Connected — the best way to describe the world today. With so many ways to connect to almost anyone across the globe, it has given a great boost to online business. As a result, the people feel more comfortable in engaging in businesses online. Moreover, the platforms like WordPress/WooCommerce also deserves the credit for making it easier for everyone to be a part of E-commerce today. Plugins like WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments and WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro have proved to be a blessing for many business owners.
This guide is aimed at the WooCommerce store owners who spend their time dealing with the customers and helping them in tracking their orders. With the help of this guide, tracking WooCommerce orders will no longer be a tiring and a time-consuming task. We will be exploring the possibility of automating the task at hand and to make sure the next time your customers require shipment tracking, it will be done in a flash.
For all the WooCommerce store owners and for those who are planning to be a part of it in the near future, as you read further, the idea of having an automated Order Tracking mechanism would be more clear. This guide is aimed at answering all the ‘Hows and Whats’, to make it easy to understand that how important it is to have a dedicated solution for order tracking.make for the business owners.
Is Order Tracking really that big of a problem..?
Let us take the example of WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a huge platform when it comes to the number of websites that are based on WooCommerce. As per Built With, WooCommerce powers 47% of the entire E-commerce websites over the internet. The graph below shows WooCommerce being way ahead of all the other platforms.
E-commerce Usage Statistics
With that huge number of websites, there would be millions of customers who are being served by those websites. Moreover, with some of the best shipping carriers like UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. tracking the orders of every customer would consume a lot of time and energy. While tracking an order you have shipped via UPS, the following are the steps that are required.
- Get the order details by searching for the Customer’s Name or Email ID.
- Find the Tracking Number for that Order.
- Visit the Official UPS Tracking link page.
- Manually entering the tracking ID.
- Getting the Official Tracking Details
- Sending the tracking details to the customers via Email.
Based on the above-mentioned process, we can easily conclude the following points.
- This process for a single order could easily take up to 20 minutes.
- There is no way of performing any other task while tracking the package.
- In case of medium scale businesses, a dedicated support representative is required to perform this task.
- In case of multiple orders, the time and the effort for this task will increase exponentially.
- This way the case with a single shipping carrier. For businesses using multiple shipping carriers, the time, effort and the cost will be much more.
Time taken to track orders increases exponentially
Should you really be concerned over tracking your orders and providing tracking details to your customers..? Well, definitely yes..!
This guide aims at finding the best solution for business owners to easily track their shipments and provide the tracking details to their customers too. But before that, let’s check out what makes an ideal solution for a seamless order tracking.
An Ideal Order Tracking Solution for your Business
Any business, be it online or offline, has similar fundamental aspects that are directly associated with the success of that business. In case of any issues, finding the solution to the issue requires a great consideration of those aspects. In trying to find an ideal order tracking solution too, considering the following factors is a must.
Time Saver
Save Time Save Money
Time is money. An online business, just like other businesses, requires a dedicated time. This time must be utilized in exploring productive ideas, solving the current issues, etc. However, in case of Order Tracking, this precious time is being spent on handling the customer’s queries about the whereabouts of the shipment. In case of medium to large-scale businesses, the support teams spend a lot of time on helping the customers locate their shipments. Hence, an ideal Order Tracking Solution must be focussed on saving the time of store owners as well as the support team. This way they would have one less task to worry about and they can work towards solving real issues of their customers.
Automated Solution
Automated Solutions resulting in Less Manual Effort
Automation serves the need of the hour very well when it comes to Order Tracking. With so many orders processed on a daily basis, even a less amount of time spent on tracking one single order can become uncompromising. Hence, the ideal Order Tracking solution must be an automated system that will not only handle the shipment tracking details but will also map those details to the dedicated order number so that if need be, these details can be produced to the customers.
Check out the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments for all your WooCommerce Bookings needs.
A major benefit of the automated system is that it can work with bare minimum staff. We already discussed how a store owner or the support staff can be occupied with the tiring task of shipment tracking. There are a lot of other examples of automated systems that can help make your online business a success. When it comes to shipping the products, there are some very efficient WooCommerce shipping plugins that automate the tasks like generating packages and even in some cases, creating the shipping labels for delivery.
Money Saver
Less Costly Business Solutions
A huge chunk of E-commerce share comprises of small to medium scale businesses. That being said, these businesses may not have the budget to spend on a standalone solution to track their packages. On an average, a medium scale business owner may be handling less than 5 orders per day. Hence, if he requires a mechanism to automate the whole tracking process, the cost of such a solution must never be a barrier for him.
When it comes to WooCommerce, there are some really reliable order tracking solutions, free-of-cost to handle the requirements of a small to medium scale business. Besides, for a large scale business, there are always premium tools that make the solution worth every penny that is spent in buying it.
Enhances Customer Experience
Because Customer’s Experience Matters
In any business, it all comes down to the customer experience. In case of Order Tracking, the fact that the customers are contacting the support or the store owner is, in fact, the biggest problem. While placing an order, the best way to ensure a great customer experience is to make sure the customers get what they might ask. An ideal order tracking solution for an online business must be an additional tool to enhance the customer experience. This can benefit the business owner in more than one way.
