Many growing e-commerce businesses are faced with the decision to build all key areas of services in-house or, outsourcing these services and purchasing an available solution in the market. While the most crucial parts are important to keep under full control, many leading businesses are moving ahead to buy best-in class tools and services in the market. This way, businesses can leverage the full expertise of these solutions and benefit from continuous new feature releases while fully focusing on business critical areas that affect their bottom line. The trend to outsource has seen an exponential uptick in recent years, with many fully embracing the mindset. This covers outsourcing their server infrastructure to providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure, leveraging existing webshop solutions like Shopify, Magento, or Magento alternatives, or utilizing e-commerce tools and adopting best-in-class WMS, ERP, or Data visualization tools. This trend can be seen worldwide as outsourcing non-business critical service components is the next logical step to drive growth for any business. So while many already have given the service of delivering goods into the hands of the carriers, buying a solution like Parcel Perform off the market enables managing the customer experience in-house.

Parcel Perform has developed scalable enterprise services and the gold standard of parcel tracking that did not exist in the early years of e-commerce. Less than a couple of years ago, online brands had to build their own tracking integrations with carriers. Now, working with us means leveraging the immediate benefits of integrating with an existing, single scalable API with access to all tools to not just delight your customers but provide better tools for your internal teams as well. Detailed below are just some of the reasons why leading brands such as Nespresso, Zalando, Wayfair, Decathlon and many others have decided against building an inhouse tool and instead choose the best-in-class available solution that already exists in the market: Parcel Perform. 

Key reasons to buy the best delivery experience solution instead of building in-house 

1. Effort in investing in infrastructure to access standardized set of data 

Building and sustaining carrier integrations

The crucial problem with logistics data is that for every carrier you have to build a seperate booking and tracking integration. Furthermore, these data integrations are not standardized and might require different integration methods such as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Secure File Transfer Protocols (SFTPs), Electronic Data Interchanges (EDIs). Even if multiple carriers support the same method, the chances of their APIs, for example, being built similarly is rare.

Your IT team would have to spend additional effort building the integration in the first place however, the biggest challenge begins when the large amounts of data start coming in.  

Standardizing the data without losing any information 

Updates on parcel tracking  such as event updates like delivery statuses always come in different forms.  Different carriers have numerous varying events to describe events in a delivery journey. These events are often embedding additional information, such as Estimated delivery dates, as well as order data and  customer information. Simply standardizing these data points  would lose a critical element of detail needed to reveal insights and optimize delivery experience. 

Additionally,  besides carrier events, cross border shipments will be updated in different locations, time zones and even languages. Building an integration that is able to normalize raw tracking data into a standardized data set that provides all the delivery details would require continuous data monitoring to assure optimal data health and early identification of issues. 

Continuous data updates and interpretations

One effect often overlooked is the continuous effort and investment required to manage the data standardization. While carriers usually have hundreds of standard events, their descriptions change of term and hence require a continuous mapping effort. While events are often ambiguous, in depth-logistics knowledge is necessary to correctly interpret the given data. Additionally, thousands of new locations would require continuous mapping but can be a very tedious endeavor - some cities exist multiple times around the globe and it is extremely important to map it to the right locations. Similar challenges come up as well when timezones change during daylight savings time, creating even more obstacles to ensure accurate mapping. ensure a correct, regular new and re-mapping of this data. 

Capturing additional data points

Suppose your business intends to capture additional data points which are not always provided by all your carriers such as Estimated Delivery Dates (EDD) or proof of delivery documents. These additional data points can help a business outperform its competition by providing full visibility to internal teams- especially for phases of the delivery journey that companies are not able to control entirely. Things will not be easy to standardize, but are important to capture for teams to be able to utilize. This would require additional effort as well.Optimizing update latenciesOnce you have tackled the challenge of standardizing the raw tracking data and ensuring that additional data points are captured, optimizing update latencies is the next important challenge. When managing large data sets, collecting it in (near to) real-time is vital. While the market is developing new tools such as webhook integrations, the majority of all carriers have customers rely on API or event EDI integrations, which have to be called in regular time intervals. These efforts are not just time consuming, but if not optimized efficiently can be extremely  resource heavy without yielding the desired, on-time results. 

