Transport challenges for eCommerce retailers under Covid 19

Covid-19 has resulted in significant delays and disruptions to both international transportation and domestic freight. This has resulted in a number of challenges for New Zealand's retail merchants to solve. In response, some retailers have pivoted the way they do business in order to better serve the needs of their customers, and to ensure the most efficient sales approach for the stock that they have available.

eCommerce Platform Responds to Transport Challenges

Website World have responded to the needs of their retail merchants with developments in the following areas related to inventory supply issues:

• Stock Notifications - When items are out of stock, customers are prompted to register their interest for stock updates. When an item is back in stock, merchants are then prompted to communicate the availability to those customers who have expressed an interest first. Merchants can also run reports to see which products are most in demand, and focus their attention on sourcing those products more quickly.
• Pre-Orders and Back-Orders - Some merchants encourage pre-orders so that the order is already in the queue for out of stock items, and orders will be served on a first come first basis when stock becomes available. The Website World eCommerce platform monitors the ETA of purchase orders loaded, and can communicate those timelines to customers at ordering time, without adding administration effort in updating the status of individual stock items, and answering individual customer questions. Back orders can be limited to ensure they don't oversell the expected quantities.

Website World have responded to the needs of their retail merchants with developments in the following areas related to product delivery issues:

• Click and Collect - Merchants are facing the challenge of delivering orders to their customers in a timely fashion. Couriers are overloaded, and may not be able to collect all the packages that a retailer has available on a day. Packages may sit in distribution centers, while previous days packages are delivered and customers are understandably frustrated with the delays. Several online merchants who never previously offered click and collect, are now making this service available to supplement their traditional delivery options as a checkout option. 
• Dynamic pricing for merchant deliveries - A brand new feature provided by Website World is dynamic pricing for goods delivered by merchants using their own transport. Using the Google Maps API, the distance and time is calculated, and multiplied by pricing factors, to determine a reasonable price for the urgent contactless delivery of goods. This was originally developed for caterers and cake makers, who usually delivered their own goods. Now it's being used by other retailers for delivery of hard goods, to ensure reasonable delivery timeframes to local postcodes. 

Website World offers New Zealand retailers a better eCommerce solution with no transaction fees, trade pricing and rural delivery detection. Start your free 30 day trial today.