It’s no secret that businesses that offer industry-standard services and facilities reach the top faster. They can easily fulfill their customer needs and maintain a good brand value. In order to compete with them and stay in the game, you have to up the ante and make sure you have the necessary tools. However, several factors can determine how your business grows and performs in the market. Offering quality shipment tracking facilities to your customers is one of them. When you look at WooCommerce, many plugins are “meant” to help you set up the order tracking feature. But honestly, almost all of them don’t offer enough features to handle day-to-day orders. They require a lot of manual effort and eventually decrease your efficiency and productivity at your workplace. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the best WooCommerce Shipment Tracking plugin and show how it can help your business. We’ll first begin with the need of using the shipment tracking plugin on your WooCommerce and go through the popular ways of improving it. And then we shall see the features of this plugin.
Need for a WooCommerce order tracking plugin
Some of you may be wondering, whether out of so many important aspects of online business, why should you focus more on tracking your orders. Well, one of the major reasons is the scale of business and the customer engagement. With WooCommerce being the easiest to use E-commerce platform, more than 500,000 websites run on WooCommerce all around the world. So what this basically means is that the number of customers that are being served by WooCommerce based website is huge.
Secondly, in case if you have a smaller customer base, then also, you are required to spend more time in handling customer queries. But when it comes to tracking, the customers do not have much to enquire. They just require the tracking details so that they can have an idea of the whereabouts of their package. Imagine the time it takes for a medium scale online store to handle the customer queries regarding tracking.
While we are on the topic of tracking, not only the customer but the store owners themselves require tracking their packages. This again takes unnecessary time visiting the shipping carrier’s websites and manually entering the shipment IDs to get the tracking details. It may not seem such a chore for 4-5 orders, however, dealing with 50 orders per week and tracking so many orders is never an easy task. WooCommerce shipment tracking may not seem a great deal at first. However, it is one of the most important post-order fulfillment aspects of online business, that can ensure the owners their peace of mind as well as a great experience for their customers.
Benefits of using a WooCommerce Shipment Tracking
Today, WooCommerce store owners can focus on tracking their shipments in many different ways. We will now discuss how you can also improve the tracking process for yourself and your customers.
Convenience for you and your customers
One thing that is clear, both the store owner and their customers need to be updated about the whereabouts of the shipment. Hence, in such a scenario, the most convenient thing would be if both of them would have the tracking details with them. This way the store owner would easily check the delivery status of his orders. Also, in the case of the customers there would be no dependency on the store owner to get the tracking details. The fact that the customers can track their orders whenever they want is a great factor for a better customer experience. Otherwise, contacting the support or the store owners to track the shipments ranks at the very bottom when it comes to convenience.
Handle tracking details of bulk orders
Manually updating the tracking details and notifying the customers may seem the best solution for shipment tracking. However, for medium and large scale businesses with orders ranging from 50 to 100 orders per week, it may not be an option at all. It would take a lot of time and manual efforts. In such cases, the tracking details must be processed in bulk for all the orders. This would make it less time consuming to manage such a huge amount of data.
Automation can really help you, more than you think
One of the best ways to tackle the tedious and manual tasks is to automate them. In case of tracking the shipments, automation can save a lot of time and manual efforts. This involves an automated solution for WooCommerce shipment tracking. There are a lot of plugins WooCommerce store owners can use to make sure the tracking details can be automatically updated with all the order. Store owners who are low on the budget can choose from the free shipment tracking plugins based on WooCommerce. These plugins may lack some advanced functionalities but can prove to be very useful for small-scale business owners. However, if you want an automated WooCommerce shipment tracking plugin with all the advanced functionalities, you can choose among some of the premium shipment tracking plugins.
Cue in, WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro
In case you felt confused while checking out the list of free and premium WooCommerce shipment tracking plugins, you can check out our recommendation.
Based on the performance as well as the popularity of the plugin, WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro to be one of the best shipping tracking plugins. The plugin boasts some of the coolest features focussed on automating the task of tracking shipments for both the store owners as well as their customers. Let us take a quick look at what the plugin offers.
