In this episode, we’re going to be talking about optimizing the post-purchase experience you deliver to customers. It’s a great episode you do not want to miss.

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Welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. The 2X eCommerce podcast show is dedicated to digital commerce insights for retail and eCommerce teams. Each week, on this podcast, we interview a commerce expert, a founder of a digital native commerce brand, or a representative from a best-in-class commerce SaaS product. Each with a tight remit to give you ideas that you can test right away on your brand so that you can improve commerce growth metrics such as conversion, average order value, repeat purchase customers, your audience size, and ultimately, sales, your Gross Merchant Value, GMV. We’re here to help you sell more sustainably.

In this episode, you’re going to read about an interview. I was joined by Andrew Chan, the Cofounder of AfterShip. I remember from my drop shipping days, AfterShip was the go-to most robust shipping tracking platform we had to help customers to track themselves. It was tightly integrated with Shopify. It has evolved to become more the preferred platform for tracking for D2C brands, just as I have evolved from the hacker-tester drop shipper to more a brand-focused eCommerce individual. They’ve got over 10,000 clients, including Amazon, eBay, Harry’s, Decathlon, and Gymshark.

Interestingly, I thought they were a bootstrap company. When you go to their website, it feels like a VC-driven website. They’re funded in April 2021 as a Series B from Tiger Global to the tune of about $66 million and they now have a global team of 250 plus. They have a technical team largely based in Asia and then their sales and marketing is in North America. Andrew is the cofounder and is in the product and the design side of things for AfterShip.

In this episode, I wanted to drill him down on the five core principles from his perspective, the five core principles you need in your post-purchase experience to deliver ultimate satisfaction to your customers within the framework of order tracking. I still asked him to step out a little bit from that domain and he did. We talked about customer experience, international shipping, and shipment. He’s a thorough individual in the sense that he’s able to cover a lot of bases and customer experience.

Why should you read this? The reason you should read this is to better your customer experience game post-purchase. That’s one reason to want to read this. Also, to understand how to get customers to self-serve their customers’ number one need. The number one question in your customer service is, “Where is my order?” That’s the number one question that customers bang on your doors for. That’s WISMO, in Andrew’s terms, the Where Is My Order question and how to automate that and then use or deploy customer services resources for more important questions. That automation bit is critical and how to go about it.

Also, other critical bits of how to communicate efficiently with customers all through that post-purchase experience, how to monitor and resolve issues effectively and proactively before customers even ask you that question. For instance, what to do with emails that have an open rate of about 65%, which is tracking emails. Also, his take on the functions of SMS right now and automating the return flow.

There is a lot of automation going on post-purchase but there is still empathy required post-purchase by your customer service team. If you look at it from this perspective where you automate some of the more monotonous, repetitive tasks post-purchase or questions, that frees up resources to drill down on questions that can ruin your reputation, that can upset customers. You then have a better chance of retaining high customer satisfaction. These are the reasons why you should read this episode. Enjoy this episode and I shall catch you on the other side. Cheers.

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Andrew, it’s an absolute pleasure having you on the 2X eCommerce podcast.

It’s nice to meet you, Kunle.

I have to be honest, I’m feeling a bit starstruck here. If I rewind a few years back, I used AfterShip. It was one of the most robust carrier-agnostic tracking apps to Shopify that works and still works and it looks much better in the future. Before we jump into AfterShip and the post-purchase customer experience, I’d like to find out more about you. You guys have been around for a while. What’s the backstory? Tell us your story and how AfterShip came about?

We start at the end of 2011. Teddy, the other cofounder, and I met at a startup event called Startup Weekend. It’s a bunch of people, hackathon, 54 hours but you have to come up with the idea. We won the Hong Kong competition and we won the global competition and then that’s how we started. One key thing is my other cofounder has been running an online store before we met for almost ten years. He was the first batch of people on eBay and Top Seller selling the mp3 player with USB. He has a pain point with tracking. At that time, international shipping takes over three months even for delivery updates.

If you run an online store, you know. We call it WISMO, Where Are My Order tickets? Always be on top. Imagine you have three months of that period and people are asking you, “Where is my order?” You’ll get crazy and you’ll hire tons of people to answer the same thing. He built up this automatic system to notify the customers proactively and get them a good tracking experience. It gets them back to the website and purchases more. That’s how we started. Time flies. The concepts are the same but when you evolve, you get more customers. For the team, we now have 375 employees. For 2022 it’s going to be 600.

Shopify was founded in 2006 if I’m not mistaken and it started to gain traction in 2013. When you started in 2011, it was a hackathon. Were you a tracking platform for marketplaces given your cofounder’s background in eBay? Were you building for Shopify? If we fast forward to 2018 when I first came across AfterShip, it was a deeply integrated Shopify app.

We started at Shopify. We won the competition and we launched the product three months after we met on Shopify. We launched our product online and on eBay as well for individual stores. We first targeted the D2C brands, which no one talked about back in 2012. It was a Shopify store. It was not only in 2014 when we launched our API product and then that got noticed by all the platforms. We got into eBay, Wish.com, Etsy, and those platforms by using our API. It’s a scalable solution for an individual store no matter what size you are to platforms like Etsy and they want to integrate with so many different carriers so we can help.

You’re tuning in from Toronto. You’re about four hours away from Ottawa, which is Shopify’s headquarters. Is your entire team based in Canada because you said that the hackathon initiative was in Hong Kong?

