Is your peak season checkout process clear and flexible enough?
Black Friday’s success is reflected in its popularity with webshops
It is impressive these online retailers manage to achieve each year during this festival of sales. However, there are still some areas for improvement, especially when you consider your checkout conversion during (and building up to) Black Friday as well as the rest of the peak season. Too often, this process is clumsy and difficult to navigate for consumers. This is especially true when considering the last-mile delivery of your packages. Living up to your promises and showing your customer flexibility in their delivery choices could mean the difference between a successful peak season, and a disappointing one.
Communication and organization can (and must) be improved
Black Friday will fall on November 26 in 2021, a day that many bargain hunters look forward to. Even if some webshops stretch the event to a week (starting this coming Sunday), it still presents a huge logistical challenge. You would expect that after a few years of practice, communication with the customer and the organization and execution of all deliveries would go smoothly. However, it turns out that this only applies to webshops that know exactly what consumers want and that have already completed their preparations.
These webshops see this reflected in the sales and customer satisfaction percentages in the period after this peak day.
The crux of that future success? The communication, especially the one at checkout. While it may be too late to implement significant changes now, it would be worth noting that there is still enough time between BFCM and Christmas to really improve your checkout experience.
‘Your checkout will determine your peak season success.’
The peak season checkout challenge
What makes the peak season checkout so challenging? Is that a huge volume of orders in a limited time? The (limited) capacity of carriers? Or is it the danger of seeing solid performance and your carefully built customer satisfaction disappear in a short time? We believe that it’s a combination of all these elements. The good news is: there is something you can do about it! You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, a multi-carrier platforms like Paazl is designed in such a way that consumers get exactly the choice that you as a webshop can and want to offer them.
There is a moment that defines the split between commercial success and failure. That’s the point at which a consumer has chosen an item and decides how he or she pays and what type of delivery they prefer. A webshop must therefore be able to serve various customers in the way they expect during the peak season checkout process.
Flexibility is the key aspect here. Some consumers want choice, others want a simple solution, but all consumers are looking for reliability. If you promise to deliver an item the next day if it is ordered before 5pm, you need to keep that promise. If this is not possible on Saturday/Sunday, the consumer must also know where he or she stands – Paazl’s Checkout Widget allows you to show and communicate clear delivery dates and timeframes, meaning your customer always knows what to expect.
A Multi-carrier platform makes it easy
Paazl is already known for the work it does for various global and local webshops. As a Paazl customer, you are able to discuss and negotiate the contract terms and conditions with your chosen connected carriers yourself – that will take a few hours at most – and the platform will display these chosen carriers and options to your customers, right in your checkout! If you choose to only offer a standard delivery of 1 to 3 days, customers will only see this option. If you’d like to add same-day or sustainable bike-delivery, you can establish rules to show specific delivery options for specific order conditions.
This can be easily adjusted in your dashboard if necessary, by adding new carriers or options. Doing this is no longer a luxury, but sometimes an absolute necessity, as became clear last year when major carriers ran into severe capacity problems. At that time, various web shops were forced to switch to another carrier.
Simply showing delivery options available in the checkout page can boost conversion!
During our recent Paazl Delivery Summit, our keynote speaker Jurjen Jongejan discussed Conversion Rate Optimization in the checkout. In one example, Jurjen showed that by simply showing the delivery options available on the checkout page, his customer saw a 17% increase in transactions!
“You would expect that after a few years of practice, the communication with the customer during the peak season, as well as the organization and execution of all deliveries would run smoothly… Sadly, that is not yet the case”
Ensure an accurate arrival time
In your Black Friday checkout, we advise that you show various delivery options with an estimated time of arrival (ETA) function. Notifications about when the package will arrive at the consumer’s home must be as accurate as possible. So in the morning, between 10 and 12 or at 10:48. Depending on what you want to offer and what options your chosen carriers have.
Determine the settings of the platform yourself
How flexible do you have to be when it comes to delivery options and ETA? You determine that based on preferences. Your Paazl team can guide you in this. As a webshop, you make the final choice yourself on the back-end. From an operational point of view, it is extremely important to ensure that things such as checkout, shipping, track & trace and returns run smoothly. Arranging such aspects properly leads to avoiding dissatisfied customers at a minimum and often to even more satisfied returning customers. Do you want to work towards a successful campaign and Black Friday checkout? Then opt for the security and flexibility of a multi-carrier platform.
Free webinar (in Dutch) for online retailers: get ready for Black Friday 2021 with Paazl, B2C Europe, Contentoo & Attitude Holland.
Paazl is a leading shipping service provider (SSP) for brands & retailers in e-commerce. Its all-in-one, multi-carrier platform unburdens the delivery process across webshop, warehouse, customer service and returns. Paazl enables logistical flexibility, consumer loyalty, cost transparency and (inter)national growth. Customers include industry leaders such as G-Star Raw, Rituals, VanMoof, Tag Heuer, Leenbakker and Under Armour.