The holiday season is never short on smiles, especially if you’re an ecommerce business that delivers on all fronts. Unfortunately, every once in a while a frown appears when an order goes wrong. Typical peak season issues all ecommerce businesses big and small are susceptible to include:

• An item not arriving on time
• The wrong item being delivered
• Incomplete orders sent out
• Lack of delivery status notifications 
• The order getting lost in transit
• Poor customer service response time

These are just some examples of how things can go wrong in the most wonderful time of year. If handled incorrectly, these peak season order issues can negatively impact your brand and drive away return customers. As you plan for a more productive, profitable, and all around positive new year, ShipMonk wants to share some advice on how to recover from peak season order issues and prevent them from happening again.

Perfect How You Track Packages

Lost and delayed packages are a big peak season problem. Thankfully, there are ways ecommerce businesses can see where their orders are. Every shipping carrier has its own methodology for creating tracking numbers. Specifics aside, unique barcodes and tracking numbers are scanned every time a package is moved. For example, when it leaves a fulfillment center, arrives at the shipping carrier’s processing facility, leaves that facility, and so on. With these constant scans, your ecommerce business has a way to track orders at every stage of their journey.

Advanced 3PLs like ShipMonk make tracking your packages easier with one-stop-shop 3PL software that’s made all the more efficient thanks to the extensive network of shipping carriers we work with. That being said, it is every ecommerce business’s responsibility to take advantage of the tools that leading 3PLs like ShipMonk place at your fingertips. 

Just as customers can opt-in to receive text updates about a delivery, with fully integrated 3PL software, ecommerce businesses can receive automated notifications about order status. Taking advantage of those integrations and that real-time visibility lets you see issues quickly, and thus troubleshoot and resolve them faster. That dynamism is the key to speedy recovery when things go wrong. 

Use Delivery Status Notifications

Harnessing the immense power of ShipMonk’s 3PL software is a surefire method to prevent peak season order issues from getting out of hand. The best way to calm a customer who is eagerly or anxiously awaiting a peak season delivery is by keeping them in the loop about where an order is. You don’t want to be a company that processes and confirms an order on Black Friday and then still hasn’t given a customer an update about the delivery the week before Christmas. That’s bad on all fronts.

So learn the lingo of the most important delivery status notifications, and utilize ShipMonk’s entrepreneur-in-mind designed 3PL software to regularly send out these notifications to customers. The basics include letting customers know an order has been received, has left the fulfillment center, is out for delivery, and has been delivered. Some important other status notifications to employ include:

In Transit – The order is “en route” on a plane, train, ship, or truck. Its status won’t change until it arrives at its next location and is scanned.

Out for Delivery – Your shipping carrier driver has the package on their truck—or at least is supposed to have it on the truck—and it should be out for delivery.

Awaiting Delivery Scan – The package was out for delivery, but has not yet been scanned at the door. This may or may not mean it was delivered. If it wasn’t, this status is usually resolved by waiting a day or two.

Scheduled Delivery Pending – For reasons outside of their control, the shipping carrier can no longer meet the expected delivery date, and does not yet have a new date.

Delivery Exception – The package could not be delivered as planned due to unforeseen circumstances. 

Exception: Action Required – An action is required on the customer’s part before the package can move further. 

Delivery Not Attempted – The package was out for delivery, but something prevented the driver from delivering it.

Make it Right

When anything happens to a package along the way to delivery (whether that be theft, delay, or mistake), it’s not necessarily the ecommerce business’s fault. However, every element of order fulfillment is the company’s responsibility. Which means if something does go wrong, especially during the high-stress peak season rush, you need to make things right with the people who chose to spend their money on your products. The optimal way to maintain a good relationship with your customer is to be proactive. That is a two-fold outreach plan.

1.) Reach out to the shipping carrier as soon as you see a problem with an order so you can understand where it is, what happened to it, and if they have a working solution.

2.) Reach out to the customer and provide them with all available information on the order, as well as insight on how you intend to fix things.

You may not always be able to immediately solve a problem, especially if an order is in the hands of a shipping carrier, but recognizing the problem as fast as possible and letting your customer know you’re working on it and are sympathetic to their plight really goes a long way. 

