There’s never been a better time for SME ecommerce retailers to scale up and deliver global growth. According to our own research, 86% of consumers will continue shopping more online well after the pandemic. And 42% plan to make fewer trips to stores in future. Opportunities abound, or at least they do for those that can capitalize on demand in a cost-effective and sustainable way.
Make delivery your differentiator
Delivery experience is the journey between clicking send and receiving your order, and it’s quickly becoming the most important differentiator for online retailers. Metapack’s most recent Ecommerce Delivery Benchmark Report showed that consumers are quite clear on what matters most. When tossing up between two retailers, 67% say that convenience is the most important factor. That means a range of delivery options.
As SME retailers scale, the variety of options their customer base demands also grows. Ambitious SME retailers must find a way to expand their delivery experience proposition rapidly but sustainably, and that’s where ecommerce shipping solutions like delivery management software can help. Metapack’s own shipping solution, Delivery Manager allows retailers access to a network of shipping services that suits their market size, with the ability to switch on new services instantly via one single API.
Reduce shipping costs with rate shopping
Access is one thing, but there’s also the issue of cost. SMEs need a broader network of carriers, but they don’t have the volumes to attract the discounted rates that large enterprise retailers achieve. It’s down to the intelligence of ecommerce shipping solutions to ensure sustainable shipping rates as SMEs scale.
Metapack’s own solution, Delivery Manager, uses shipping rules to automatically select the service that can offer the best price while also meeting all the order requirements and delivery service requirements, for example economy, next day or nominated day. What’s more, Delivery Manager performs this process in the rapid-fire timeframe of 300 milliseconds.
Safeguard your delivery promise
In our Ecommerce Delivery Benchmark Report 2021, 81% of consumers say they had a bad delivery experience last year. That’s 5 times more than the year before. It’s experiences like these that can turn off newly acquired customers for good.
Ecommerce shipping solutions like Delivery Manager can help retailers safeguard their delivery promise, once again through shipping rules. In this case, the logic checks against factors like warehouse cut off times, parcel weight and dimensions, delivery addresses and business rules to prevent allocating to a service that can’t deliver.
The capability can also serve as a contingency tool in critical periods such as peak, for example by diverting allocation in the event of a carrier outage. This helps SME retailers maintain the highest uptime and reliability, even during the busiest times.
There’s never been more opportunities in retail’s new normal, but the competition to succeed remains fierce. The SMEs rising to the top will be those who can scale their delivery experience quickly but sustainably, and above all effectively.