve Your Store Experience

Shipping can be an incredibly stressful part of any business transaction. Once your customers have paid for their product you supply, you have to send it to them, but you have virtually no control over the carrier that delivers it. However, as helpless as you may fee in this process, there are steps you can take to help make your customer more comfortable about their pending product.

Offer an Estimated Delivery Date

Hands down, one of the best ways to make your customer more confident about buying from you is if you offer an estimated delivery date. In fact, nearly 60 percent of online shoppers want to see some sort of guaranteed or estimated delivery date in checkout, as reported by a 2012 comScore report. Even though it seems pretty standard to have an estimated delivery date, many online stores still don’t provide them.

Send Shipping Notifications to Your Customer

Shipping notification emails seem like pretty standard practice. In fact, when a customer gets one, they usually look at it for only a second before deleting it. However, to make more of an impact to your customer, you can double up on your shipping notifications by alerting them of updates to their package via Facebook Messenger.

Believe it or not, Facebook Messenger has more than 800 million monthly users. However, it’s growing from a simple way to chat up your friends and family to a business tool to connect with customers. Not to mention, these days you can even add a Messenger channel to your own Shopify store, in which you can update customers with real-time shipping notifications.

Allow For Same-Day, Speedier Shipping

When shopping online, customers are looking for quicker delivery times to receive their products. In fact, nearly a third of millennials consider same-day delivery standard practice from a business and expect it to be a company’s top priority for their customers.

Offering same-day, speedier shipping can allow your customers to receive their order only a couple hours after they place it. However, this can help prevent shipping complaints from a delayed courier. If you’re looking to start offering same-day shipping from your Shopify store, you can team up with Postmates to deliver your products to customers quicker than ever.

Streamline Processing Times

You can also reduce the time it takes between the customer placing their order and you shipping it out. This can help you to streamline your processing times. The faster you can ship out a product, the better. One way to do this is to immediately notify whoever is packing the product when an order comes in. With a small business, you can simply send a text or automated email to the packer.

You can optimize your packing process too. Make sure you have enough packing materials, boxes, and tape on hand so the packer can easily complete their task. Also, make sure your printer always has enough ink so you can quickly print shipping labels.

Allow Customers to Track Their Orders

This is another feature that many customers love and find to be incredibly helpful. Give your customers plenty of options for tracking their package like on-site tracking and links to track on the package carrier’s website.

Provide Free Shipping

If you want to compete with larger retailers, you should consider offering some kind of free shipping option. Nowadays, many shoppers expect to have this option. Think about providing free basic ground shipping with every order that totals over a certain amount.

Offer a One-of-a-Kind Unboxing Experience

Improving shipping involves more than simply getting the package to the customer. You can boost customer experience and improve the entire shipping process by paying extra attention to the unboxing experience. This refers to the moment that your customer opens their package for the very first time.

This is a great opportunity to go above and beyond for your customer, increase brand awareness, and keep your customers coming back again and again. Here are a few ways you can create a unique unboxing experience:

• Purchase FSC® certified and BCT stamped cardboard boxes
• Include a handwritten thank you note
• Add a free sample, discount code, or small gift
• Wrap the product in beautiful tissue paper