Weird Fish reels in NetDespatch to avoid online delivery hiccups
- Summary:
- UK clothing company Weird Fish seeks to meet high customer expectations by integrating with the SaaS parcel management platform used by Royal Mail.
After all, today’s demanding online shoppers expect an excellent despatch and delivery experience. According to the 2015 IMRG UK Consumer Home Delivery Survey of around 1,300 adults, over two-thirds (70 percent) of respondents said that a good delivery experience keeps them loyal to a particular retailer. For more than four out of five, meanwhile, being provided with a delivery date and a tracking number for their parcel is all part of that good experience.
But if the third-party logistics provider that ferries products from the retailer’s warehouse to customers’ homes slips up in some way, it’s typically the retailer who’s left dealing with complaints, reputational damage and perhaps a serious dent in repeat business.
In other words, delivery experience is now a critical differentiator in online commerce - and customers don’t make any allowances for retailer size. That’s relevant to Weird Fish because, with its focus on relaxed weekend wear for relatively affluent, outdoorsy types, the company competes for the attention of the same sorts of customers who shop at White Stuff or Fat Face. But with annual revenues just shy of £14m, it’s dwarfed by both those competitors, which boast yearly sales of £115.6 million and £178.8 million, respectively. It also has far fewer bricks-and-mortar stores than its rivals.
Having assessed a number of different logistics providers, Weird Fish ultimately chose Royal Mail’s Tracked 24 and Tracked 48 services for its next-day and standard delivery services. However, Royal Mail’s in-house Despatch Manager Online (DMO) service, which allows businesses to label, track and report on deliveries, couldn’t support multiple workstations. That was a problem for Weird Fish, as the company’s e-commerce manager James Lloyd, explains:
One of the main things we need is to be fairly scalable. We do around 50 percent of our annual online business during the months of November, December and January. In the run-up to Christmas, we’ll have four or five people working on despatch to get orders out the door, using four or five computers, flat-out, all day long. We asked Royal Mail for solutions, and they pointed us in the direction of NetDespatch.
NetDespatch is a SaaS parcel data management platform for postal and parcel carriers, provided by a small UK software company of the same name. Its customers include Royal Mail, Yodel and New Zealand Post and the aim is to help them work more closely with e-commerce and mail-order retailers.
In effect, NetDespatch acts as a point of integration between carrier and retailer, so that the retailer can share details from their order management and warehouse systems with the carrier and the carrier can, in turn, offer the retailer the ability to print shipping labels and customs documentation, for example, notify them that parcels are ready for collection and prepare reports on daily, monthly or annual shipment volumes. Carriers can also use the platform to make their tracking available to retailers and their customers, from point of despatch to final delivery.
Better still, says Lloyd, the new e-commerce platform that Weird Fish had chosen to underpin its new website - SelectCommerce from WebSelect - integrated closely with NetDespatch. This, in turn, integrates with the Microsoft Dynamics AX system that Weird Fish uses for stock control.
Since the launch of the new Weird Fish website, incorporating NetDespatch, in November 2014, the company has been able to reduce order processing and despatch times by 50 percent, and make the delivery process far more transparent to customers, says Lloyd:
It’s really easy now. Microsoft Dynamics AX manages the picking [of product] and all orders are manually picked into individual trays and brought to the packing bench. From there, the order is called up on SelectCommerce, each item is scanned into the parcel and, by the time that’s done,
the label from NetDespatch is ready at the printer to stick onto the parcel. And once that label is created, the tracking number from Royal Mail is stored in SelectCommerce against the relevant order.”NetDespatch just sits there in the background, quietly doing its job, which is acting as a bridge between us and Royal Mail. The only time we need to log directly into NetDespatch is for our end-of-day procedure, where we print out a list of all despatches for the 24-hour and 48-hour services, which is signed by us and the Royal Mail driver who comes to pick up our deliveries. They get on their way to the customer and the journey they take is clear from our door to theirs.