How to Choose the Right Delivery Management Software?

Introduction

If your team has ever faced problems in making a successful delivery, or getting timely status updates on shipments, or fulfilling orders on time, or with all of these, you’re not alone. 

Maintaining an efficient delivery management process is a challenging task. It’s a constant balancing act of ensuring timely deliveries, efficient resource management, and meeting customer demands—all while keeping costs under control. 

Unfortunately, most businesses struggle with it. A recent McKinsey study shows that around 90% of companies face supply chain issues. At the same time, it’s one of the most important tasks that determines eCommerce success. 

Enter delivery management software. The right shipping management tool mitigates the logistics challenges and enables you to optimize the entire delivery process with automation. But with tens of thousands of delivery management tools at your disposal, which one should you opt for? 

In this guide, we’ll be providing a few tips and tricks you should consider while choosing the right delivery management solution. 

Why Should You Use Delivery Management Solutions?

If you’re exploring delivery management software solutions for the first time, chances are you are still thinking about why you should even go for one. So, let us walk you through some major benefits delivery management tools bring to the plate. 

A delivery management solution is a tool designed to plan, track, and streamline the entire shipping process. It comes up with advanced technologies like AI, ML, and data science to help perform tasks like carrier allocation, carrier management, tracking, SLA maintenance, failed delivery management, and so on. 

6 Tips to Choose the Right Delivery Management Software

When assessing the best delivery management software solutions, you need to consider a few essential features. For example:

1. Check the variety of integrations

Most delivery management solutions come pre-integrated with various platforms. These mostly include Warehouse Management Software (WMS), Order/ Inventory Management Software (IMS/OMS), Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, eCommerce platforms, and more. The more diverse the integrations, the better. 

With a variety of integrations, you will be able to enable seamless communication across different platforms and streamline your delivery operations. Plus, it’ll reduce manual data entry and speed up the process. 

2. Evaluate real-time tracking capabilities

E-commerce merchants today are under enormous pressure to improve customers’ post-purchase experience. With around 90% of shoppers actively tracking their packages daily, it has become crucial for merchants to monitor each movement of the orders across the entirety of their delivery routes and display them on the tracking portal in real time. While route planning can shorten delivery times, it takes a different system to perform driver tracking services. The right software is needed for tracking the delivery status, sending it to your existing systems, and sharing it with customers.

The delivery software you choose must assist you in such a scenario to track deliveries, regardless of delivery windows, delivery drivers, or vehicle capacity. It should fetch tracking information across different carriers and present it on an integrated dashboard as soon as a parcel progresses forward. Alongside this, it must provide regular tracking updates to customers through multiple channels. Even a slight delay in this process can disrupt customers delivery experiences and the workflow, even when it comes to local deliveries. 

3. Assess scalability

As your business grows, its requirements increase accordingly. For example, when you deal with 100 orders a month, you will need one to two logistics providers to handle the shipments. But when the order volume grows to 500 or 1000 a month, you will have to integrate with additional carrier partners and process all the orders efficiently to ensure smooth operations. It's the most surefire way to ensure you regularly meet customer expectations, and grow your business operations with maximum operational efficiency.

When selecting the best delivery management software, ensure that it’s capable enough to handle a higher volume of orders and peak season requirements without compromising performance. Make sure it has the ability to process more orders and handle increased complexity with zero downtime. 

4. Review the key features

Choose a delivery management software that offers a host of advanced features along with basic capabilities. Beyond simple order processing, tracking, and driver management, it must provide key features like route optimization, checkout optimization, branding features, SLA breach prediction, failed delivery management, automation of customer notifications, returns management, ePOD, etc. Additionally, evaluate whether it has integrated advanced models like AI, ML, and data science. 

This feature-rich delivery management software will not only help you improve your delivery operations but also give you a competitive edge in the market. 

5. Consider ease of use

If a tool takes days to integrate with your existing business systems and is hard to navigate, it might eat up a significant amount of your valuable time and slow down operations. Hence, ease of use is one of the most important aspects you need to consider while choosing the best delivery management solution. Be sure to check for aspects like:

• A clear and non-cluttered UI

• A straightforward onboarding process

• Easy customization

• Seamless integration

• Mobile-friendliness 

• Extensive training for system use

• Reliable customer support

6. Compare pricing and ROI

Once you’re done with all the tips mentioned above, it’s time to evaluate whether the delivery management system is worth the investment. Will it be able to offer a positive ROI in the long run? To assess this, look beyond the initial investment. A tool might seem expensive on the first go, but it might benefit you eventually. Take into consideration the potential savings and long-term value like lesser RTO%, fewer delivery errors, fewer missed deadlines, improved customer satisfaction, etc. 

Boost Your Delivery Management Efficiency with ClickPost

ClickPost is an AI-based logistics intelligence platform. With a bunch of advanced functionalities like order creation, advanced tracking, EDD prediction, failed delivery management, and returns management, it aims to improve businesses’ delivery operations and customers’ post-purchase experience. It also provides on-time customer notifications to keep customers informed regarding each step of the delivery journey. As of now, ClickPost is connected with 500+ carrier partners, OMS, WMS, CRM, eCommerce platforms, enterprise resource planning systems, and communication gateways. 

Over 400 brands rely on ClickPost’s comprehensive solutions to smooth out their logistics workflow. A gifting brand, IGP has achieved 99.99% order visibility by using ClickPost’s delivery management solution. Likewise, it has helped DaMENSCH (A men’s fashion brand) reduce RTO by 54%. ClickPost also offers a dedicated returns management platform for Shopify business owners, named ClickPost Returns Plus. 

Final Words!

Choosing the best delivery management software when you have thousands of options around is no easy feat. It's quite normal to get overwhelmed when every tool claims to be the best one available on the market. So, check the tips we have mentioned in this article before investing. If any tool checks all the boxes, you can opt for that. 

Lastly, one important note: try to invest in a solution that offers API-based functionalities instead of a single comprehensive platform. These are API-based solutions. These API-based solutions mostly offer different APIs for key features like real-time tracking, route optimizations, failed delivery management, returns management, and more and provide the “pay for what you use” model. This saves you a significant amount of money that would otherwise be spent on unnecessary functionalities in an integrated platform.