Russell Steed (00:07.567)
What's up everybody? Welcome to the Ecommerce Unlocked podcast where we cut the fluff and talk about the actionable strategies and tactics that you can use to implement into your eCommerce business today. As of today, it is tomorrow's Thanksgiving. So we're gonna be taking a little bit of time off. Hopefully your holiday plans are going well and you're just killing it. Hopefully we'll hear some good news from you guys after this holiday season. And we'll probably do, I don't know, we'll probably do a post-mortem in December.
at some point just kind of seeing our own successes during Black Friday season and then and hopefully hear from some of you on your successes and some of the failures because that's good too. So today let's jump into it. So today Emerson is going to bring some knowledge to us on shipping in transit changing things and I'm going to just let him talk about it because he sounds way more educated when it comes to shipments and that kind of stuff. I find it extremely and incredibly boring. So I'm going to go take a nap.
Emerson (01:04.69)
No, we're gonna make it spicy today and we're gonna put you Eaters. Alright, so first off the wonderful world of shipping is amazing. We're gonna cut the fluff and talk about the stuff That's like a cartoon, bro Wow, I said one word. Alright fine to keep you awake we're just right off with drum roll
Russell Steed (01:07.12)
Hahaha
Russell Steed (01:23.076)
I'm just saying you already got me asleep.
Russell Steed (01:28.211)
Hahaha
Russell Steed (01:33.648)
I get... oh I could, yeah, here we go.
Emerson (01:36.11)
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
The question of the day is, what carrier over the past three years has had the most, the highest on-time delivery percentage? Your options are FedEx.
Russell Steed (01:40.423)
Hehehe
Russell Steed (01:47.211)
Ooh, it's good. No, no, I wanna pick TNT.
Emerson (01:54.76)
TNT is the old FedEx in Europe. So yes.
Russell Steed (01:58.079)
Yeah, I just I wanted to pull it out of the one shipping thing. I did just kidding I know a lot about shipping so continue. It's not that boring
Emerson (02:05.25)
one. The most like obscure thing that most like domestic Americans don't know is the thing. Yes.
Russell Steed (02:10.227)
Okay, give me some options, give me some options and I'll actually guess.
Emerson (02:13.298)
UPS or USPS. So those three, these are domestic on time deliveries between November 20th and December 14th or the past three years from now, between 2022.
Russell Steed (02:20.497)
Mmm.
Okay, I'm thinking, I wanna say FedEx. For some reason they seem like the top tier to me.
Emerson (02:29.646)
Brr-Pfft! You know nothing, son! Heheheheh!
Russell Steed (02:31.44)
Oh, dang it. Well, it's definitely not USPS, so I guess it's UPS.
Emerson (02:35.455)
It's UPS. UPS has won. They have been 2019, 97.5% on time. 96.7, 2020, 96.9. Great radio station. 96.9. No? Alright. 97.5. All sound like radio stations.
Russell Steed (02:47.475)
Yeah.
Russell Steed (02:51.017)
UPS 97.9
Emerson (02:53.026)
Listen to their daily update on UPS. So yeah, kind of interesting. Now all the other carriers are hovering around that same point. So I mean, again, the highest, uh, UPS has done 97.5% on time delivery. Now this data, I honestly believe is very skewed. This is from, um, uh, ship matrix, which is one of like the leading, um, like auditing companies and have this like statistical companies out there of the space, um,
Russell Steed (02:55.872)
Yeah, seriously.
Emerson (03:17.302)
They, this is excluding anything due to like a weather delay or acts of God or things that are like non carrier related. This is more just carrier performance, which I think is very skewed because in general, you're going to see most carriers have around a 93 to 96% on time delivery in general throughout the year is typical. And that's with acts of God and everything included. So
Russell Steed (03:37.159)
So I love that they use the term acts of God. Do they like ever define like what that means? Cause it may be natural disasters, but then I've talked to some brands where their FedEx truck like just lit up on fire or somebody stole the FedEx truck. Do those count?
Emerson (03:53.462)
They usually don't, those are, those are not acts of God, those are acts of, acts of man. Okay, now we'll turn to our segment and we will all go this way and talk about Jesus. Jesus and shipment. Jesus take the wheel. That is what we're talking about. That is what, it's a hope and a prayer to make sure your shipments arrive. So you have to have a little bit of faith here, y'all.
Russell Steed (03:58.317)
Act.
Russell Steed (04:03.46)
Yeah.
Russell Steed (04:08.955)
Excellent.
Russell Steed (04:14.275)
We need to get Adam Peek back on here to talk about packaging. Is the packaging pastor, was that his name or preacher? One of those two. Yep.
