Good to Great for SMB eCommerce? It’s All About Logistics

Logistics And You: How Good Logistics Makes eCommerce Companies Great
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The eCommerce industry is growing at an incredible rate

Consumer expectations are growing as well. A decade or two ago, people were happy as long as their orders got to their house within a day or two of the scheduled arrival date.

Now, people expect retailers to offer next-day or even same-day shipping. Also, they like being able to track their orders through every stage of the delivery process.

Can you give your customers what they want?

When you have a route planner, it’s much easier to satisfy these demands.

7 Tips to Keep Your Employees

Plan Routes Effortlessly

Route planning is complicated.

Just figuring out which roads your drivers should take to reach your customers is hard enough. On top of that, you also need to account for traffic, weather, construction, customer availability, and other factors.

You’ll probably make a mistake or two if you try to do this by yourself, and all it takes is one mistake to mess up a route and delay your drivers.

But there’s no reason to plan routes by yourself. Using a road trip planner with multiple stops ensures that your routes are accurate and efficient. It gives your drivers everything they need to show up on time consistently. It’ll save you money on gas, too.

Route4Me

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Manual route planning can take hours. When you use a driving route planner, planning routes only takes 30 seconds. All you need to do is plug in the addresses of your customers, and you’re good to go.

Catch Mistakes Before You Have To Deal With Their Consequences

If you accidentally input “1400 Riverdale Dr” instead of “4100 Riverdale Dr”, your driver isn’t going to make it to all their stops on time. Your customers certainly won’t like that!

route planner app will help you catch these errors before they affect your route. It’ll review your addresses just before your optimized route is created, and if anything looks suspect (for example, if every address is in Indiana except for one that’s in Alaska), you’ll be notified. Then, you can either confirm it’s correct or make the necessary changes.

Also, the best route mapping software will let you connect with your eCommerce platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.) and transfer customer data directly to your route planner. This saves time, and it eliminates the risk of data entry errors.

Keep An Eye On Your Drivers

Of course, optimized routes won’t do you much good if your drivers don’t actually follow the routes you give them.

That’s why it’s so important for your route planner to have vehicle tracking capabilities. GPS tracking will show you where your drivers are and how fast they’re going in real-time. Whenever you want, you can check in on a driver and make sure they’re sticking to their route and staying on schedule.

Do you have any questions about using a multi-stop route plannerLet us know in the comments section below.

Route4Me

Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?

Whether you want to slash the time it takes you to plan routes for your drivers, increase the number of stops they can make, or keep your customers satisfied knowing that your drivers show up on time… Route4Me helps you achieve that!

Start Free 7 Day Trial

About author: Rahul Dasgupta

Rahul Dasgupta is a content writer with over 20 years of work experience. He holds a master’s degree in computer science and has written thousands of blog posts on route planning and scheduling, making it easy for readers to learn about these complex topics. Rahul enjoys playing tennis in his spare time and loves cuddling with his pet labrador Shinu. Rahul is a big fan of Roger Federer, Messi, and Bill Gates - he admires their drive to be the best at what they do and their philanthropic efforts.

Route4Me

About Route4Me

Route4Me has over 40,000 customers globally. Route4Me's Android and iPhone mobile apps have been downloaded over 2 million times since 2009. Extremely easy-to-use, Route4Me's apps create optimized routes, synchronize routes to mobile devices, enable communication with drivers and customers, offer turn-by-turn directions, delivery confirmation, and more. Behind the scenes, Route4Me's operational optimization platform combines high-performance algorithms with data science, machine learning, and big data to plan, optimize, and analyze routes of almost any size in real-time.