Hopefully, resolution can be quick and a package can be tracked by its barcode/shipping label, or it can be reshipped in a timely manner. If not, have a company policy of how you extend goodwill to a customer who has experienced a peak season order issue, i.e. free shipping, an extra percentage off their next order, and so on. Whatever you decide the policy will be, the second something happens with a delivery, it’s go-time for your ecommerce business to make it right as soon as possible. Do this, and recovery will be a lot smoother in terms of the actual affected order and your brand’s reputation.

Invest in Package Protection

Getting people to choose your ecommerce business is great! But just because a customer clicked BUY doesn’t mean you don’t still have to go the extra mile to protect them. Especially considering those miles a package has to go to be delivered are often the biggest cause of customer relations issues. 

No ecommerce business is immune to the condition of having something happen to an order along the way to being delivered. Thankfully, there’s MonkProtect—a package protection option that safeguards your buyer’s experience and ecommerce business’s reputation. What’s MonkProtect? Let us enlighten you!

Despite your best efforts, packages can get lost, damaged, or even stolen upon delivery. MonkProtect can’t specifically prevent that from happening, but this 3PL solution is a means to cushion the blow. This post-purchase suite allows you to keep up with industry standards and command your customers’ post-purchase experience. Additionally, it offers:

1.) An automated claims portal that centralizes and simplifies all your claims

2.) Additional revenue streams per order to directly benefit your bottom line 

3.) Branded, real-time tracking updates on order delivery to enhance your ecommerce business’s visibility and promote customer loyalty 

4.) Superior post-purchase practices with a suite of tools designed to enhance your customer experience from checkout to delivery

5.) Seamless integration with ShipMonk’s ultimate 3PL solution (our proprietary software) so you can manage and review all your claims from the same platform you already use 

6.) Rapid claims resolution and instant reships thanks to an average 48-hour processing time and automatically triggered shipments once a claim is approved

With all those amazing benefits, MonkProtect won’t just protect your ecommerce business model, it will propel it to a new level! This package protection answer is an effective way for every ecommerce business to recover from peak season order issues.

Rely on a Better 3PL Partner

You may have heard the saying “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” In an ecommerce business, there are A LOT of links in your supply chain. From the moment your goods leave the manufacturer to when they arrive at a buyer’s door, there are so many steps to go through, which means there are plenty of places where things can go wrong. Add in the hecticness of the holidays, and that probability increases exponentially. Hence why peak season order issues happen in the first place.

That being said, the best way to recover from peak season order issues is also the best way to prevent them in the first place: have the best 3PL partner. Your ecommerce business deserves a 3PL solution that handles picking, packing, and shipping with speed and accuracy. You deserve a 3PL solution with an extended global network of major shipping carriers and state-of-the-art facilities, so you can achieve optimal delivery speeds at minimum costs. And most of all, your ecommerce business deserves a 3PL solution that has premium 3PL software that streamlines your operation with all-in-one order, inventory, and warehouse management.

Does such a 3PL trifecta of operational efficiency truly exist? You bet it does! ShipMonk is a tech-forward 3PL that handles all aspects of ecommerce business order fulfillment so you can recover from past issues and prevent new ones. We take the stress off your brand that comes with in-house or 2PL fulfillment, which can hold you back and cost you more. And, unlike with a 4PL, we are solely dedicated to our clients and safeguarding their products at the 12 fulfillment centers we fully operate. All around, we are a one-stop shop in your supply chain where every link has been strongly fortified to help your ecommerce business thrive.

Live, Learn, and Grow!

From smaller problems like shipping labels with inaccurate information to bigger problems like lost packages, there are a range of dilemmas that can occur with order delivery. But it’s time to put those problems behind you and recover from peak season order issues by learning from missteps and understanding the must-haves for a successful ecommerce business. 

We, at ShipMonk, pride ourselves on being the omnichannel order fulfillment and 3PL solution that aids brands of all sizes across all verticals with their ascension to ecommerce business supremacy. Let us be a part of your solution for a future with fewer issues and more victories. Contact our dedicated fulfillment experts today to learn more, and grow further than ever before!