Emerson (04:18.014)
Oh yeah. Yeah. The packaging feature, uh, the packaging pass. That's what it is. Um, but yeah, that's right. I'll use the fun guy. Um, so yeah, just to kind of have that first off is the carriers are not a hundred percent on, on time delivery. I, they're not always making it. You gotta have expectations. You're outlining that. And the main thing is you're looking at your CX and your emails, um, your customer inquiries, you're probably only having like
2 to 5% of your customers are making 80% of the noise, most likely. This is not even the 80-20 rule, I'd even say. I'd say it's like the 595 rule on customer service. So of those, if only 5%, 5, 10% of your shipments are being late, that's still a decent amount of orders. If you're shipping out during Black Friday, 2,000 orders that week or whatever it is, and 10% of them are having some type of issue with shipping in it, that's 10% of your customers that are emailing you asking about, hey, where's my order? What's happening to it? It's stuck and whatnot.
and you gotta find solutions out there. So your main thing on this is managing the entrant. There's two things you wanna do. You wanna have great communication with your customers and you wanna get those issues resolved, okay? Another statistic on this, Steve, another drum roll. A drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Russell Steed (05:31.759)
and uh
There.
Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know what I'm anticipating here.
Emerson (05:41.474)
Guess what question I'm going to ask you next.
Russell Steed (05:43.947)
Oh man, this is going to be good. Well, I've got one. Um, what percentage of the US population is named Karen? Is it close to five percent? And is it the Karens that are, uh, causing all the noise?
Emerson (05:56.298)
It could be the Karen, just probably about that. I would say Karen with a C, the ones that are causing most issues.
Russell Steed (05:58.651)
Yeah
Ooh, that's fair. I only looked up Karen with a K, which I felt is a little bit noisier.
Emerson (06:06.92)
No, I'm saying I'm saying point to five percent of population.
Russell Steed (06:14.092)
Ooh, I was gonna say you're close, but you're not. It's 0.019%, so not nearly as high as I expected. Anyway, so it's not all Karen's, it's probably the Tiffany's and the Lindsay's as well. So continue, Emerson.
Emerson (06:18.85)
I was Karen's.
Emerson (06:25.407)
That could be it. Yeah, so question of the day is, did you know?
Russell Steed (06:31.247)
I just, sorry, I just realized I only gave women's names and we might get called out on that. So it's the Bobs and the Daves as well. We'll throw them in, throw them under the bus. Sorry, now get back to it.
Emerson (06:36.246)
Oh yeah.
Emerson (06:40.578)
There we go. Back to it. Okay, not even a question. I'm not gonna ask you a question, I'm just gonna tell you something now. Okay. Yeah, okay, so fun fact. One in 20 online orders failed to be delivered on the first attempt. Okay, and that's from DHL. That's a statement. What do you think it is? Because that's a statement from DHL. DHL is telling me that.
Russell Steed (06:47.655)
Sorry, I guess I wasted our time.
Russell Steed (06:57.299)
Is that true or false? Because I want to say false.
Russell Steed (07:04.775)
Gotta change my answer. It's true.
Emerson (07:06.866)
Alright, you win! Wow!
Russell Steed (07:09.8)
Hey! No, no, no!
Emerson (07:12.582)
So yeah, one in 20 online orders failed to be delivered on the first attempt. That's a decent amount. Again, if you're having a hundred orders, that's five of them that are going, are not going to make it even on the first attempt, that's not including some of us that are late or lost damage or stolen. Those are just orders that they try to get delivered. And for whatever reason they don't, they're either be returned to sender or there was a key code they couldn't get in. Um, whatever the reason was is they couldn't deliver it. They went to the wrong address, wrong zip code was on the label, whatever it was. So just kind of have that in mind.
Now, some of the things you can do to streamline this is when a customer has a question about their order status is either you're going to get a phone call or an email about that, right? And so if you're using a tool like Gorgias or Zendesk, Help Scout, customer, some type of help desk, you want to have awesome flows to easily create an awesome experience to see if the customer got a quick resolution on that, that issue. If you can create flows, you can have chat bots that these days with Gorgias, for example, you can say if someone.
uh, chats in saying, Hey, where's my order? They tag your tracking information and they can send the tracking information to the customer. So I'll do a chat. They can get that. You can create auto replies and automated workflows, um, through those help desk, most of them and send the customer automatically their, their tracking, um, details. Now the question is, is Steve, have you ever experienced a late package in your life?
Russell Steed (08:30.788)
Um, uh, what's the yes I have. That's the answer. What are the options? Yes, no, maybe.
Emerson (08:34.206)
The answer is what's the truth? Russ only responds to multiple choice answers.
Russell Steed (08:44.392)
multiple choice questions and or true or false. So, which is just a different type of multiple choice.
Emerson (08:46.622)
Yeah. He's on the blank, he did not do good.
Russell Steed (08:52.72)
Ding her! Yes I have.
Emerson (08:56.124)
Yeah, no, so the thing on that it's very if you don't know where it is, it's very concerning am I right?
Russell Steed (09:02.951)
Well, yeah, especially if you're like anticipating it and you're checking that email or that link like every 20 minutes. You're like, is it here yet? What the? Ah, dang, now it's coming tomorrow? What?
Emerson (09:13.486)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, for me, so example, I just moved back to Fresno, so now I became a Fresno State fan. What, what, Fresno State go Bulldogs, you know? But I...
