Our Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, Dana von der Heide, was recently invited as a guest of Claus Lauter on The E-Commerce Coffee Break. She had the opportunity to share her perspectives on the need for intuitive platforms in e-commerce logistics, why it's essential to get your first-mile operations right, and importantly, how consumer brands can deliver the best Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) experience. 

The E-Commerce Coffee Break is an e-commerce podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants who want to optimize for maximum conversions and revenue. It is hosted by Claus Lauter, an e-commerce conversion optimization expert, official Shopify & certified Klaviyo Partner, award-winning e-commerce store owner, and certified Google expert. He was recently named one of the Top 20 Shopify Experts to follow for 2022. He is also a Coach & Student Mentor for the Advanced Certificate in Digital Marketing and Communications at India's top marketing university upgrad.com.

Listen to the podcast interview here or read the transcript below. The content has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

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Claus Lauter:

Hello! Welcome to another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee Break today. I want to talk about the direct customer experience. What does that mean? That's basically what's happening after somebody has ordered from you. Shipping and delivery are probably one of the most asked questions when it comes to customer support, and to get this right helps a lot with returning customers. A happy customer will probably come back. Many Shopify store owners focus more on the front end / the marketing side of things, but even more important than that is to get the rest right, so, therefore, I’ve Dana von der Heide with me today. 

She's the Founder, and Chief Commercial Officer of Parcel Perform at www.parcelperform.com, a leading delivery experience platform for businesses covering 800+ logistics carriers worldwide. She's also a member of the distinguished e-founder fellowship program by Alibaba, a network of international entrepreneurs and business leaders. Dana also co-hosts a logistics podcast series called The Logistics Tribe. Also, she's on the advisory board of the German logistics association. 

She has a vast background in everything related to delivery, shipping, and logistics. So let's dive into it. Hello, Dana, how are you today?

Dana von der Heide 

Very good. Thank you so much for having us!

Claus Lauter  

Dana, to get started, give me a bit of a background on where you're coming from. How did you get started in logistics? 

Dana von der Heide 

So I think by now, I can fairly say I'm quite a logistics nerd, but that's not how my career started. I originally studied Psychology and Communication Science. But I went into logistics pretty quick! I work for DHL, the global logistics company, and did corporate strategy roles. During my time there, I realized that there was a big gap in the industry: making data accessible and standardized for merchants to optimize their logistics operations, make better decisions, and create better customer experiences.

So I stuck with the industry, and I started Parcel Perform more than six years ago. I'm here in Singapore, where I’ve lived for quite a long time. But usually, I'm based in Berlin. 

Claus Lauter  

Okay. So what makes it so difficult to get delivery right?

Dana von der Heide

Getting the delivery right is problematic per se, but what is even more difficult is getting the experience behind that delivery right because everyone is delivering parcels. There are now more than 1000 different carriers in the world. And getting the delivery right is really hard because many things can go wrong: i.e., Traffic is terrible, parcels are lost in transit, etc. 

This is something that the merchant cannot control because that's in the hands of the delivery companies and carriers. So the question is: what do you do to make this experience intuitive and consistent - one that creates loyalty and trust with your customers? This is quite hard because everyone, specifically in the DTC (Direct-To-Consumer), are working with multiple carriers. 

One carrier may be enough if you ship in one country, but we see increasing carrier diversification in the broader industry, especially for DTC brands that are expanding internationally and operating in multiple markets. They’ve to work with multiple carriers, and all have their own websites to update their end-customers. One potential problem is that everyone wants updates uniquely to their region and language. For example, if you ship between Germany and Singapore, no one in Singapore wants to see German delivery events on Deutsche Post's Singapore website. 

For the DTC brands, It's better for them to have this information available on their website. We know this from Amazon and the like, where instead of sending your customer away, you keep them engaged on your webshop; you manage this part of the experience; even when someone loses your parcel, the customer doesn't have to hassle in finding the information themselves. DTC brands know it themselves; they can communicate proactively and manage that customer experience to drive loyalty.

Claus Lauter 

So obviously, tracking and predicting when it’ll be arriving is the most important information for the customer. Most customer support requests are coming from that direction. If you don't have the right system in place, how in a perfect world would you say this whole flow of getting your customer excited about the shipment and when it will arrive?

Dana von der Heide

Fantastic question. I think the key is to get all the data into one place, and then you can work with this data for your internal visibility and delivery notifications. 

What we've seen in the market is a lot of DTC brands are working on Shopify stores and if you’ve multiple brands on multiple markets, that could result in inconsistent data throughout the stores. We ensure that you can automatically connect to one Parcel Perform account with multiple Shopify stores, no matter how many you’ve. We don't want to bother your IT departments;  it's two clicks, and all your shipping data and your customer information and order information automatically gets integrated into Parcel Perform. 

