Online Retailers - Time to get Credit for your fulfillment capabilities

According to the latest research report from FedEx/Internet retailer, almost 70% of online purchases are delivered to customers within 3-4 days, which is great news in itself and retailers should be proud of this. However, when you look at this metric in conjunction with yet another critical metric, which is that about 80% of the customers actually want to see 3-4 days delivery windows when they are shopping online. Unfortunately, retailers have failed to provide personalized delivery dates and shipping costs to their customers. These two combined result in about 50% cart abandonment for a typical online retailer.

What a waste of your marketing dollars and missed opportunity to bring the traffic to the site, have the customers add the items to the cart, and then let them leave the site due to lack of personalized delivery experience and ship cost. Most unfortunate part is that retailers are doing a great job in actual fulfillment but are not able to get the credit at the top of the funnel when customers are actually browsing the items and making the purchase decisions.

Amazon is on its way to 100Mn prime customers so customers' expectations are only continuing to rise. Whereas most of the retailers can still provide 5-7 days deliveries on their site or worse yet, item ships in 2/3 days and not even communicating to their customers when they will get the delivery.

Retailers, let's grab this opportunity to personalize delivery experience and shipping cost for your customers, increase conversion rate, reduce cart abandonment and provide your customers a great experience that they deserve. Remember, the best part is that you still already do a great job in actual fulfillment. It's a matter of presenting the reality to customers during their shopping journey.

Akhilesh Srivastava is an ex-eBayer, where he had first-hand experience of improving topline growth by launching new delivery programs for the customers. He is the founder of Fenix commerce, a provider of SaaS-based personalized Delivery engine which lets retailers provide a personalized delivery experience, shipping cost, shipping promotions, and post purchase tracking/alert.

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