Russell Steed (09:22.039)
Hmm, I love I love I love water pillow. That's awesome
Emerson (09:25.982)
Yeah, well, the presence of water polo is the shiz, that's where it's at. Well, I bought that, uh, there's a little water polo in town. I'm not, I never been, I went to the woman's basketball game last night. Our friend is the woman's basketball coach for Fresno State. So that's fun. Um, but, um, anyways, I ordered all this from state swag, but they didn't send me an order confirmation email, which was, I thought was really weird, um, from their site and, um, it took them like a week to send me my tracking information. And like, that was very annoying.
Russell Steed (09:30.64)
Is that their big thing?
Russell Steed (09:42.867)
Alright, okay.
Russell Steed (09:49.683)
Mm-hmm.
Emerson (09:55.446)
And I'm like, dude, I can't buy from these guys again. I don't know where my order is. I have no idea what's happening with it. This is terrible. I've gotten one of my items and the other one, I guess they shipped out later and they shipped it like a week after I got my first item. And then they sent me the tracking and it should have been delivered yesterday. It's not delivered. So they said today it's gonna be delivered. So we'll see if I get my full swag pack yet or not. But anyways, managing that customer expectations. So what's pretty interesting about this, the industry has changed significantly, I'd say, since August of 2023.
And with Shopify putting out all these updates, it's really interesting to help customers get better insight into their orders and what vendors can now do, merchants can do on Shopify. So first off, the old school way, which is still a very valid, great way to do it is you're going to get those Wismo tickets, where is my order? Right. And there are services out there like wonderment, Malomo, 17 track rush. These are all kind of popular Shopify tracking apps that are out there that basically a customer can go to their site either through a
a hyperlink or through entering their order number and email address or some criteria, they can search their own order and pull up a branded tracking experience for your customer. Now the tracking page in general, if you want to view most views sites, pages on your site, typically between like three to seven times while an orders in transit customer is going to look at the tracking status. So you want to have a beautiful branded tracking page where customers are saying, hey, here's my order. And then you can also be promoting some other item, some upsell.
some informational videos on the products I just ordered, whatever it might be. That's a very valuable page. So using a service like that is very, very valuable. So I definitely look into a service provider if you don't have something like that of a branded tracking page. Now, before this, there wasn't really a good way to notify your customers of the shipping status of where your order really was, you would use maybe one of those service providers and then ping them saying like, Hey, when the order is in transit, send an email out to the customer, let them know their order is in transit or an SMS or whatever it might be. Then once it's delivered, send a.
a notification to the customer once it's delivered. Now, what you really wanna look into though, is very interesting, I think on Shopify standpoint, is they just came out with a new API. Well, not API, a new update to their service. And so I'm gonna pull up on my screen for those that are watching on YouTube and whatnot video. Here's a dummy store that I'm looking at too, is they now have delivery status as an option that you can track within your orders. So in the orders tab,
Emerson (12:19.914)
Here's a couple of samples. It's going to show the fulfillment status, which you've always had that information for. Now they have delivery status. And what's great about that as well is you can add a filter and filter by that. So if I go to the delivery status filter, I can then click and see which orders are at different stages of the delivery process. Now, what I love about this is that you can now actually react to customers or know before a customer maybe even looks at their tracking page.
to say, oh, I tried to get this delivered and it was attempted delivery, but they didn't make it. It's delayed for whatever reason, failed delivery, all these issues that can happen to a shipment in transit. You now can notify that customer before they even know, hopefully. So at least you're managing the expectation that's coming from you instead of them reaching out to you. So again, if you can say, hey, I realize that there's a delay in the shipment, you're gonna wanna notify that customer. And now through Shopify's updates, you can now adjust that and make that happen. So I definitely would take a look at.
taking advantage of these delivery statuses, because that's going to be a game changer for you. Now there are providers out there. Usually you pay a little bit extra for those, but now you can do that all in-house and not need a third party provider to actually give you a better look and visibility into your delivery status on it. So those would be kind of my key takeaways to manage end shipments and transit and managing that expectation with your customers. First, have a great help desk to be proactive when something does go wrong, the customer is email you.
Make sure you have a good process to give a good customer experience there. Have a good tracking page on there. Good. Make it easy for customers to track your orders. If you're using a low cost ship method, it doesn't provide tracking. That can, that could be a good solution for you to paint on the price point and the service you're trying to offer, but that's going to increase the amount of customer service tickets you're dealing with. So just be aware if that's something you're choosing, that's what's going to come with it. It's going to be an increased cost of customer, customer service. I'm using a less reliable or.
less visibility in your supply chain, you're gonna get more people asking questions. So I would say if you can, use a tracking, a shipping method that has tracking on it, and then use a branded tracking page. Use one of those services like Wonderment, like Malomo, like Rush, Track 17. Find one that meets your needs and go with one of those services that you can get that branded tracking experience, give the customer more information on their order status and your brand as a whole.
Emerson (14:43.998)
and then track your order information and shipments and transit using Shopify, new updated order tabs in here to see the delivery status of them. I think that's gonna really help your customer experience and manage that customer experience across the whole. So hopefully that helps you guys manage that expectation and process with your customers a little bit more. And we'll see you guys on the next episode. Have a great weekend.