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Practically half of your customers abandon their shopping carts because of unexpected or unsatisfactory delivery conditions. They include delivery dates, costs, extra fees, and options.
With all that, an abundance of terms used to organize logistics can seem confusing at the start but yet critical to understand and deliver on.
Which terms? Ship dates, estimated delivery, delivery dates, last-mile delivery, and a host of other dates and deliveries.
But before you jump into exploring effective strategies for organizing an effective shipping strategy, and communicating the available options to your site visitors, let’s define what the ship date is. In this article, we’ll cover other important terms too.
Most Important Shipping Terms to Understand
Whether you are an eCommerce business, a store admin, or a person involved in organizing the delivery process in your organization, the following terms will help you understand the land of shipping.
Ship date
The date when an order leaves the seller’s premises or its warehouses is the ship date. For instance, if you offer same-day delivery, an order will leave your premises and get accepted by a customer on the same day.
Your customers and you should note that the order date and ship date are not the same. It can take businesses up to a week (or even more) to change the delivery status of an order to “shipped”. And there is a variety of reasons why such intervals take place. Holidays, weekends, and cut-off times determine the ship date status.
Estimated shipping date
This date shows when the order ships out. Due to many factors, such dates aren’t perfect either.
An item can get out of stock, and then we talk about backorders. Here, giving an estimated shipping date helps tell consumers when they can expect the orders to get shipped.
Estimated delivery date
This term determines a calculated guess on when the order is likely to get delivered.
Undoubtedly, it shouldn’t be taken at face value as a host of scenarios can take place. Natural disasters happen. There is always room for failures in operation and the human component.
Nonetheless, today’s technologies help display dates with high precision and help your consumers plan for it. Order tracking systems come in handy here too.
Date of invoice creation
No, invoices do not usually get created on the same date as the billing date. Occasionally, they can be dates before order processing.
Delivery date
This date is the actual date when your customer receives its order. For a variety of reasons, estimated delivery dates and factual delivery may not match. Such reasons can include issues with customs, state holidays, package damages, failed delivery attempts, etc.
Conclusion
As trivial as shipping dates may seem, communicating such details to your site visitors can impact its performance drastically.
Besides, with an endorsement of a customizable solution in hand – such as Mageworx’s Estimated Ship Date for Magento 2, for example – launching, running, and managing any delivery strategy can become a piece of cake.
We hope this article has managed to make essential delivery terms loud and easy for you.
