Video – Designing your customers’ receiving experience: E-commerce lab

This is the fourth blog of our six-part series on how to efficiently operate your e-commerce business with in-house expert Suveen Suri. In our e-commerce Innovation Lab, she’ll walk you through how to deliver the best possible receiving experience for your e-commerce customers and provide vision into what Canadians expect from retailers. Use those insights to better cater to their needs and stand out among the competition.

The receiving experience

‘Receiving’ is everything that happens to your package in between leaving your hands and arriving in your customer’s. A critical part of your customer’s experience with your brand, there are four things shoppers value and expect when it comes to their receiving experience:

1. Speed: Canadians are pretty patient. Though free shipping trumps fast shipping, customers value access to speedy options.
   

   ¹ Canada Post. 2019 Canadian Online Shopper Study, CPC 19-201, April 2019.

2. Communication: Shoppers want notifications updating them on the delivery status of their item. Enabling tracking through your delivery partner, or on your website, keeps the lines of communication open with your customer and keeps them updated every step of the way.
   

   ² Canada Post. 2019 Canadian Online Shopper Study, CPC 18-200, April 2019.

3. Convenience: For those who work during the day, it’s tough to be home to receive a delivery. Make the delivery experience a breeze by extending your network with your delivery provider’s network. This creates greater reach for your brand and greater convenience for your shoppers.
4. Flexibility: Shoppers want options for where they’ll receive their item – at home, at a post office, or from your storefront. Offer your online shoppers the opportunity to tailor their delivery needs and enjoy an exceptional delivery experience every time.
   

   ³ Canada Post. 2019 Canadian Online Shopper Study, CPC 18-200, April 2019.

Build brand with package tracking

With Canada Post’s web services, you can embed tracking into your website to keep shoppers coming back. Canada Post offers integrations for every major e-commerce platform, allowing you to enjoy marketing value on your website from our powerful package tracking system.

Not looking to track packages on your website? Direct your customers to canadapost.ca with a tracking number sent by email that enables them to track their package.

Convenience means different things to different shoppers

Next, let’s focus on the convenience and flexibility shoppers expect.

Enabling a quality receiving experience is about taking advantage of everything your delivery partner can offer.

Canada Post’s network is a great asset for your business – with our 6,200 coast-to-coast retail post offices within 5 km of 90 per cent of Canadians and our unparalleled reach and access to every Canadian address. Our network can be used as an extension of your brand that enables Canadians to receive their packages. And don’t forget about our convenient parcel lockers in apartments and condos, and our network of community mailboxes, that ensure safe and secure delivery.

You can leverage our post office network to enable your customers to send their parcels directly to a post office of their choice. You can do so either through our free FlexDelivery^TM service (post office box delivery) or through an integration on your website that enables this choice at checkout through our Deliver to Post Office solution.

Offering choice allows customers to tailor their experience to their needs.

Canada Post’s Deliver to Post Office service is easy to integrate into your website and allows consumers to select a post office of their choice for package delivery. Instead of receiving at home, customers can send their package to a post office near work, along their commute, or anywhere else they find convenient.

Now you can ensure that even after the order has left your warehouse, your customer is still receiving a great experience from end-to-end and it’s this experience that will keep them coming back for repeat purchases.

Sources:
¹ Canada Post. 2019 Canadian Online Shopper Study, CPC 19-201, April 2019.
^{2 3} Canada Post. 2019 Canadian Online Shopper Study, CPC 18-200, April 2019.

Suveen Suri is an Advisor for Ecommerce Solution integrations at Canada Post. She works with hundreds of Canadian merchants each year to help them operate more effectively by integrating the right e-commerce tools and solutions.Read more by Suveen Suri