Brand owners will get a dashboard of what is happening, and you see all the information on who the customer was, the latest status of the shipment, when it’ll arrive, and anything else that you need to know. 

We also see specifically in DTC that these brands are now working with other software operators. They can send emails via Parcel Perform, and it's all entirely white-labeled, but they often also use other tools like Klaviyo, for example, where they then use them to trigger notifications. 

Now we believe you shouldn't force a brand to do everything via Parcel Perform, but we need to integrate neatly into their environment of software tools. Georges is another one for customer service. It’s important for us to be able to integrate back with all our customers’ systems from one Parcel Perform account. 

For example, we can automatically trigger the creation of tickets whenever the carrier says the parcel is missing last or late, we can automatically create a customer service ticker, or even more importantly, we can create a trigger, for example, in Klaviyo or with our notifications, and inform the customer, so that they can avoid having to dig out the information on the carrier website.

You can also proactively communicate in your branding, which is very important. And you can build this loyalty also after the purchase, which is super important since you spent many marketing dollars winning this customer, you should also invest in retaining them!

Claus Lauter

Okay, I like that. I mean, obviously, I'm biased. I'm a Klaviyo and Shopify partner. So I want to hear how it completely integrates into the systems. Now when it comes to compliance. You're handing over, or you're handing over a lot of customer data to these shipping companies and all these systems. Many countries are coming up with GDPR and similar solutions when it comes to compliance and data protection. How do you deal with that?

Dana von der Heide

Yes, also a super important point. When we handle the data, we are fully GDPR compliant. But what is super interesting is that many brands are giving the data to the carriers. This means that you should generally get the approval from the carrier and from the end-customer that you can pass on this data, but there's usually an opt-in kind of process, and many people haven't done that. So I think this gray zone of letting the carrier notify your end-customers is already a risk. 

And this is why it's super powerful to build this process in-house. Because when you sign up an end-customer, they in every standard terms and conditions (also for Shopify clients), agree to be notified on this specific delivery but only towards the shop because that was where they transacted.  So with our service, you communicate this as the shop; no one knows that Parcel Perform is behind this. And you are much more in line with GDPR than passing this information to the carriers and letting them communicate it. And then, of course, on our side, we sign all the necessary kinds of agreements and standard contractual clauses to be fully GDPR compliant, who hosts our data in Europe, all that sorts of stuff.

Claus Lauter 

How does the merchant deal with returns shipping because it goes through your system, or do they’ve to connect to the delivery service? How does it work?

Dana von der Heide

Also, a huge topic that we see right now in the market. So there are two things on returns that are important to differentiate that sometimes get mixed up. 

You have involuntary returns, and this is quite a big one. So you sent out something, but the parcel never made it to the end recipient for some reason. In some markets, you have cash-on-delivery, so they didn't have the money, or they couldn't find the address. It's super crucial that you also manage this process extremely well. Let's say, the parcel went back with our system, we can give the customer a ping that the parcel didn't reach the recipient, so you can immediately do the cash remittance, and the earlier you give them back their money, the more likely they are going buy. The same is also for the returns process that you do voluntarily. Returns are definitely due to its own whole entire different coffee chat episode!

We have a lot of best practices, and we absolutely also support that; it’s a process of designing and aligning with our customer needs: i.e., should the label already be in the parcel? Do you want to generate it later? What are your return policies on what?

We believe that it is very important to make this super-intuitive. We have a widget that our customers can plug into their Shopify stores. They don't have to develop anything; we hand them over the code, and within the widget, we can show where the delivery is; they should also immediately be able to facilitate your returns. So it's a truly integrated experience and convenient, and I think the times are over when retailers try to avoid returns. 

I think at this stage; everyone should make returning easy because it's been proven that the easier that process is, the more kind of reselling and upselling you can do later on.

Claus Lauter

Give me a bit of insight into what's happening in the shipping industry right now. Everyone reads about delays and container ships getting stuck somewhere else, and the delivery times are getting high. And specifically in the Shopify world with dropshipping and DTC stores, lots of stuff coming from Asia from China shipped all over the world, with massive delays. What's happening there? Just give me a bit of background.

Dana von der Heide

I think there was never a better time to talk about logistics because everyone has realized its huge impact on their lives. First, we had the Suez Canal; then, we had a supply shortage in terms of COVID because no one was in the warehouse. 

Now Shanghai is in lockdown right now. If you look at the pictures at the port. I mean, it's almost art! It's fascinating, but I've never seen such a blocked port in my life, and I've been in logistics for a while. What to do with this? I think the most important thing is that you know where your deliveries are, even on the first mile. And this is also supercritical. We all think about the customer (Great!), but if there's one step to get a parcel to the end-customer, the very first one needs to hit your warehouse. For that, you need to know where the deliveries are on the way to your warehouse as well because that's a true end-to-end process that we're seeing. And that's why a lot of the clients that we're working with, such as Waterdrop, but also bigger brands like Nespresso, they really try to do end-to-end visibility - from like tracking anything that goes into the warehouse, from anything that happens in the warehouse, to anything that goes to the customer. 

