Order Tracking

Order tracking is the trail an order leaves from the minute it is paid to the minute it reaches the door. Every step carries a name and a time, so the trail runs from paid to being packed, then handed to the courier. After that it is out for delivery and, at last, delivered. The customer sees exactly the same trail your staff see, and that is the whole point of it.

Those step names have to be written for the buyer, not for your warehouse, because “awaiting fulfilment” means nothing to a person waiting at home. “We are packing your order” means something, so give every step a plain name of that kind. Add a date the buyer can plan around wherever you can, since a promise of Thursday is worth far more than a promise of soon.

Once the parcel leaves you, the courier owns the story, and it hands you a tracking number for it. Your shop should show that number and link straight to the courier's page, but one warning here catches almost everyone. The number exists the moment you print the label, but the courier's site answers “not found” until a driver actually scans the parcel, often hours later. So send the number when the parcel is collected, not when the label is printed, and the wave of worried messages never starts.

A tracking page the customer can open without signing in is the cheapest support tool you will ever build. Add a short message at each change, by email, text or a phone alert, and the calls fall away. That is why shops that write at packing, at pickup and on the morning of delivery hear the where-is-my-order question far less often. And the message people value most is the honest one about a delay, sent before they ask for it. So when Linkysoft builds a mobile app for a shop, the tracking screen is almost always the most opened screen in it.

Keep one trail, and keep it in one place. If the packing table writes the status on paper while the website shows something older, your staff answer every call twice and still guess. That is why Storek stamps each step with the time and the person who made it, so a complaint about a missing parcel becomes a question with an answer. Linkysoft has watched that single record cut call volume more than any redesign of the shop pages.