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If you haven’t yet read our State of Shipping Report, it speaks to the growing complexity of shipping for businesses. Businesses are therefore taking steps to improve their entire post-purchase customer experience:
“Retailers are clearly leveraging technology to enhance their delivery operations. A significant number are using multiple platforms to optimise their ecommerce and shipping processes, with Shippit playing a crucial role in this ecosystem”
There’s an old saying; “you can have it either good, fast, or cheap, but you can only pick 2”. In delivery circles the phrase is “fast, free, or reliable”. Overwhelmingly customers choose “free”.
Speed and transparency are tied for second choice, but over 50% of shoppers said they would not shop a brand again if they had a bad delivery experience (Shippit & Jarden whitepaper). Immediacy is valued, but not at the cost of good service; reliability drives loyalty and a broken promise is more damaging than a longer wait, when expectations are managed.
With nearly 90% of Australians now shopping online, delivery services need to keep up – especially businesses with complex freight requirements. For any business looking to compete, investment in technology unlocks advantages and protects against inefficiencies.
Historically many businesses relied on a single rigid system to manage multiple specialised functions, which could result in feature gaps. Now multiple integrated systems can provide the flexible functionality specific departments need, while connecting for greater efficiency.
Organisations, reluctant to change critical systems, now have access to expertise to guide this change process. Through the partnership of technology providers, and implementation specialists, the right software stack can be rolled out to a business with minimal disruption.
Ecosystem Program Manager, Elliot Spirrett, spoke to Shippit partner, Gaelle Decolnet at Fluent Commerce about our work with Freedom Furniture, a major furniture and homewares retailer, with more than 58 stores across ANZ.
Fluent Commerce is a distributed order management platform, giving businesses real-time inventory data, to sell more and reduce cancelled orders. Freedom’s fulfilment processes were highly labour-intensive; manually measuring cartons, entering data, and calling couriers. These tasks for over 50 stores and nearly a hundred dispatch points required a large workforce – neither cost-efficient nor sustainable. Additionally, their reliance on a single courier meant higher shipping costs and reduced delivery flexibility.
The result was coordination challenges, stock management issues, and inconsistent customer experiences, damaging customer satisfaction.
Freedom made huge gains from the implementation of Fluent and Shippit, as well as cutting down their losses and inefficiency.
- Order cancellations due to lack of stock dropped from 14% to just 2%.
- Stock accessibility went up 10x as they were now able to fulfil from all stores, up from just five previously.
- Dynamic shipping costs and more accurate, competitive delivery options helped reduce costs and enhance overall customer experience.
Check out the full interview below:
