Top 8 Benefits of Using Delivery Management Software for Your Business

Overview

The eCommerce delivery landscape is on the verge of a makeover. 61% of eCommerce shoppers across the world want next-day deliveries. To meet rising customer expectations and maintain competitive advantage, retailers are relooking at the whole delivery process. Customers could look forward to convenient pickup and drop off options, like parcel lockers and convenience stores, especially in Europe. 

So, it’s not surprising that eCommerce retailers are increasingly investing in automating last-mile logistics, optimizing routes, digital reporting, and delivery tracking. By doing away with manual processes, they can ensure higher delivery success rates with fewer failed deliveries. 

But, what if you had an easier option to invest in only one solution that has all the features mentioned above? The answer is delivery management software, that streamlines the entire process. 

Let’s understand what that is and how it benefits eCommerce businesses and increases customer satisfaction. 

Why are Delivery Management Systems Essential for eCommerce Businesses?

Delivery management is overseeing the transportation of a shipment, especially during the last-mile leg of the shipping journey to the customer’s delivery address. It is a planned and well-coordinated process utilising cutting edge technology, often involving third party logistics providers and other delivery businesses. 

Through the integration of innovative technologies, a delivery management system streamlines your shipping process and increases service quality. Its goal is two pronged - to identify the most efficient routes and at the same time bring in cost reductions so you continue providing exceptional customer service. The demand for such software solutions has risen due to the rising customer expectations for faster delivery and real time tracking of their delivery status.

Customers aren’t just shopping for your products, they are tuning into the customer experience you provide. A whopping 76% of global customers prefer home delivery, and a significant portion. (46%) crave even faster shipping options. This means there's a lot riding on your delivery performance.

Understanding the New Paradigms of Enhancing Customer Satisfaction

To stay competitive among millions of sellers and meet digital shoppers' rising expectations, you need to identity and prioritize key performance indicators that enhance delivery efficiency and reduce operational expenses. The best way to do that is with the help of delivery management system solutions. Your customer’s loyalty depends on how you fulfill their post-purchase demands for visibility and convenience. Recent customer feedback across the globe, highlights some key preferences for delivery services:

• Multiple shipping options at checkout (74%) 

• Live tracking and notifications (86%)

• Select delivery time-slots. 

• Fast deliveries within the next-day (63%)

• Precise arrival times of shipments (59%)

With the right delivery management software, you automate shipping, execute efficient deliveries and craft an exceptional customer experience that becomes a cornerstone of your brand identity.

Moreover, delivery management is proven to have a real-impact on businesses. Take the case of  Walmart. The retail giant synchronized all its logistics systems with a single API, lowered TAT, and improved delivery time with ClickPost, a multi-carrier delivery management platform. 

The platform also helped tackle the complexities of D2C shipping like it did for Candere’s, an online jewelry brand. It elevated Candere’s post-purchase customer service with real-time branded tracking thus helping it retain more customers.

How Do You Benefit from Using Delivery Management Software?

Relooking at your entire delivery process can be daunting. A delivery management software does the hard-work of improving your overall delivery experience. Let’s take a look at top 8 benefits of using an intelligent delivery management platform:

1. Automate Solutions for Successful Deliveries 

The journey to a timely delivery begins long before a package hits the road—it starts in your warehouse. Inefficiencies like fulfillment delays, slow carrier allocation, and manual paperwork gives you a late start on the shipping journey. 

Achieving less than 3 deliveries per hour signals poor performance and more cost per delivery. The key to overcoming these challenges is the automation delivery management solutions offer. 

Automatic warehouse pickup scheduling, shipping labels generation, and faster allocation of orders to carriers help reduce TAT (Turn Around Time). With every automated delivery, you can save 40% of your time from repetitive manual tasks.  

2. Integrate With a Vast Carrier Network 

As your business expands, so should your carrier network. Diverse carriers offer strategic advantages. Foremost is the speed and flexibility that comes with having multiple delivery services providers. 48% of shoppers want more delivery methods at checkout. You can provide your shoppers a range of options like same-day or 2-day shipping by leveraging multiple carrier services. 

Additionally, a multi-carrier approach empowers you to negotiate better rates, optimize delivery routes and mitigate risks by not relying on a single provider.

The quickest and easiest path to onboarding multiple carriers is integrating with a delivery management software. These platforms provide access to a vast network of carriers, easy API integrations, and even assist with discounted shipping rates. 

3. Stay Ahead of Delivery Exceptions with Real-Time Visibility

Shipping delays and exceptions are a common occurrence, but such incidents negatively impact your customers' experience. One report found that 46% of online shoppers expect quick deliveries. But, the reality is that many receive orders later than the estimated delivery dates (EDD).   

