Alloy Guest Post: 4 Ways to Personalize Your Customer’s Shipping Experience with Integrated E-commerce Touchpoints

Some of e-commerce’s greatest benefits come in the form of highly personalized fulfillment experiences. By centralizing your data across your marketing, customer support, shipping, and 3PL apps, you’re able to better integrate e-commerce experiences and turn each step of the fulfillment process into an opportunity to connect with your customer. Better yet, more integrated experiences enable e-commerce stores to extend their post-purchase marketing and upsell efforts from the digital into the physical world.

Here are four ways merchants who use Shippo can integrate their apps to supercharge their customer’s experience with their brand:

1. Automatically process refunds once returns are received

The return process is often one that lacks transparency for both the merchant and the customer. On top of that, tracking, receiving, refunding, and informing customers of the status of their return are all individual processes that eat up time and rely on different tools.

By integrating apps across this process, fulfillment teams can improve the customer experience for a return, increase inventory accuracy, and of course, save time. Alloy pulls the status from a return label using the Shippo tracking API, and then informs the merchant and customer of updates in shipment and delivery. Once the return item is received, Alloy automatically refunds the customer and updates the store’s inventory based on the items returned.

2. Leverage customer data to personalize upsells in shipment update emails

Many believe a customer’s e-commerce experience ends once they place an order and leave your site, but soon enough they’ll receive a series of order tracking emails. These emails have high open rates and are received positively by customers, but are underutilized for upsells given the lack of personalization and centralization of customer information.

With Alloy, a store can pull in their customers’ information from a wealth of different sources, presenting opportunities for insightful product recommendations and upsells. In one example, a store was able to increase their reorders by simply prompting customers to schedule their next order upon notification of their delivery.

3. Enable SMS order tracking updates

Some customers prefer to skip email entirely and would rather be informed of tracking information via SMS instead. As text becomes more commonplace in communication with consumers, being able to pull in their data from multiple locations becomes increasingly important.

Alloy can use customer preferences for tracking updates to only send information to customers when necessary, via their preferred communication platforms. On top of that, stores are also able to further customize texts for an opportunity to upsell, just as they would in the email example above.’

4. Separate large orders into multiple shipments

Large orders are great news for sales teams, but can be a nightmare for fulfillment. Splitting orders can sometimes result in confused customers and inaccurate tracking information.

With Alloy, a store can set parameters for which packages automatically get split. Alloy can then share updates with a customer regarding the split order, includes tracking information for the new shipments, and informs the fulfillment team of the change.

With 80+ other integrations, Alloy can supercharge a merchant’s experience with Shippo and leverage cross-app automation to improve their store’s fulfillment processes. By aggregating customer information across multiple channels, merchants can provide a truly integrated experience.

By Sara Du, CEO & cofounder of Alloy Automation (YC W20), an e-commerce automation platform that helps brands eliminate manual work across fulfillments, marketing, & more. Before Alloy, Sara was an engineer at Snap, product designer at Wish, and had dropped out of her undergrad at Harvard.