Building data feeds into your other systems

Lastly, once you have all data in place most businesses would want to push these streamlined data elements into additional workflows and data bases. If you utilize Webshop Systems such as Magento and Shopify, you will need an inbound integration to import order and shipment data automatically. Working with other tools such as Enterprise Resource Planning tools (ERP) or, Order Management Systems (OMS), Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), will also require data feeds to flow to and from seamlessly. Additionally, you might need to push the delivery data back into your Email Marketing tools, to automate delivery notifications.

As data is key for many high growth businesses, IT teams also adopt data lakes or Business Intelligence (BI) tools - to ensure they can consolidate all data points. These efforts require teams to spend important IT resources on building integrations that would otherwise be already established and an easy plug and play solution for businesses like Parcel Perform.

2. Enabling order tracking throughout the delivery journey for customers

Branded Tracking PageOnce you have all the data you need, gaining visibility on deliveries is a key consideration for customers who shop online. Consumers also expect more updates proactively from e-commerce businesses. Displaying tracking updates to your customers in real time and ensuring that they are kept in a branded environment is crucial. This page  should also be able to function as a widget that can be easily displayed in your webshop and serve as a valuable touchpoint between you and your customers.Delivery Notifications Making sure the data you have collected and analyzed is accessible to your customers via SMS, email or webhooks ensures a concrete omni-channel communication strategy. Ideally, these email or SMS templates should have additional field placeholders to support personalization where necessary. Shipping cross-border also means that customers should be able to choose their preferred language of choice when being notified. Leveraging machine learning technology to predict a more accurate date of arrival so then customers know when their orders will arrive is also ideal.

Returns Management Solution

Providing a simple solution that adopts an end-to-end approach for returns management will also enable you to focus on revenue while easily managing return requests and keeping customers informed and engaged throughout the process. 

3. Making all actionable insights & data tools available to internal teams

Logistics Intelligence for your Logistics and BI TeamsGaining full visibility on real-time logistics performance and analyze this data accurately for your data and business intelligence (BI) experts is also essential. Running these reports would require manual effort wasting time and resources to ensure that they can be flexible enough to analyze all aspects of the delivery journey. These reports will also have to analyze complete and real-time data not historical data - which is what excel sheets are built on. This will allow your teams to identify logistical inefficiences and opportunities from order creation to delivery. The best case scenario is for these reports to be readily available on demand and allow for configuration when custom reports need to be built. 

(Service Level Agreement) SLA Compliance Management for your Logistics and Customer Service Teams

Once you sign contracts with your carrier partners your logistics teams might have to rely on carriers’ SLA reporting which do not provide transparency and are hard to compare to determine the best carrier to work with. It is often the case that you are unable to monitor your carrier performance on your own and track their performance in a particular region or day of the week for example. This helps you measure your external KPIs in the last mile. Secondly, being able to measure your internal KPIs to understand if your warehouse is in line with your internal SLA expectations. Gaining a full overview to compare and make data driven decisions across carriers, services and trade lanes can help your logistics teams monitor performance effectively. This data can then act as powerful reports to prepare for Quarterly Business Reviews and help optimize the last-mile operations with accurate and readily available data. A Customer Service Toolkit for your Customer Service and Logistics Teams

Being able to provide your customer service teams with all the necessary data in an easily accessible tool so that they are able to retrieve shipment details easily in one intuitive platform across all your carrier partners is essential to easing the burden for your customer service teams. These details should be easily searchable with tags and filters that work intuitively with your teams’ internal workflows. Data that is accessible should optimistically cover all carrier updates at every stage of the delivery journey and, in the best case scenario, also combine with order and customer data. This enables your teams to proactively communicate with customers especially in the case where there is an issue or a delay with a parcel.

Quick and seamless on-boarding with Parcel Perform 

Everything you need to build your infrastructure, assist your internal teams while servicing your customers in a branded environment are expertly built by technology platforms such as Parcel Perform. Working with Parcel Perform means a fully integrated tracking experience that is better than any other in the market. You get full access to our data and logistics experts and on-boarding of your data within our integrated platform is deployed at a maximum of four weeks. The time saved and the resources needed to build this in house will not be worth building it. We estimate building an in-house platform such as ours will take up to 12 months for any business. Our continuous maintenance and additional feature development also allows you to utilize our expertise whenever you intend to at no additional cost. Above all, our flexibility to configure a platform to suit your business allows you to communicate with your customers within a fully branded environment throughout the delivery journey. 

Speak to our product experts and find out how you can start building delivery experience.