- Support for 85+ Shipping carriers
- Add or Delete a Shipping Carrier
- Automatically Importing Bulk Data
WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro plugin allows WooCommerce store owner to update the tracking details for every order instantly. The plugin is preconfigured with almost 85+ shipping carriers along with their tracking URLs. Hence, in the case of most of the WooCommerce store owners, there is no need to configure the plugin. Once an order is placed, the shipping carrier will be available along with the other shipping carriers on the order page. As we discussed, WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro plugin has almost every shipping carrier preconfigured. However, in case you don’t find your shipping carrier among that list, the plugin provides an easy way to add the shipping carrier to the list. Besides, if you are planning to use only one or two shipping carriers and don’t want any more shipping carriers to show while updating the tracking details, all you have to do is just delete the remaining shipping carriers. WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro plugin is a pro when it comes to automating the process of updating bulk orders with the tracking details. For this, the plugin provides an option to import the tracking details via CSV Import. This way the store owners can update the tracking details in the CSV file and import the file to update the tracking details. However, the plugin provides an advanced feature to schedule when the tracking details will be updated automatically for the orders using Tracking Data import via FTP. The plugin allows store owners to choose the time interval when the import will begin and after what interval should it start again. This way the only thing that the store owners need to do is update the CSV file on the server and let the plugin do its job.
- Automatic Scheduling of Tracking Data Import
- Email Notifications to Customers
One of the best features in WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro plugin is the way it provides an automated way to import tracking details via FTP. The store owners need to configure the FTP details and the path of the CSV file on the server to automatically import the tracking details based on the time that they have entered. It allows store owners to schedule the import time once and then after every interval the import will start automatically. As we discussed, the WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro plugin provides an easy way to handle WooCommerce tracking data. For the customers, these tracking details that are updated in the orders are sent via Email.WooCommerce by default sends an Order Completion Email to all the customers when the order is marked as complete. The plugin allows store owners to create a personalized message for the customers that will include the tracking details. This message will be included in the Order Completion Email and will be sent to the customers.
- Custom Tracking Message
WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro allows you to customize the tracking message that is attached to the Order Completion Email. This way you can set a template message and make sure your customers get a sense of personal touch while checking the email.
- Automatically changing the Order Status to Complete
The plugin while importing the tracking details of the orders, provides an option to automatically mark the updated orders as Complete. This way if in case there are a lot of orders, it saves a lot of time of the store owner to manually mark the orders complete. Also, since the Order Completion Email sends the tracking details automatically once the order is complete, the whole process is automated to save a lot of time per order.
Other carrier-specific plugins with shipment tracking
There are many other carrier-specific shipping plugins that offer shipment tracking. They can really help you manage orders in a much better way. And if you work or partner with carriers like UPS, DHL, etc., then it makes a good sense too. Here are some really good plugins that offer the tracking feature. Feel free to go through them.
- WooCommerce UPS Shipping Plugin with Print Label
- WooCommerce FedEx Shipping Plugin with Print Label
- WooCommerce Canada Post Shipping Plugin with Print Label – Canada region specific
- WooCommerce Royal Mail Shipping Plugin with Tracking – United Kingdom region specific
Here’s an article that explores other great shipping plugins. And while you’re going through them, you can also check out their specific features. Some features like Print label, Freight shipments, Box Packing, etc., can really put your business out there.
Final thoughts…
In this article, we discussed how WooCommerce shipment tracking seems simple at first yet plays a vital role in improving the way you do business. Almost every customer likes to be updated about the location of the shipment. And for store owners, keeping the track of all the orders and providing the tracking details to every customer is such a tedious task. In such situations, the best options would be to go for a WooCommerce shipment tracking plugin that can automate the process of handling the tracking data for the orders as well as providing those details to the customers. This article covers all the aspects of a successful business including time, cost, convenience, and customer experience and shows the importance of an automated way to handle WooCommerce shipment tracking.
