Aftership for shipping notifications

If you provide an timely update to your customers about the order delivery, it increases the quality of customer experience as well as it reduces the number of emails or customer service calls you would get. Please do read more on this on our previous post: After-sale care : Tracking Customer Orders & Notifications

Many third party courier companies do not notify the customer about the progress, hardly they give a web link to customers to go to the website and enter the tracking id to know the status and many customer may not know how to do that, and people may confuse that - "I have ordered from XYZ webstore, why I have to go UPS to track my order delivery".  The problem with such system is to building it. Suppose you have courier tie ups with 20 companies, then you have to write 20 API to track the shipments progress from 20 companies, and update the status to customer. In the early days of start up, you would like to focus more on the other critical components rather than the customer notification. In this case you left with one option, taking help of B2B products.  One of the such products is AfterShip. 

AfterShip allows online stores to track all shipments automatically, and send out delivery notifications through email or SMS when package is in transit, out for delivery, delivered or any exceptions. You can watch the below video for better understanding. You can integrate it with Ebay, Shopify, Magneto, Amazon, Opencart, and Spree easily. One reason to particularly mention Aftership is, as of now as per our knowledge we are not aware of similar product which offer similar service. Read Techcrunch coverage on the same: link1 and  link2.

Building your own Notification system

After few years, when you are sufficiently expanded you can think of building your own notification system. The first step towards is to find out from which vendors you are shipping highest orders. Slowly write API's to those courier companies and expand.  Say 90% of your customer orders are shipped through only 3 couriers (out of 20 couriers) - say DTC, FedEx, UPS. Then write API's for these three couriers and send customer notifications.  For the rest of 17 courier companies you can use After Ship.