Answer
Jan 16, 2021 - 08:13 PM
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A survey by Econsultancy found that customers prefer these shipping options; the first being the most important and the last being the least:
• A fixed delivery date
• Possibility to collect at local stores
• Delivery the next day
• A two hour delivery slot
• Delivery on the same day
People like being certain and so if you can let them envision receiving the purchase and using it, you are a step closer to closing the sale. In short, yes, letting customers know when to expect delivery has been shown to increase conversion rates.
One popular conversion rate heuristic (developed by MECLABS) states that “anxiety” is one of the negative factors that influences conversion rate (the other being “friction”). Try our course for free to learn more about increasing your conversion rates.
By how much? It varies widely depending on the product but, as always, I suggest split testing. Have a delivery time/date on one version and not the other version and see how it performs for you.
Displaying your delivery times the way Amazon does is a great way, for example, “place your order in the next 6 hours and receive it Saturday, 16th January”, or "pay $1.50 extra to receive your order on Thursday, March 2nd rather than Monday, March 6th”.
In both of these instances, the user is presented with a delivery date as opposed to shipping times, which can be a bit confusing for customers to decipher. Having a complex checkout has been proved to work against your conversion rates so keep it simple.
Using Plugins
You can use apps and plugins to help decrease abandoned cart instances and Magento and WooCommerce have some, to name a few of the options available.
Showing the Delivery date/time range on an order will therefore be your best bet at driving conversion rates up for your store.
Work With What You Have
It is true that FedEx and UPS give more accurate delivery times than USPS and so if you ship some of your orders with USPS, you may need to work around the uncertainty.
For UPS, I recommend under-promising a little, and then over-delivering a little i.e. if you think UPS will deliver in 3 days, use 4 days.
Allowing one or two extra days for handling and making sure that your package is at their offices before they send their shipment for the day will help a lot. You will also have to speed up handling on your end in order to make sure there is no delay from you.
All of this will work together to give your package ample time to be shipped and you can maintain some accuracy for your customers.
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