Published on February 04, 2012 Your Shopping Cart is useless without quality delivery
Shopping cart software that entices customers and makes the buying experience as quick and easy as possible can be completely undone if your business policies supporting the shopping cart website cannot cope with the volumes you receive or you don’t deliver on the promises you make to customers.
A successful online business therefore requires more than just a great ecommerce website – it requires business planning and the business processes to support the business and help it grow. When it comes to business policies like payment and delivery, the old adage is definitely true: failing to plan is planning to fail.
If any of you have tried the online shopping systems of Woolworths and Coles and had similar experiences to the ones this writer has, then you’d be able to see how customers react to these kinds of problems. An efficient website that assists you in buying products gets you over the line online, but what happens when the order comes to being fulfilled. In this writer’s experience (and on multiple occasions), both of these businesess have given multiple examples of how not manage order fulfilment:
- Home deliveries/pickups that are regularly missing items but listed as packed (people will expect the odd item to be missing occasionally, but not on a regular basis – that’s just unprofessinoal)
- Reselling missing items before customers have the chance to return to the store to pick them up – not communicating between customer service and packing/delivery/pickup teams
- Not having any in-store mechanism of providing feedback or handling issues if they occur, or not being willing to contact the customer service team while you wait in-store
- Issuing blanket “inconvenience” credits instead of trying to fix the processes that caused the problems
- Not delivering on the date/time promised
This article is not picking on the less than impressive online fulfilment systems of Coles and Woolworths – unfortunately there are many Australian businesses that are not up to the mark when it comes to fulfilling orders. Customers will be accepting of the odd mistake, but do something wrong on a regular basis and they will start looking elsewhere.
What do online stores need to do:
If you’re running an online store or planning on starting one, make sure that you think beyond just having a great shopping cart website. Think about the following:
- What kind of shipping policy will you have? How long will it take you to process an order before you send it to your dispatch/courier company? How long will they take to deliver it? What methods do they use?
- How many orders can you handle in a day? What if your business is more popular than you would have thought?
- How will you check an order before it goes out to ensure its correct?
- How will you handle customer complaints if/when you receive them?
It’s always better to promise the “worst case” scenario and over-deliver on it, than have customers waiting on products and getting angry with your business. That hurts your reputation and you never know how many other people they will have told about their bad experience. Word of mouth is a powerful seller, and in an online world it’s even more important as businesses can live or die on reputation – the more the competition, the more important it is to keep your reputation good.
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Ozcart has been in business since 2006 and is an online, hosted shopping cart that you can use for your current or new online store. We offer so many features for the same low price. In fact, we are addicted to adding new ones to ensure that we remain one of the best choices for a shopping cart.
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