Why do online retailers send you an email that a product was “shipped”, when the status is just label created or carrier awating package etc.
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Because as far as they’re concerned, they’ve done the work required to ship the product. The underlying problem is more a matter of language than it is technology or even logistics.
Imagine you start making knitted hats and selling them online. You setup a web storefront, and that storefront automatically generates shipping labels for you. You receive an order, package up the hat, print a label, and set the package in the bin with all the other packages to be handed off to the shipper.
You’re done. As far as you’re concerned, the product is shipped, even if the shipper hasn’t picked the product up yet. The act of printing and affixing the shipping label is the last “action” that you’ll take.
When your customer logs in, they see that the package is “shipped, awaiting pickup by carrier”. When the carrier picks up the package, the status will automatically update, but it’s the shipping carrier updating the information at this point, not you (the hat maker).
That’s why orders transition to “shipped” as soon as the seller prints the label.
Let’s assume for a moment that this isn’t good enough. Customers are annoyed that it says “shipped” when the carrier hasn’t even picked it up yet. How can we do better?
One option would be to mark the order “awaiting shipment” instead of “shipped”. But how will the system be updated when the carrier actually picks the package up? We could assign the fulfillment a shipping “batch”, then manually tell the system when the batch has shipped. But that’s a manual process, which requires additional time.
You (the hat maker) are busy knitting hats and packing them up for shipment. If you have to spend more time simply updating order status information manually, you’ll have to raise your prices. There’s a problem though. The hat maker around the corner isn’t even trying to solve this problem, so their overhead is lower. They’re beating you on price because of this, and you’re losing customers.
Another option would be to have the system check the tracking information for each order and update the shipping status with more meaningful status information like “awaiting pickup”, “in transit”, “delivered”, or “delivery exception”. This requires an additional API integration though, and your shipper won’t provide this for free. The web storefront you bought also doesn’t support this feature. You’d have to pay your shipper more for API access and buy a more expensive web storefront system in order to provide this to your customers.
Again though, your competitor down the street isn’t doing any of this. They’re still over there offering a lower price, taking all of your customers. Sure, those customers are frustrated when their order says “shipped”, even when it is not, but they don’t find that out until *after* they’ve placed their order. The majority of them aren’t going to cancel over something so trivial, so you’re getting stomped in the market, event though you’re offering better customer service.
And *that* is how we end up with crappy customer service on the back-end of the sale. This is the result of decades of optimization for consumer preferences. We may be unhappy about poor customer service, but on the whole, consumers are unwilling to pay a little more to get something better. Until that changes, you’ll just have to stare at that “shipped” status and click through to the shipper’s status page to get more detail.
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