How WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Increases Customer Satisfaction

woocommerce-shipment-tracking
When it comes to WooCommerce shipment tracking, customer satisfaction remains a high priority. This guide will help you understand how order tracking can have a positive impact on customer satisfaction. What is Shipment tracking? Shipment tracking is the process of locating the ordered package at different points of time during the order fulfillment. Tracking shipment status provides the current status and the location of the ordered package in real-time along with its anticipated delivery date.  To provide a seamless shopping experience to customers, WooCommerce store owners have to provide regular shipment tracking notifications. In this article, let us discuss how important shipment tracking is for eCommerce stores and how store owners can provide WooCommerce shipment tracking.

Importance of shipment tracking for eCommerce stores

WooCommerce store owners must provide tracking status to their customers from the moment an order is placed to the time the customer receives the package. This will ensure that the order fulfillment experience is smooth for both customers and the store owners. Let us see the effects of shipment tracking:
  1. Reduces Customer anxiousness
When customers order products from your WooCommerce store, they look for options to locate their packages. Especially, the customers who order from your online store for the first time. When there is a delay in the shipment and customers do not get the shipment tracking details, they get anxious about their orders. This anxiousness leads them to cancel the order resulting in the overall increase in the order cancellation rate.
  1.  Increases customer satisfaction and Builds Customer trust 
Tracking Shipment status provides complete details of the customer’s package right from the time it is ordered until it is delivered. Shipment tracking lets customers know the package’s current status and location. Customers also get notified when there is a delay in their shipment. When customers know the whereabouts of their package at any point in time after they place an order, it adds to their overall positive experience and they start building trust in your brand and are likely to become your repeat customers.
  1. Reduces the workload on you and your support team 
In the absence of the shipment tracking details, customers completely rely on your support team to locate the package. Numerous calls from customers asking the status of their package will increase your team’s workload. And if it’s only you handling your orders, then you end up spending your major time answering to customer calls. Shipment tracking helps you save your time from these queries and lets you focus on more important business  I think by now we can all agree how important tracking status is for seamless shipping experience to your customers. So, let us now see what information customers want to know from the tracking status.

What is the information that a customer wants to know from the tracking status?

  1. Has the WooCommerce store owner received the order?
  2. Did the shipping carrier pick up the package from the Warehouse?
  3. Where is the package at any given point of time?
  4. When can I expect the package delivery?
All this information must be provided to the customers ordering products from your WooCommerce store.  So, let us briefly look into order fulfillment steps that most of the WooCommerce stores go through 

How to provide shipment tracking in your WooCommerce Order Fulfilment 

WooCommerce order fulfillment process is the steps taken by the store owners from the time they receive the orders until the package is delivered to the customers. In most of the WoCommerce stores, the order fulfillment process will involve basic steps like:
  1. Online buyers place the order on your WooCommerce store
  2. WooCommerce store admin can see all the new orders received on WordPress backend under WooCommerce orders. Here admins can change the status of orders into processing
  3. Online buyers receive the email notification that their orders are received by store owners and are being processed.
  4. Now WooCommerce store owners can choose the shipping carrier and generate the shipping label, invoice along with other documents. If WooCommerce store owners are using WooCommerce shipping plugins by PluginHive they can print the shipping labels and other documents within WooCommerce and save lots of time.
  5. WooCommerce store owners can now pack the products and prepare them for the pickup. Shipping carrier company will pick the product from the warehouse to deliver it to the customers.

Here is where the tracking begins:

  1. At this point, WooCommerce store owners can notify Buyer that their product is picked up by the shipping carrier. Along with this, they can also give an estimated delivery date for the package arrival. 
  2. Online buyers will receive the tracking notification about their package at each stage from the shipping carrier.    
  3. Shipping carriers deliver the package to Customer.
  4. Both WooCommerce store owners and customers get notified that the order is fulfilled.
Providing tracking status of all the orders to customers is a hectic task whether you are managing a big or a small WooCommerce store. You require lots of time and manual effort to perform order fulfillment tasks like packing, printing shipping label along with other documents. On the other hand, shipment tracking can be completely automated for any WooCommerce store by using the robust shipping solution or plugins. There are plenty of plugins on the market but none comes close to the WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro. With this plugin, you can integrate order tracking functionalities to WooCommerce stores.

Order Tracking in WooCommerce 

There are two ways in which WooCommerce store owners can provide tracking status to their customers. One is through email notifications and other is on the My Account page of the WooCommerce website. The advantage of providing tracking information within the WooCommerce site in my account page is, you will lead the customer back to your site, thus you will have an extra opportunity to upsell your products.  To automate the WooCommerce shipment tracking you will be needing the shipment tracking plugin. Before you choose any shipment tracking plugin you need to make sure that the plugin can provide shipment tracking information for the scenarios below.

Carrier coverage

Most of the WooCommerce stores will use more than one shipping carrier. In a day you might have received several orders and have decided to ship them with the different shipping carriers. In this case, you need to send shipment tracking information for orders from all the carriers. Therefore you need to use a tracking solution which can provide tracking status from more than one shipping carrier. In many of the cases, WooCommerce store owners use popular carriers like FedEx or UPS to ship the products to easily accessible areas and for remote locations, they use local shipment carriers. 

Bulk Tracking 

If your WooCommerce store receives more than 50 orders per week then instead of individually updating the order status you can prepare a CSV sheet to update these details in bulk. You can bulk update the order status from multiple carriers. You can prepare a CSV file with the tracking status along with their respective order numbers. Import this CSV file into your WooCommerce store. The tracking details on the CSV file should be obtained from the carrier.

The tracking details on the CSV file  obtained from the carrier

After you import these tracking details into your WooCommerce store the tracking status must be automatically mapped with the respective orders. That’s why it is very important that you provide the correct order number while preparing your CSV file. After mapping is done the order status will be automatically marked as completed.

WooCommerce-Shipment-Tracking-Orders-completed-automatically

As your order status changes from processing to completed, customers should receive an email notifying their order status. Also when a customer logs in to his account on your WooCommerce store he should be able to see the tracking details.

Tracking-Details-in-My-Accounts

Tracking-Details-in-Order-Completion-Email

You can read this article on how you can import tracking data via CSV file for bulk shipment tracking.

Live Tracking 

Until the product is picked up you can easily locate the product and provide the tracking status. When the product is in the warehouse it is easy to locate it. But once it leaves the warehouse and is picked up by the shipping carrier it might not be easy to locate the products. In this case, the customer needs to receive the tracking status directly from the carrier services. If the customer does not have the tracking status with him he will not know when the product will show up at his doorstep. This will cause anxiety in the buyers, which might lead to a bad customer experience. All popular carriers like FedEx and UPS provide real-time tracking status of the shipments. You just need to forward the same tracking status to your customer manually or automate it with the help a shipment tracking plugin.

Email Notification

Whenever a customer orders a product from your WooCommerce store, an email with the tracking status is a basic thing he expects from you. Email tracking should contain the tracking number along with the order status. And if possible the link to the real-time tracking status. You can read these articles on how to send the tracking status to the customers. Also Email with the tracking status provides you a great opportunity for marketing. You can also provide other information, like how can they contact the support team. WooCommerce shipment tracking pro is one such plugin that can automate shipment tracking for your WooCommerce store for all the above scenarios. 

Conclusion:

In this article, we have discussed how important shipment tracking is for a seamless shipping experience for customers. We have shown you how order tracking can be improvised and how you can leave a positive impact on your customers. If you need any help with setting up shipment tracking on your WordPress/WooCommerce website then feel free to Contact PluginHive Customer Support. Good Luck!

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