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There are two peak moments consumers experience during the process of shopping online: discovering a new product and receiving their purchase.
Finding good products is contingent on the marketplace offering a relevant curation to their customer base. The process of a customer receiving their purchase is contingent on the shipping policy that is in effect.
This article outlines the components of a clear and measurable shipping policy, and provides advice on how to tailor them to your own marketplace.
It is considered standard to ask for shipment within 24 hours of a seller receiving an order. This threshold can prove challenging for some brands, depending on the timing of the order and the geography between the fulfillment centre and the end-customer.
Recent developments (ex. Covid-19) have also dramatically impacted shipping times. Pre-Covid, the average ship time of sellers in the Convictional network was 31 hours. More recently during the Covid-era, shipping times can be 4-5 days or longer.
Shipping times are not evenly distributed across sellers. Depending on the brand’s size and level of sophistication, average ship times can vary widely.
One example where shipping times may not be necessary to outline and enforce is regarding made-to-order goods. Customers inherently understand that custom goods require time to craft and thus have much lower expectations around delivery times.
It is also recommended to have your sellers integrate their ecommerce platforms (to the extent possible) to ensure that information such as tracking numbers is automatically synced across to your own marketplace platform. This also allows your marketplace to provide branded packing slips to maintain consistent branding.
Below are sample legal terms that can be used as a template for your own contracts:
Legal
[Brand Name] agrees to ship orders on behalf of [Retailer Name] to customers of [Retailer Name]. When an order is placed on [Retailer Name] for [Brand Name]’s products, order information will be communicated within 24 hours to [Brand Name]’s Customer Success Manager or customer database via Convictional. [Brand Name] Agrees to ship in stock products within 24 business hours after order has been communicated. Please refer to Page X of this document for [Retailer Name]’s Shipping Policy.
Below is a sample shipping policy that can be used as a template for your own policies:
Once you have set your shipping policy and crafted both legal terms and public-facing documentation, you are ready to inform your sellers and then begin measuring performance.
Shipping policy is only useful to the extent in which it is consistently measured and upheld. One method to do so is to codify your baseline expectations as a part of your Seller SLAs and then track per-order performance against those baselines.
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