How confident are you your carriers are delivering?

Deliveries sit at the heart the ecommerce brand promise today. That means any weaknesses in your delivery capability can soon ripple out into abandoned carts, increased costs, and lost customers.

Some 78% of customers say a poor delivery experience would stop them buying again. In 2024, a third of UK shoppers reported a problem with peak-season deliveries.

Nobody wants that for their customers.

When it does happen, you’re probably the last to know. By the time you get to the missed-delivery reports from your carriers, the damage to customer goodwill will already have been done.

Strong carrier connections build delivery resilience

Like all winning partnerships, they depend on everyone being on the same page as to what’s important: targets, timings, costs, and contingencies if things go wrong.

You and your colleagues will no doubt have clear views on all of this. But do your carriers agree? More to the point, do their service level agreements (SLAs) with you reflect the delivery choices you’re offering to customers today? Any mismatches here could cause issues further down the line.

The interplay between retailers and their carriers is like the rapport between waiting staff and the chefs in a restaurant. People go for the food. But what they remember is the service.

Just like in a restaurant, customers soon feel if something’s gone awry between the kitchen and the tabletop. However talented the chefs are, if the waiters are overworked, or clumsy, or rude, the experience is undermined. In the end, customers vote with their feet.

Take our 2-minute Carrier confidence assessment →
Benchmark your carrier network’s performance under pressure and find out if your setup is built for resilience or risk.

Don’t let delivery nightmares derail your peak season

There’s a window of opportunity to reflect on how confident you are in your carriers. How well they perform, where they fall short, and what value they really add.

With the winter peak season just around the corner, now’s the time to examine if you’re skating on thin ice, building on solid foundations, or scaling the heights.

Make deliveries your ecommerce growth engine

What does “carrier confidence” look and feel like? How can you turn a better delivery capability into accelerated growth?

Here are a few key factors.

First, it’s about spreading risk. You aren’t pushing carriers to the limits of their capabilities, and you have back-up options when things are at their busiest.

Second, confidence in carriers empowers you to widen customer choice over deliveries. You can trade for an extra few days before Christmas because you can set up premium delivery options that are guaranteed to arrive on time. And that keeps the checkouts open for longer.

Third, automation. It’s amazing how many manual processes still exist in deliveries management. The right software can automate everything, right from when the customer clicks “buy now”. By handing more admin over to software, you can free up your team to supporting growth, for example shipping to customers in new markets.

Finally, ensure you’re making the best use of delivery data. Carriers already gather exhaustive data on their last-mile performance, but it’s often hidden away in difficult-to-use systems. nShift’s Delivery Management Platform aggregates and standardizes all this data, making it easy to see what’s going well, and where the weak spots are.

The best delivery management software can take you from monitoring to optimizing, giving you real-time visibility across all delivery operations. Track carrier performance, compare costs, spot bottlenecks, and continuously improve.

It all starts with a few small steps

Go into peak season with confidence. Explore our carrier network: 1000+ global and local delivery specialists, giving you reach, flexibility, and resilience when it matters most. And book a quick, no-obligation demo to see how nShift helps you benchmark carrier performance, optimize costs, and turn delivery into your growth engine.