To avoid this, you’ll need a mechanism that alerts you about delays, stuck shipments, and failed deliveries like real-time visibility. By harnessing the APIs and webhook integrations of platforms like ClickPost you can send proactive communication to customers to update them of their shipment’s status. 

Additionally, you’ll receive insights into which shipments are at the risk of being late. This allows you to reduce customer queries and empowers your customers with real time tracking.

4. Retain Customers Using Positive Delivery Experiences 

A positive delivery experience certainly constitutes shipments arriving on time at your customer’s doorstep without incurring any damage. But that’s far from enough. 

A 2024 DHL report reveals that 37% of shoppers desire precise delivery time, while 86% demand live tracking. A delivery management software, with its intelligent AI algorithm and tracking abilities empowers you to meet these expectations. You can offer end-to-end traceability, proactive shipment status notifications, and accurate EDDs. 

5. Speed-up Your Delivery Process

One of the best use cases of these software is route optimization. With real-time and efficient route planning you speed up your delivery time. It takes into account multiple factors affecting transit time like traffic conditions, delivery window, vehicle capacity, etc. 

As technology embedded in AI, telematics, and other complex algorithms, it dynamically calculates, plans, and adjusts routes for every delivery. This ensures you save on fuel consumption and shipping cost especially in cases of multi-stop deliveries, and avoid delivery delays. It categorically assigns every driver to a particular route based on vehicle capacity and driver experience among others. 

In doing so, you can automate the order dispatch process in the last-mile. You can also offer customers real-time ETA details along with the information of the delivery agent. This constitutes a transparent delivery experience—a demand that 43% of global customers have. 

6. Amplify Operational Efficiency Quickly

Manually managing deliveries is a significant hurdle that many retailers, particularly those in the B2B and dropshipping realm suffer from. Paper-based communication is commonplace, coordination with carriers over emails, and poor visibility in shipping still prevalent. 

For instance, retailers tend to allocate orders to carriers based on price and commercials. But, that’s not in their best interest if the carrier is underperforming in areas like RTO (Return to Origin), POD collection, meeting delivery deadlines, etc.

To avoid customers from canceling orders after a shipment is dispatched or returning it, you would need a solution that optimizes delivery. Delivery management platform has solutions to automate shipment allocation based on your priorities and the actual performance of the carrier. 

Besides this, it offers you: end-to-end order cycle visibility, streamlined delivery alerts to customers, instant generation of shipping labels, and optimized reverse logistics. 

7. Optimize Your Logistics Spending 

If you want to make your deliveries you would have to optimize your logistics spendings. Delivery cost is dynamic and based on a number of factors like trip distance, vehicle type and capacity, shipment weight and dimension, type of product, etc. Apart from these, you have to consider inventory cost, price of renting a warehouse, charges in additional handling, and equipment use. 

All such factors make logistics a major cost center of your business. But with the right solution you can control and lower logistics costs. For example, by optimizing routes you can bring fuel cost. 

Similarly, you can avoid losses pertaining to damages and delivery exceptions by increasing order traceability and delivery re-attempts. Some multi-carrier delivery management platforms also negotiate rates and offer volumetric discounts to lower your overall logistics spending. 

8. Conquer Holiday Rush and Peak Season With Ease

Nothing screams of the rush hour in eCommerce like the holiday peak sales season. Everything is in fast and furious mode with an onslaught of orders and frayed customer nerves. The chaos of coordinating expedited deliveries, multiple payment options, stockouts, securing shipping, and managing order cancellation is real.

To tackle these problems you will need a multifaceted solution—an all-in-one logistics management platform. Integrations with multiple carriers, payment gateways, and storefronts, real-time EDD calculation, inventory tracking, etc. are some of the features that help you glide through the mad holiday rush. 

Grow Your eCommerce Business With ClickPost

When delivery experience determines your customer retention rate there is very little room for error. This is why using a multi-carrier delivery management solution operating with advanced AI, ML, and Data Science like ClickPost helps. ClickPost has a comprehensive product suite devoted to slashing your RTOs, reducing customer queries, and increasing your Net Promoter Score.

It has a large library of nearly 500 carriers, 30+ storefronts, 10+ WMS/OMS, and 45+ communication gateways. ClickPost optimizes the core field of delivery management. This includes smart carrier allocation based on your business unique demands, real-time API based and webhook enabled order tracking, and delivery exceptions management. 

With ClickPost you can offer multiple delivery options and branded tracking to your customers, embed precise EDDs at checkout, and streamline returns. It streamlines customer communication across multiple channels and deploys an automated stream of notifications to shoppers in case of any failed delivery report. It helps you manage every aspect of your logistics. 

Conclusion

Delivery management is essential for eCommerce businesses aiming to maintain profitability and improve customer satisfaction. Since the delivery process is prone to errors, delivery management software is a valuable tool for streamlining delivery operations including optimizing delivery routes careful planning and execution and enhance operational efficiency.