Finding the best WooCommerce Order Tracking Plugin
The best thing about WooCommerce is that it is based on WordPress which is an open-source platform. In other words, if there is a genuine problem concerning WooCommerce and WooCommerce store owners, it won’t be long before there would be a plugin developed for that very problem. In case of Order Tracking, again there are a lot of plugins that you can use to track the shipment.
However, with these many plugins, it becomes very hard for a WooCommerce store owner to choose the best one for his business. So in this section, we will be shedding some light on some of the must-have features for an Order Tracking plugin.
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**Ability to Handle Multiple shipping carriers**When it comes to a popular E-commerce platform like WooCommerce, business owners won’t just be using a single shipping carrier. Moreover, WooCommerce store owners tend to cover the customers all over the world. So there are chances they might be using more than one shipping carrier to ship products to their customers. In such cases, the perfect way an order tracking plugin can satisfy that business case is by providing support to multiple shipping carriers.
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**Complete Orders Automatically**In the earlier section, we talked about automation playing an important role in terms of reducing the load on the store owner. For an order tracking plugin to work perfectly, the order status must be changed to Complete in order to update the tracking details for that order. It makes it very convenient for the store owner to focus on different orders rather than making sure that the orders are completed or not.
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**Insert Tracking data into delivery note**Personalization is among the top requirements when it comes to WooCommerce store owners. Wouldn’t it be great if you received all the tracking information in a dedicated section of the Order Confirmation Email? A plugin with the ability to insert all the tracking details to the delivery note would be nothing less than perfect if you are aiming for an order tracking plugin.
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**Tracking order directly from My Accounts page**When it comes to multiple orders, some customers may access their orders from the website. So, it is more accessible for them to be able to track all their orders directly by logging into the website. This way they will have an option to just log into the website and select the order they want to track. So having a plugin with this functionality would really surprise your customers.
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**Tracking orders via email**Email has become one of the widely used modes of communication for business owners. It is a great option to be able to send an email once the order is placed. However, sending the tracking details to your customers would be a whole new experience to the customers. This way they will be able to track their orders directly by clicking the tracking link included in the order completion email.
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**Import tracking details from any platform**The ability to import tracking details is one of those features that must be in a WooCommerce order tracking plugin. This way the store owners can easily import the CSV file containing all the order details along with the tracking information.
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**Import via FTP**In some cases, WooCommerce store owners may choose to make changes to their WooCommerce store via FTP. In such cases, taking additional time in logging in the FTP account and making changes to the files seems less practical. There should be some mechanism where you can enter the FTP credentials in the plugin settings and import the tracking details to the orders.
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**Automatic import from a folder**There is another way busy store owners can make use of a reliable shipment tracking plugin in their WooCommerce store. By importing the tracking details stored in a folder using FTP seems an efficient option. However, by automatically importing the details based on a time interval would easily give the order tracking plugin an edge over the competitors.
So, a WooCommerce plugin fulfilling all the above features would be the best solution for tracking shipments. With such a plugin not only the small-scale business owners would be able to strengthen their store but even the medium-scale store owners would be able to optimize their customer’s experience.
You can also check out our WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro on PluginHive.
Order Tracking using WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro
WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro, by PluginHive, is one of the best tracking plugins that WooCommerce store owners can find. This powerful plugin allows WooCommerce store owners to track their shipments directly from the Orders Page. Not only that, using this plugin the customers can get the tracking details via Email, as soon as the order is completed.
Now, let’s us check out how this plugin offers unmatched performance in terms of order tracking for WooCommerce store owners. Below are some of the highlighting features that will save business owners a lot of time, money as well as their efforts.
Support for Multiple Shipping Carriers
Support for Multiple Shipping Carriers
WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro provides support for multiple shipping carriers. Based on the preference, store owners can easily add or remove additional shipping carriers easily.
Custom Tracking Messages
Create your own Custom Tracking Messages
Give your Order Completion Email a personal touch by adding a personalized tracking message for your customers. This way it can help build a strong relationship with the customers and help in providing a better experience.
Bulk Import Tracking Data
Import Tracking Details in bulk via CSV import
With the help of Bulk Import store owners can easily add the tracking details for multiple orders using a CSV file. This way the store owners can save both time and energy by adding tracking details to all the orders in one go.
FTP Import & Auto-Import
Import Tracking Details via FTP
WooCommerce store owners have the option to add the FTP details in the plugin settings so that they can add the shipment tracking details directly to the WooCommerce site.
Schedule Auto-Import CSV via FTP
The auto-import functionality allows WooCommerce store owners to add the automation to their order tracking. Using this feature, store owners can schedule the time of importing the tracking details to the WooCommerce store.
In Conclusion…
In this day and age, it’s quite difficult to run an online store and set up shipment tracking facilities. So using a methodical solution like WooCommerce Shipment Tracking, for this requirement can really take the dust off your shoulders and get your sales up.
You could also get some useful resources on how to secure your WordPress site from WP Buffs.
This article was originally written by Ujjawal Shirkot.
About Ujjawal
He is a notable Content Writer who likes to work on WooCommerce and explore various shipping solutions available. In his free time, he loves to find reasons to believe in simplicity. And you can’t beat him in a FIFA match, painfully experienced.