Delivery Management Cheat Sheet: 5 Ultimate Tips for Success

Delivery management and the understanding of mechanics around it can help entrepreneurs achieve great efficiency and face lesser setbacks. Couriers, whether that be a local courier Melbourne or an international courier, have become an important channel of supply with the onset of the global pandemic; from food to essentials to clothes – everything is preferred to be ordered online by countries around the world so you must know what is route optimization so delivery can be done efficiently and quickly as possible.

Even in the case of premium, high-end restaurants, where people liked to instead visit the location and experience fine-dining, online deliveries of food are now offered and preferred. Online orders and deliveries have emerged as a whole new, almost primary source of revenue for most businesses. In order to deal with the new normal of consumer behavior, it is time for entrepreneurs to up their game and better understand the nuances of delivery management. To do this businesses need to deploy a robust delivery management solution.

Here are a few tips to nail the game of online delivery management-

Understand the algorithms that run the game
Just like search engines run on algorithms that display an optimized web link on top of the searches, delivery apps also run on an algorithm ball game. In order to make this better understandable, let’s say, for example, you are an entrepreneur who is in the food space and you own a fast-food cloud kitchen.

Now, if a hungry user who wants to eat a Burger goes to Uber Eats and enters “burger” in the search bar, UberEats will recommend a couple of burger places. Some names on top of the list would be sponsored, while all others would be there because the algorithm got it there. This algorithm runs on the basis of what it assumes would be a burger place likely to provide a positive eating and delivery experience to the customer.

This assumption is usually done on the basis of factors that are both, customer-dependent as well as the restaurant dependents. The customer-oriented factors include those of customer ratings while the restaurant-oriented factors include the average food-preparation time, average order acceptance, and the average delivery time amongst others.

Hence, you, as an entrepreneur, need to make sure that you have your business understand the relevant metrics for optimization and thereby, to appear on top of the delivery apps.

Dedicate a part of your team to online orders
Let us assume that you are running a clothing store. Now, as a store owner, you would be running online deliveries as well as catering to regular store-visitors. In a case like such, it would be best for you to dedicate some people solely to the online part for delivery management and optimization.

If not, you would find yourself as a classic example of ‘biting more than you could chew.’ Neither would you find yourself completely fulfilling the expectations of the store visitors, neither would you be justifying to your online orders. Such a mess up is better to be avoided than to be sorry about.

Think-through your online delivery offerings
For another example-based understanding, let’s assume here that you are an owner of a grocery store that is also home-delivering the essentials through orders made on your store app. As a grocery store, you would have a lot of perishable items on your list like milk, curd, and perhaps, even poultry. You would want to make all such items available for online delivery, however, in the long run, this might fire back at you.

Do not ever add items more than you can actually fulfill the orders of. Customer A might order 1 kg chicken on your app while Customer B, in the meantime, might visit your store and buy the last kg of the chicken left. Even if you do want to make all such options available on the app, you should at least have your online-delivery team keep a constant check on what’s actually available. Once goods start to run out, by keeping a close eye, you can at least disable the sold-outs on the app in order to avoid failed deliveries.

Invest in the packaging
The manner in which deliverables are packaged is another really essential factor that determines the success rate of your deliveries and hence, an important aspect of the whole delivery management play.

You might be an online store that sells jewelry. Now imagine what would happen to those fragile earrings if you do not package them in bubble wrap, with layers of cushioning, and ultimately in a sturdy outer box? The earrings will see their end even before they reach the consumer. And once they do, they will not only frustrate the consumer but also will be an added cost for you because the consumer will either demand replacement or refund.

Hence, pay special attention to the way you package your products. They should reach the consumers in the actual form that they expect it to be as. Besides, brownie points if you pay attention to the aesthetics of the goods. Aesthetics might also get you some free marketing as consumers like to show-off ‘pretty’ packages on social media handles like Instagram. Having said these, with growing order volumes, packing is becoming complex. This is where the need to introduce software that makes management of delivery operations and packaging simple and automated. This reduces manual errors and ensures that a package is dispatched with all the information properly labelled on it.

Take help of professionals to manage the delivery operations
To err is to humans and as an entrepreneur who is into e-commerce, you are bound to mix up deliveries here and there. Though such mix-ups are a part of human behavior that can never be fool-proof, there is an alternative to manage such errors and to reduce them to the very bare minimum: delivery management solutions. Try and hire professionals who can help you take care of your delivery ecosystem and thereby help you reduce the rate of errors. For instance leveraging a final mile tracking solution can help businesses gain real-time visibility into ground level delivery operations and optimize costs, ensure faster deliveries and add more value to a customer’s buying experience.

Hiring professionals might sound like an expensive affair but again, by hiring professions like Far Eye who bring in tech-based and data-driven solutions will only help you save money in the bigger picture. Think of all the money you will save up from otherwise fixing the errors; and also the opportunity cost that you will save up on by otherwise upset customers.

Final Words

With the world becoming more digital and tech-oriented than the previous day each day ahead, there also is rising competition in all fields. Online delivery businesses and e-commerce retailers should now understand and recognize the importance of investing in delivery management software. Incorporating such technology offered by Far Eye can also help you create a robust framework for the recruitment and training of your personnel for an overall enhanced and efficient system of deliveries.

FAQs- Delivery Management Cheat Sheet: 5 Ultimate Tips for Success

What is delivery management?
Delivery management is the answer to ‘how should a deliverable be transported from place A to place B.’ It refers to the entire framework of processes that go behind ensuring efficient, optimal, and effective transferral of goods across locations.

What is a delivery management system software?
A delivery management software like Far Eye is a platform that can help take care of the nuances of package deliveries with the help of tech-driven solutions. A delivery management software optimizes the process of deliveries by digitizing dispatching, task assignment, vehicle tracking, route mapping route optimization, consumer communications, delivery confirmation, etc.