Impacts Of Late Deliveries And Ways To Manage Them

By Author: Maulik Shah
Total Articles: 88
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People have become impatient nowadays as no one likes to wait for their delivery. This has made on-time delivery crucial. A few years ago, it was still considered normal to wait for seven to 10 business days for an online order to arrive. But thanks to technology, same-day, and next-day delivery have become common.

The demand for these instant deliveries has become huge and that’s why they are even ready to pay more for it.

According to research, 80% of online shoppers in the US want same-day delivery options. In short, not delivering the products on time to your customers can harm your business in several ways. Let’s have a look at the negative impacts that late deliveries can have on your business.

Impacts of Late Deliveries

Unhappy Customers

69% of customers will not buy from the retailers if their product is not delivered on time. Even a single late delivery can make your customers unhappy, making them lose trust in your store. So it means that it could be the last purchase made by the customers.

Unhappy ...
... customers will turn to your competitors if their deliveries are getting delayed.

Bad Customer Reviews

According to a report, 40% of customers read only one to three reviews to form an opinion. It also states that 88% of customers trust online reviews to make a purchase decision.

Remember, customer has the power to uplift the business of anyone. If they receive the late deliveries, they will go to your competitors.

Worst case, they might leave a bad review online. Even a single bad customer review can tarnish your brand reputation.

It is because customers no longer only ask their friends and families for recommendations. Instead, they surf online and use search engines to find the reviews.

High Cost of New Customer Acquisition

Late deliveries can also increase your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). CAC is the cost of convincing a potential customer to purchase a company’s service or product. Customer Acquisition Cost includes the cost of marketing, sales, advertisement.

For retailers, acquiring a new customer costs multiple folds more than retaining an existing one. So, any loss of existing customers would mean an increased cost of new customer acquisition.

Decrease in Revenue

As per this stat, retailers lose more than 1.5$ billion due to delivery issues. In this one of the major reasons is late deliveries.

When the deliveries are getting delayed, customers will leave to shop from that retailer altogether. So, losing existing customers due to late deliveries can result in a large loss in revenue.

How to Avoid Late Deliveries

Maintaining Accurate Inventory Records

Ensure your inventory is upto date i.e. your raw material purchasing and receiving processes are robust and flawless. Perform cycle counts on key product lines regularly. This is to ensure they are in-house before a production order is ready to manufacture.

Or you should have a product in your inventory before taking a lot of orders from your customers.

Maintaining Realistic Production Schedules

Knowing your production capacities is the best way to deliver the products on time. You should balance the workload to run the production process effectively. You can also get in touch with the sales team for line utilization KPIs which would be good to avoid chaos and blockage.

Let Your Customer Select the Delivery Date

In the end, you are serving your customers. What could be the better than letting them select the date and time of the delivery Magento 2 delivery date extension exactly lets you do the same.

With the Magento 2 estimated delivery date extension, you can pre-define the date and time of delivery for your customers to select one. For example, if your non-working day is 26th November. So you can exclude that date from the available delivery dates.

Your customer will also have the “Call me before delivery” option and can edit the date and time of delivery. You can also manage the holidays and undeliverable dates so that your customers couldn’t select the delivery on such dates.

Conclusion

For retailers, there are multiple ways to ensure a quality delivery experience. These are by ensuring the production schedules, inventory records, or scheduled delivery dates. 

Technology like delivery date scheduler is available nowadays. You just need to utilize it in right way to see the benefits of it. By following the above ways you can ensure the deliveries are on time.

Maulik Shah is the Founder and CEO of AppJetty, a fast growing software add-on store selling extensions and plugins for various technologies, including Odoo themes and odoo apps Magento 1 extensions and Magento 2 extensions. Maulik is a tech enthusiast and writes about the various aspects of ecommerce technology.