6 Advantages of Having Dedicated Ecommerce Package Tracking App

There are a variety of package tracking solutions out there. Some are more suitable for personal use, while others are designed for businesses. If you run an ecommerce business, you should consider getting a dedicated package tracking app. Let’s explore some of the advantages of having one of those.

1. It’s More Convenient for Your Customers 

The first and most obvious advantage of having a dedicated package tracking app is that it’s more convenient for your customers. They don’t have to go to a third-party website to track their orders. Instead, they can do it right from your website. This will save them time and effort, which will increase customer satisfaction. 

Quality package tracking apps also allow your customers to track their orders using only their order number and email, which is great if they don’t have their tracking number at hand. It’s often the case that an order number is just a short combination of digits, while a tracking number is a long combination of letters and digits, so it’s much easier to remember the order number, which causes less confusion. 

Not to mention that sometimes (especially if you ship internationally) the parcel can be handled by multiple carriers, so in order to get the full picture of the parcel’s movements, your customers would have to visit multiple websites, in case you don’t have a dedicated package tracking app. 

2. It’s More Convenient for You

If your store doesn’t have some kind of package tracking solution, you probably have to deal with a lot of customer support tickets asking about the status of their orders. This can be very time-consuming and frustrating, especially if you have a lot of orders. You would have to manually check the status of each order and then reply to the customer. The situation gets even worse if you run a dropshipping store since you have to deal with a lot of orders from different suppliers. 

One way of dealing with this is simply by giving your customers a link to the tracking page of the carrier you use. For example, if you use EMS, you can just create a menu item like EMS tracking in your header menu. But if you use more than one carrier, it gets very messy very quickly: multiple links to multiple tracking pages on your store would look confusing for customers, not to mention that they would have to know which exact carrier is handling their order, which is not always obvious. 

Another slightly better way of doing this is by having a link to a third-party package tracking solution, which is able to track orders from multiple carriers in one place. But it’s not perfect either: it’s not customizable, you’re still sending your customers to a third-party website, which they may not trust, and it may not be the best look for your brand. 

Not to mention that in both aforementioned cases, you would have zero information about how it’s going, for example, you would not have statistics about your shipments, how many of them are delivered, how many are currently in transit, etc. 

Having a dedicated package tracking app reduces the load on your customer support team in a professional way: you can just direct your customers to it, which will save you a lot of time and effort, which you can spend on more important things, such as marketing or product development. 

3. It’s More Customizable
 

Another difference between a dedicated package tracking app and simply redirecting your customers to some third-party website is that it’s more customizable (or at least it should be; not all apps offer flexible tools for customization, so take your time to explore your options). You can customize the look and feel of the tracking page to match your brand, which will help you build brand awareness and increase customer loyalty.

Also, you can use it to increase your sales. The tracking page on your store is a great place to promote your other products since it’s visited by your customers, who have already purchased something from you, so they are more likely to buy something else. 

Some apps also allow you to customize the tracking information, which is very useful if you run a dropshipping store. For example, if you dropship from AliExpress, you may want the tracking information not to indicate that the parcel has been shipped from China. Of course, you can’t change the tracking information that comes from the carrier, but you can filter it, so that your customers don’t see it, or replace it with some generic line, like “processed through facility”. This will help you avoid customer complaints, since some customers may not like it if they see that their parcel has been shipped from China, even though they ordered it from your store. 

Another way of customization that you might want for your parcel tracking solution is being able to translate its user interface. Some third-party websites may not have your desired language available, or may even be available in just one language. Not to mention that carriers’ websites are usually available in only one language as well, maybe two or three at best. A good quality dedicated parcel tracking app should allow you to translate its user interface into any language you want. 

4. It’s More Secure

If you redirect your customers to a third-party website, you’re basically sending them away from your store, which may not be the best idea, since they may not trust that website, or they may not want to share their tracking information with a third-party app. Having a dedicated package tracking app on your store is much more secure, since your customers will stay on your website, which they already trust, and they will not have to share their tracking information with a third-party app. 

5. It’s More Reasonable
 

As we briefly mentioned before, a good package tracking solution would have detailed statistics about its usage, so you would see how many of your orders have been tracked by customers, how many of them are delivered, how many are currently in transit, etc. This is very valuable intel since it allows you to optimize your shipping process and improve your customer service, so it would be unreasonable to throw it away by redirecting your customers to a third-party website. 

For example, if you see that an order takes too much time to be delivered, you can contact the carrier and ask them what’s going on before your customer even notices that something is wrong. Sure, it can take some additional effort to manage, but it’s obviously better to have this information than not. 

You may even find some unexpected ways of optimizing your shipping process. For example, you may see that one of the carriers that you use has a much higher percentage of lost packages than others, or takes more time to deliver them on a regular basis, so you may want to cut that one off and use only the ones that perform better. 

6. It’s More Professional
 

Having a dedicated package tracking app in your store is a sign of professionalism. It shows that you care about your customers and want to provide them with the best possible experience. It also shows that you’re serious about your business and want to make it as good as possible, which will create a good image for your brand. 

So where to get one of those?

The answer to this question depends on the platform you use. Usually, each platform has its own app market, where you can find apps for different purposes, including package tracking. For example, if you use Shopify, you can find a lot of package tracking apps on the Shopify App Store. If you use WooCommerce, you can find them on the WooCommerce Extensions Store. And so on. Just search for “order tracking” or “package tracking” and you’ll find a lot of options.

Take your time to explore them and choose the one that suits your needs best. As we discussed in this article, it should give you the ability to customize its look and feel and translate its user interface into any language you want. It should also have detailed statistics about its usage, so you can optimize your shipping process and improve your customer service. And of course, it should support all the carriers that you use. 

It can be your first instinct to go for the most feature-rich solution right away, but keep in mind that such ones usually are the most expensive: some of those may even cost the same amount or even more of what you pay your ecommerce platform to run your whole store. So it sometimes may make sense to go for simpler solutions for a fraction of the cost. For example, if your business model is not dropshipping, you probably don’t need to filter the tracking information. Or if the app is presented in just one language (and doesn’t have a translation feature) and it’s the same as your store’s language – it may be a perfectly good option as well