Online shoppers want eCommerce order tracking capabilities that track purchases from the moment they click the buy button until the goods arrive at their front door. If the items they buy aren’t in hand, shoppers want to know their location and how long they will take to arrive. As a result, virtually all retailers that sell online must now provide reliable shipment tracking to enhance the customer experience.

Do I Need eCommerce Order Tracking?

Online sellers can no longer afford to skimp on value-added services such as order tracking. With the eCommerce boom continuing unabated into 2022, shoppers will keep favoring brands that provide them with speed, reliability, and visibility in order shipping. Online buyers demand reliable eCommerce order tracking because it offers them the following benefits:

• Real-time information about when the order leaves the fulfillment center
• A smarter end-to-end shopping experience
• An ability to benchmark service levels between eCommerce sellers over time
• A capability to correct mistakes by canceling an order before it ships

Conversely, the seller also gains multiple benefits by providing visibility into online orders, including:

• Improved customer loyalty by meeting service expectations
• Enhanced consumer confidence
• Less time fielding customer complaints/inquiries about orders
• Ability to identify and address fulfillment/shipping issues in near real-time
• Ability to track and maintain higher on-time shipping ratios

How to Get Affordable eCommerce Order Tracking

Not all retailers implement order tracking technologies on their own. Instead, most rely on the capabilities of business partners to provide a clear end-to-end shipment picture to the end customer. To provide customers with reliable eCommerce order tracking, retailers use data from multiple sources. These sources may include:

Fulfillment centers

When an online shopper buys an item, that purchase triggers a series of events that result in a warehouse associate picking and packing the item and shipping it out to the buyer. The overall process may involve numerous steps, but the first consumer-facing order update usually happens when the fulfillment center prints the label for the parcel carrier. For the purposes of eCommerce order tracking, this process looks relatively similar whether the fulfillment operation is in-house or operated by a fulfillment provider.

Brick-and-mortar stores

Store fulfillment models have increased in popularity over the past two years despite the higher overall cost-per-order involved with this method. Omnichannel retailers have leveraged national store footprints to get local inventory into the hands of online shoppers quickly. In this model, a store associate acts as a warehouse associate to pick and pack the item from store inventory and ship it out to the customer. However, the end result is the same — the customer gets an alert once the shipping label prints.

Parcel carriers

Once shipped, data about eCommerce orders in transit comes almost exclusively from the carrier. Though this data isn’t quite real-time in most cases, it’s close enough to satisfy most customers. Each parcel has a tracking number, and carriers scan barcodes at each touchpoint. These scans automatically update location data for the retailer and consumer. Data from parcel carriers such as USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, and regional carriers gets linked to warehouse management software (WMS) and order management software (OMS) used by retailers and their providers to keep all parties up to date on order statuses.

Reliable eCommerce Order Fulfillment Services from Staci Americas

At Staci Americas, we continually invest in logistics and fulfillment technologies that provide the data you need to keep you and your customers up to date. To see how we can help you provide reliable eCommerce order tracking capabilities for your customers, please contact us today.