Trading can be stressful in an eCommerce environment. While your store is always available, customers can place an order any time of the day or night, any day of the year. Most retailers (and shipping carriers) can’t be available the same way.
This can make it difficult to offer shipping services such as next-day delivery, same-day dispatch, or even in-store pickup. Those “guarantees” often rely on a process involving at least one or two time-sensitive conditions to ensure they can be met.
For example, you offer next-day delivery on your store checkout. Your shipping carrier pick up is at 3 pm every weekday. It can take an hour to process so the description for your next-day delivery includes “only available if the order is placed before 2 pm”.
You’re not going to be able to provide next-day delivery to a customer who places an order after that, yet the option is still there on your checkout all day and night for the customer to select. You’re left with the potential of an unhappy customer, or not offering that guarantee. But there is a third option.
In this post, we’ll have a look at why you may still want to offer these shipping guarantees, and how Maropost Commerce Cloud can help you avoid situations such as the example above.
Why Offer Shipping Options with Shipping “Guarantees”?
There are a few reasons you may want to offer shipping guarantees on your store. These include
- The general added appeal to shoppers (they know when their order will be shipped)
- You trade in perishable goods such as food and beverages or fresh flowers
- You sell products that customers require ASAP, like pharmaceuticals
- You’re a local supplier and provide your own personal delivery service once a week
- Make sure you’re not offering a “same day in-store pickup” five minutes before you close the doors for the weekend.
It’s often necessary to provide some form of limitation on when these delivery options are available. Any shipping option you create in Maropost Commerce Cloud can be set up to only display at certain times and days.
Set The Days And Times a Shipping Option is Available
Each shipping option has its own availability settings at the bottom of that shipping option’s Edit page, under the Shipping Options Delivery Options tab.
There are two groups of checkboxes in these settings: days and times (by the hour). These check boxes define when a delivery option will be available at checkout. For example, if the option is for “same day delivery”, but this service is unavailable on weekends, you would clear the Sat and Sun (Saturday and Sunday) checkboxes. Similarly, using the time checkboxes, you can make an option available at specific times of the day.
If you do set up limited availability on your shipping options, we highly recommend creating a shipping option with the inverse availability that would appear at the other times. For example, if you offer “same day delivery on orders” and have that set to display between 12 am and 2 pm, you should set up a “next day delivery on orders” shipping option to display at other times. This would be as simple as cloning the existing Shipping Option and changing the availability settings.
Do you have any Shipping Availability requirements with your store? Let us know in the comments if this helps, or if there are any other parts of the Commerce Cloud you’d like to see a future tip on!