One decision that one has to take is how much you want to expose the end-to-end process to the client. Because obviously, no customer wants to see that something is stuck, and it is also not that much of an immediate - it comes from there /directly goes out /cross storage, etc. Having that visibility of what your first mile does also affects your marketing campaign. We've seen this so frequently: you're advertising a product, and then you realize it wasn't even in stock (worse possible customer experience!) 

Get transparency, not just on your last mile. Don't make it intuitive for your customers but make it intuitive for your own operations people on what's coming on the last mile is key.

Claus Lauter

Talking about the last mile as a merchant, what would you recommend? What should be sort of your value proposition there? Recently Amazon Prime was offering 24-hour delivery. In certain areas in the US, they tried to deliver within 15 minutes or something like that. So obviously, people get this in their mind. I think, okay, that's happening from everything. From a merchant's side. How should you communicate? How do you deliver on how quickly it goes? 

Dana von der Heide

Yeah, this is also something very much talked about. I have a bit of a different stance on this. I don't believe, and we've seen this with our customers, that it needs to be as fast as possible. 

First of all, also because that's not sustainable. And if you look at the new generations, they care about the CO2 footprint and sustainability. But what is really important is that it's there at the right time. People want to plan their lives. Hopefully, we can all leave our house, go on holiday, and go to the office. If the parcel arrives and you're not at home, it can be as fast as it could be, but you didn't get it!

So this element of predictability and choice, I think, is very important. So if merchants can give their customers a choice, and we see this with some brands to say, "do you want to make this a little slower? Do you want us to combine shipments and be more conscious of sustainability efforts? Do you maybe want us to deliver this to a parcel locker or parcel shop because they are always open, and then you go and collect it whenever convenient?" So I think these are very big topics, the element of choice at checkout, and I think we should trust customers to be able to make that choice. More and more because they want to. 

The second element is predictability. Carriers basically, at the moment, give you an EDD (estimated delivery date), but it only comes in once the carrier has collected the parcel; that's mighty too late because you already made the order, and you cannot stop it anymore. So I think we should learn from the Amazons and the like and actually be able to predict when the parcel arrives at checkout. And it's also something that we're driving here at Parcel Perform.

Because once you really need to do it again, it's a matter of data. If it's a rule-based thing, and if you check out now for three days, it is still a bad experience, even if that's wrong. So you got to have all your data together to standardize it, you need to know what is in the parcel, who's the customer, and which carrier it's going to go to be able to predict that, but that's exactly the benefits of the likes of Amazon because they would actually tell you what's going on there. And it can be replicated for any merchant if they invest in this data play as well. 

Claus Lauter

Your platform obviously, brings all the data from these different data sources together, who's your perfect customer who should work with Parcel Perform?

Dana von der Heide

So we're open to anyone that ships parcels, but it's DTC brands for us. It's a massive thing because it's so quick to set up. There are no integration efforts, two clicks to connect your Shopify store, we do the Klaviyo stuff, and we love this industry! I mean, it's a high growth sector; DTC is predicted to be a US$150 billion market in 2022, even more next year. 

So even though many DTC companies are still below one million, and we love established brands that ship much volume, we believe in the segment's potential. We'd love to get all the DTC brands and have them on the road to internationalization. They need more data across all these different carriers, personalization, and languages as they grow. So we'd be honored to support them there as well.

Claus Lauter

Okay, before we finish, give me one golden nugget for a merchant. What should they do? 

Dana von der Heide

Well. Acknowledge that it's not just about winning customers. It's about building loyalty after checkout. You can burn as much marketing dollars as you can on gaining customers there. But I think the real golden nugget is to focus on post-purchase control and experience because that will save you a lot of marketing dollars and generate a really loyal customer base.

Claus Lauter

Very good tip! I’ve been there and I know how painful it can be to deal with shipping that has not arrived. People are not informed where it is a real pain in the neck. So 100 percent right there. 

Thanks so much for your time. Where can people find out more about your services? 

Dana von der Heide

Come to our company website, www.parcelperform.com. We have a community page, www.parcelmonitor.com where we give insights and reports on parcel monitoring, or just find me on LinkedIn. I'd be more than happy to connect, Dana von der Heide, Parcel Perform. Very easy to spot us anyway.

Claus Lauter

Okay, sounds great. I’ll put the links in the show notes and people can click right through there. Again, thanks for the time. It was lovely to chat with you and learn a little bit more about this part of the e-commerce business and talk soon!

Dana von der Heide

Thank you very much for having me.