Read the latest report about how Delivery Anxiety is affecting eCommerce Conversion rates
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Improving the shopping experience with pre-purchase delivery estimates on product detail, cart and checkout pages (EDD) can lead to a significant increase in site conversions.
92% of customers online say that knowing their order will arrive by the promised delivery date is one of the biggest factors influencing their buying decisions. 90% also expect 2-3 day delivery timelines.
You're already losing customers if you’re still providing vague and unclear delivery timelines. Read along to know how you can show accurate delivery estimates to your customers.
With FenixCommerce retailers can calculate and provide delivery estimates with 91% accuracy. Customers can add accurate estimated delivery dates to their online stores through our API-first platform.
In order to calculate delivery estimates Fenix requires the following set of data as inputs:
Let’s take a look at these data points in detail.
Fenix provides multiple ways to consume product data from retailers. For retailers on platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce, Fenix uses platform-specific webhooks to retrieve that information.
For retailers who are not on such platforms, Fenix provides a feed upload service where the retailer can upload the necessary product data through SFTP or S3. Fenix will consume this data within 5 minutes of the upload.
This way Fenix platform maintains up-to-date product information for your shoppers.
There are two ways product data can be synced.
This feed must contain any new SKUs added or changes to the existing products. Only the SKUs present in this feed will be modified.
Retailers can configure unlimited fulfillment locations in Fenix. They can be your Warehouses, Distribution centers or physical stores.
To configure fulfillment locations you will need to enter details such as:
The lead time field can be used to add additional hours/days to the delivery estimate. Based on the lead time, cutoff time and carrier pickup time Fenix will automatically determine if the order can be shipped on the same day or not.
With Fenix you can display the fastest delivery date to the customer on the product detail, cart and checkout pages (EDD).
With an omnichannel setup, retailers have multiple locations (DC, store, suppliers) where inventory is present and can be used to fulfill online orders.
The multi-location inventory sync is dependent on the type of eCommerce platform. This feature enables merchants to expose store inventory to online shoppers. This way merchants can start offering pickup from store (BOPIS) and route online orders to stores for fulfillment.
Fenix provides a feed upload service where the retailer can upload the necessary inventory data through SFTP or S3. This way Fenix has up-to-date inventory information which is near real-time and accurate.
Merchants can send updated inventory data from OMS or ERP by uploading files through SFTP or S3 to sync location-wise SKU inventory count in Fenix. This file can be uploaded every 15 mins or 30 mins as desired by the retailer.
There are two ways in which inventory data can be shared:
FenixCommerce allows you to setup your carriers and rate tables so that you can display accurate delivery estimates to shoppers.
To set up a carrier in Fenix business console following details need to be entered:
In case you do not want to share the carrier account credentials we can setup the rate tables from the backend for accurate delivery estimate calculation. The buffer days allow you to add any additional days to delivery estimates for any particular service.
We have observed that carrier delivery dates are only 65% accurate as compared to Fenix’s accuracy of 91%.
Shipping is one of the highest expenses incurred by eCommerce merchants. Selecting the right carrier method is essential to maximizing cost savings while ensuring a delivery promise is kept.
Carrier Rate Shopping is an automatic comparison of carriers’ shipping services and their corresponding shipping rates in real-time in order to find the most optimal rate to ship each order.
One of the biggest value propositions of Fenix’s Rate Shopping solution is the automated multi-carrier rate shopping on the Checkout page to make accurate delivery promises to customers while also showing them competitive shipping rates.
On the Checkout page, Fenix will rate shop among all the shipping options and pick the least expensive carrier service in each of the shipping methods. It will then display the EDD corresponding to the chosen carrier service and related shipping charges.
Multiple shipping rules can be configured in FenixCommerce that gives retailers more control over the services retailers ship certain products with and the services which can ship to certain areas.
These rules will improve the cost-effectiveness of your shipping by creating custom rules and restrictions in order to avoid extra charges, offer discounts for specific locations, exclude certain costly areas from your shipping, restrict delivery, or create shipping by customer group.
To begin with, you will need to create shipping zones. Each carrier will have their own shipping zone but that is primarily based on the distance. However, Fenix’s shipping zones are more flexible in terms of grouping certain regions in the country.
You can customize shipping zones to set rules and restrictions or offer special rates and shipping methods based on the customer's location. Fenix shipping zones are used at two places: Shipping Groups and Shipping Options.
Sometimes retailers carry a few products that need special care and need to be shipped by specific services only.
Shipping groups are additional rules that can be configured in the Fenix platform that gives retailers more control over shipping operations.
Some sample use cases are:
Such use cases can easily be handled by creating shipping groups.
Shipping options are the customer facing options. These options can be created at each zone level. This gives retailers a leverage to create shipping options like showing Flat rate on Standard option in US 48 and an Actual rate for the same Standard option for an order from AK/HI.
Customers are looking for free and fast shipping. Their delivery expectations have been set by Amazon and most shoppers won’t buy if the delivery time is more than 3 days.
Traditionally all eCommerce orders were fulfilled from warehouses but now omnichannel retailers must use their stores to fulfill online orders faster. This needs a powerful and robust routing engine that can determine the optimal fulfillment location for each order based on proximity and inventory availability.
Fenix supports some important allocation rules for optimized order routing. These rules can be prioritized and can be chosen which rule should be applied before another. A user friendly rules screen will help the business user to change the rules, prioritize and add/remove them with ease and any change that is made to the rules will effect immediately.
This rule is for those retailers who ship from multiple DCs and stores and want to prioritize the DCs before the stores.
This rule will prioritize the locations based on the distance of the fulfillment center to the buyer or the available quantity at the fulfillment center.
This rule is a generic rule that can be added as a nested rule under, let’s say, the DC Priority rule or can be added as a main rule itself. In the former case, only the DCs will be prioritized based on the criteria and in the latter case, rest of the stores will be prioritized.
A fast selling SKU may get the inventory deplete in all warehouses and such a situation may arise, the SKU’s request quantity may not be available in one single location. In such cases, enabling this rule will make sure the same SKU gets split into multiple locations for fulfillment.
However, the caveat is that this may increase the number of shipments. So, the retailers can add a max split criteria which restrict the number of fulfillments a SKU can be split into.
This rule when enabled will try to minimize the number of shipments for an order. The rule looks at the inventory position of all the SKUs in the cart and tries to pick a location which can fulfill the order as a whole.
When deciding whether to build or buy an EDD solution, money and resources are critical considerations. Building a delivery management solution is rarely the best option, even if your enterprise company has enough of both to use on development.
If you want to maximize efficiency and save operational costs and resources, it's better to use SaaS solutions, particularly headless ones, for greater scalability. Using them frees up your company's time to focus on other matters.
Headless EDD solutions, such as FenixCommerce, allow you to reduce infrastructure costs while removing the burden of maintenance costs from your shoulders.
Offering fast and free shipping needs regular tradeoffs between speed and cost, which is impossible to achieve without the help of modern technology. FenixCommerce platform provides an intelligent automated solution that optimizes delivery dates (EDD) and shipping options based on real-time customer info, inventory levels, fulfillment locations, product parameters, and carrier contracts.
With Fenix, you can now calculate and display optimized delivery dates (EDD) with top-level accuracy (EDD) on any relevant page-search results, product, cart, and checkout.
Join our growing clientele of 75+ leading eCommerce & DTC brands to create a streamlined delivery system that reduces the overall cost of shipping while increasing conversion.
Schedule a Demo today to talk to our eCommerce conversion experts!
