The delivery experience you offer your customers is one of the most essential parts of an e-commerce business. A good one can help to drive sales, reduce returns, and grow customer numbers.

A bad one could do the opposite. Research shows that a poor delivery experience discourages 85% of people, who say they won’t buy from a retailer again if their expectations aren’t met.¹

Could optimising your own delivery experience provide you with a competitive advantage? Here are five ideas that could help to give you an edge.

Data can play an important role in optimising your delivery experience. For example, you may be able to crunch the numbers to see how tweaks to delivery prices or free delivery thresholds impact purchases.

Or you may be able to analyse the popularity and success rates of specific delivery options to help you craft a more compelling delivery offer. This could potentially increase conversion, as improper or inconvenient shipping options is one of the main reasons for cart abandonment.²

You could even employ predictive analytics to forecast demand, which could help in resource allocation and minimising delivery times.³

• It’s a good idea to think about what you want to achieve and set key goals in advance.
  
  
• Select key metrics to monitor – these will depend on your goals but some good examples could include average shipping time, average number of delivery attempts and number of out-of-home deliveries.⁴
  
  

E-commerce comes with an unavoidable environmental footprint. Estimates show that CO2 emissions from e-commerce logistics in the world’s biggest urban areas are expected to reach approximately 25 million metric tons by 2030.⁵

Many consumers are concerned about environmental issues such as this and are prepared to make purchasing decisions based on it. This opens up the potential for you to make your delivery process – and by extension your business – more appealing.

For example, 60% of online consumers are interested in carbon neutral delivery, while 56% would like it if sellers recommended the most sustainable delivery option.⁶ Another study showed that over 60% of consumers are quite or very interested in environmentally friendly deliveries, with 59% willing to act if they are not satisfied with their retailer’s efforts.⁷

• Analyse and evaluate how sustainable your delivery methods are to see where any opportunities may be.
  
  
• Consider where you could make improvements, good places to start could include using more sustainable packaging, consolidating orders into fewer deliveries (or encouraging consumers to order more items in fewer individual transactions), and working with carriers that can provide eco-friendly options.⁸
  
  
• Promote your efforts but ensure you are honest and transparent to build trust with consumers.⁹
  
   

Returns are inevitable in e-commerce, and they can have a major financial impact. Figures suggest that at least 30% of all online purchases are returned.¹⁰ The cost of those returns is significant, with research putting it at an average of 27% of the purchase price.¹¹

But a good delivery strategy can help to reduce returns, giving your business a potential boost. For example, failed deliveries are linked to over 5% of returns, so cutting the number of those could be beneficial.¹²

• Review and analyse the reasons for returns, identifying any that are related to the delivery process.
  
  
• Consider what would improve the experience and eliminate reasons for return – for example, could better packaging reduce damaged goods, or would more accurate estimated arrival times reduce returns coming back because of later-than-expected delivery?¹³
  
  

It’s no great insight to suggest customers want to pay as little as possible, especially with free delivery cited by 70% of consumers as one of the most important criteria when shopping online.¹⁴ But delivery costs are unavoidable, and somebody needs to pay. So, it’s important to find ways to create a compelling delivery offer where the maths works for everyone.

There are ways to adapt your strategy to help do this. For example, almost 4 in 5 people (78%) are willing to spend more to get free delivery, meaning that offering free shipping, but at the right threshold, can actually increase sales and average order value.¹⁵ Sales could also be increased simply by displaying delivery costs clearly – 17% of people abandon their carts because they are unable to calculate the full costs of their order upfront.¹⁶

• Review your fulfilment operation to see if you could lower the cost of delivery – areas to focus on could include getting the best rates from carriers and reducing the size and weight of packages.¹⁷
  
  
• Consider strategies that could work for customers and your business. For example, 56% of online consumers in the EU would pay more for next-day delivery,¹⁸ so perhaps a premium tier could work for your business?
  
  

There are lots of stats that help to illustrate the range of preferences and priorities that e-commerce retailers face when implementing their delivery strategies. These include 87% of consumers saying that the range of delivery options presented is important to them¹⁹, 23% of consumers – over a three-month period – abandoning purchases period due to slow delivery speeds²⁰, and 75% of consumers saying they would choose free shipping over fast shipping.²¹

The bottom line is that consumers have different needs when it comes to delivery, and the more of them you can cater to the better.

• Review your carriers to make sure they can offer the flexibility you need.
  
  
• Ensure you have a range of options available for customers to choose from – cost, speed, pick-up locations, and the ability to manage deliveries are some good areas to focus on.