4 Common eCommerce Pain Points and how WareIQ can help
Tags: Solutions, Direct To Consumer, Supply Chain, Ecommerce, Warehouse Management

There can be nine good reasons to place an order on your eCommerce platform but a single bad reason is enough to drive the customer away. Even something that might seem trivial can have a huge impact on deciding if the customer wants to place orders on your platform. In fact, only about 30% of the potential customers complete the same. Why is it so?

The answer is simple - you fail to deliver what you promise or your competitor offers a better service and you simply don’t meet the customer expectations. There are two broad ways to tackle this-

Enhance the user experience on your website. Ideally, it should be as seamless and optimized as possible.

Enhance the overall customer service delivered beyond your website.

With changing consumer trends and fast-tracked digital adoption and eCommerce growth due to the COVID-19 pandemic, customer expectations have increased rapidly. It becomes quintessential to improvise subtle aspects of your website and service to beat the competition. In this article, we will discuss various pain points of the supply chain and logistics that can cost your business and how WareIQ can help you in dealing with the same.

Hiding shipping costs can be an expensive mistake

Cart abandonment (wherein the customer adds items to their cart but doesn’t complete their order) is one of the major problems for eCommerce websites. According to a study by Baymard Institute, up to 50% of the customers quoted extra hidden charges from shipping as the reason for abandoning the cart at checkout. Customers prefer to know the total cost of the product right away. Any additional costs popping up during checkout can be an unpleasant experience. It can suddenly feel like too much or out of their budget. Conversion becomes difficult and the customer would be prompted to explore other options to try to get a cheaper deal.

The solution — Let the customer know the shipping charges before the final checkout. Ideally, a modern-day customer expects free shipping (at least at a certain price threshold). Firms like Amazon have set high benchmarks for the same with their free prime delivery.

What if you are unable to provide free shipping or even reduce the cost of the same? Showing it upfront can make everything look costly for the consumer. This can be addressed in multiple ways.

You can modify your pricing strategy to cover the shipping charges within the product cost but brand yourself for free deliveries.

You can bore the shipping expenses from your side on behalf of the customer to improve loyalty/retention and hope that the net long term revenue is improved.

You make a smart choice to partner with WareIQ and actually reduce your shipping charges significantly- a win-win for both the seller and the buyer.

So, how exactly is WareIQ able to do it? It is the result of a PAN-India decentralised network that WareIQ hosts to make shipping efficient and cost-effective. With optimised inventory placement closer to the customer, shipping charges are reduced.

Customer service can get affected by things beyond your control

The level of customer service provided is directly reflected in the online reviews and word of mouth recommendations. In many cases, mistakes by a 3PL provider or some external agent in the supply chain can affect the consumer-facing brand value. For example, a delayed delivery by your logistics provider brings a negative review to your brand.

The reputation you hold among your customers is influenced both by how you deal with customer complaints or assist them online as well as the offline ecosystem you work with. What’s worse than a delayed delivery is not addressing it on time and being accountable by giving personalised feedback to the customer.

With WareIQ in the picture, a lot of things become easy to manage. Firstly, you need not worry about the delivery part and how shipments are handled by the offline staff. You will also be provided with a branded tracking page to take timely actions as required. RTOs/NDRs are also efficiently handled by WareIQ without any delays. It enables you to have faster returns processing with quicker and more efficient returns approval, pickup and cash recovery cycle.

Ageing inventory and how to deal with it

Have you ever faced issues with your stock cluttering up in your warehouse? Slow-moving products and those in low demand can be difficult to sell. They end up taking your precious inventory space. This can directly increase your operational costs.

On top of this, going out of stock frequently for high demand products is a huge red flag for the business. If customers don’t get the products they want and when they want it, they will simply lose their trust and loyalty in your services. Poor inventory managed can also lead to misplaced orders, delayed deliveries, and poor tracking- all of which can directly affect your sales and have a long term impact on your business.

All these issues can be tackled with smart inventory management that WareIQ provides. Once you plug in WareIQ into your supply chain, you can generate insight on inventory placements by locations to offer fast shipping. WareIQ will then take care of optimally shipping the inventory to the customers. It can also recommend inventory placement across their decentralised network based on supply and demand trends ensuring that the stock is available where it should be.

WareIQ shipping engine is integrated to all major national couriers & same-day delivery providers. Sellers can go by default “Intelligent Mode” or easily configure their own preferences.

Handling the issues due to low quality/untrained on-ground personnel

Your customer has placed the order and you have taken care of all the logistics required smoothly and shipped it successfully. What can go wrong now? In fact, a lot of things in the last-mile delivery, which actually puts the product in your customer’s hands- the ultimate end goal.

We have seen in a previous article on how WareIQ can help you deal with these challenges. One of the major issues you can face is with the on-ground personnel who don’t handle the packages well and make mistakes with the delivery. A lot of the last mile challenges due to poor handling can be overcome with smart customized solutions that WareIQ provides.

Customers expect to get their package delivered without any hitches and experience a smooth unboxing. Branded packaging helps. It also makes it easy for delivery personnel to handle it. Amazon is a great example in this context, and WareIQ can provide the same level of experience with its predefined packing guidelines. Sellers can also avail discounted rates from the supplier network with branded packaging options. With a robust tracking system in place, things get easy to monitor.

Endnotes

Addressing the eCommerce pain points where a third party is the cause of them can be difficult. If there is some issue with your online website, you can probably seek some optimization with your in house developer team or your software vendor. In case of offline issues in the supply chain like we have seen, things get tricky with a lot of variables involved. Partnering with someone trusted and efficient like WareIQ, which has the technology and infrastructure to deal with such issues at scale can immensely help in mitigating the same.