We got the R&D team in Asia. We got the sales team in North America including the US and Canada. It’s only in 2022 that we started to build up our sales and marketing. In the last couple of years, we were focused on product and development. I’m a product person. I’ve been using software. I don’t like software that charges tons of money and does not deliver and once you sign a big contract, they don’t improve. I don’t want to be like those companies. We envisioned AfterShip to be the better company in terms of product quality, service and offering to our customers.

I’m on your site. I’m seeing the likes of Gymshark and Kylie Cosmetics. How many merchants do you serve in AfterShip?

We have over 13,000 paying customers and in over 1,000 Shopify Plus stores. The numbers are growing. In the past, we got lots of enterprise-grade customers platforms but we also got enterprise-grade customers from brands as well. Brands like Gymshark or even some enterprise brands like IKEA will use AfterShips on the post-purchase experience.

Let’s dig into why you guys exist. There’s this transition from shopper to customer. When people become customers, some merchants do an amazing job and some drop the ball. From your perspective, what are the core principles merchants should be aware of to deliver a best-in-class post-purchase experience to their customers? We’re not talking to shoppers now, we’re talking to their customers.

For the brands, there are five things that they need to bear in mind post-purchase. The first thing is about the tracking experience. I still see merchants sending the tracking number without a link. That’s bad. I still see customers sending a direct link to the carrier website. This is also bad because customers expect you to hold the experience from end to end. These days, the most important is the basics like brand and the tracking experience.

No matter which carrier you use, get the customers to this landing page, show them to deliver updates like the delivery time and the support they need, even to the carrier’s phone number. Shows some marketing assets, even Instagram feed or your newest promotion or product recommendation, getting them back to store.

I always say that this experience is why Apple will place an advertisement on the street. The more you see about the brands’ after purchase, the more they recognize you. That’s the first thing. The second thing is about proactive notification. It’s like Amazon. Email, SMS, or the method that the customer chooses, get them updates about the delivery.

A failed attempt is the customer is not at home. Tell the customer proactively, “You’ve got to be arranging delivery, otherwise we will send it back to the shipper.” It’s making sure that they get the message to increase your delivery rates but at the same time get some recommendation that the customers may be interested in.

The third thing is about monitoring the shipments proactively about finding exceptions before the customers realize. We see common problems, exceptions like incorrect addresses. Many of the merchants don’t even realize it. They only realize it when the customers complain. It’s bad if you let the customers do that job. What you should be doing is having your support team or your logistics teams keep monitoring every day and resolve it for the customers and let the customers know you are taking care of them.

The fourth thing, which many people probably don’t have, is called the On-time Report. Figure out your own on-time rates. You’re shipping out thousands but how many of them are delivered on time? You tell the customer 3 or 5 days, but how many of them are late, on time, or early? Having that information can help you improve your experience after purchase. The fifth thing is the automated return and exchange flow. It’s telling customers, “Go here and you can do it by yourself. No question asked.” Having a simple flow like that can increase the exchange rate rather than the refund rate and also lower your return cost as well.

We’re going to cover all five of them. From my notes, it’s to control the experience of making a brand communicate effectively, whether it’s through notifications, SMS, or email. It’s communicating at every step of the journey and when issues are proactive with issue resolution. Number four is on-time reporting. It’s understanding the percentage of deliverables of shipments that were delivered on time and then finally further automation of return flow.

A lot of resources, particularly customer services, are allocated to serving customers post-purchase when issues occur. As you alluded to the WISMO, Where Is My Order effect, in many cases, if you’ve not taken care of it, it’s the number one question people ask. The plethora of other questions they did want to ask but the main category is they fit the category depending on your vertical. My question has more to do with direct consumer eCommerce brands. What are you seeing in how they structure their customer services department optimally to ensure better returning customers better customer satisfaction that brings better retention long term?

The customer support cost is quite high for many D2C brands. They try to minimize it but also provide a great experience. Choosing the right customer support portal that can deeply integrate with your shopping cart system is the first step. The other thing is I use solutions like AfterShip that can show the information and the delivery updates directly within the portal and enables your agents to answer and resolve the ticket faster.

Imagine your customer asked, “Where’s my order?” Your customer service is supposed to say, “You can go to check your carrier website and you can track your tracking number in your email.” If you were the customer, you probably would be quite pissed. You want to say, “We see there’s a problem. There are exceptions. We’re handling it. Sorry about that. We are already resolving it. Here are the updates.” It’s already a big contrast to taking it proactively versus reactively. Even reactively having the information right next to you when you answer a ticket to resolve it faster, can help you reduce the ticket’s demands and resolution time as well.

If you talk about, “Where’s the order,” having that, deeply integrated with your customer support portal and choosing the right portal is key. The second thing is about the tracking experience if you’re about the, “Where’s the order?” Do you allow the customers to go to a page that can enter all the numbers and emails or even a tracking number to see the status or they can always refer to your email and in one click, and then see the information directly rather than doing so many different steps? That’s something that will immediately reduce it.

Customers these days are smart. They know how to click and do this. The problem is that merchants don’t have the information connected and provide the means for the consumers and that’s why they reach out. You don’t see customers asking Amazon that. They see, “Why should I ask?” Unless it’s stolen or lost.

That’s deep integration. Speaking to Philippe Roireau from Gorgias, a customer service platform for Shopify, one of the things they talk about is key automation. It’s automating where is my order. They’re pre-configured but they’re training to connect with a service like AfterShip to reveal the order starts to make sense. It takes up less customer support resources because that bit has been automated and they can ask more difficult questions if an order has been stolen, there’s damage, or what have you, which, which makes more sense.

Going into the five principles you talked about, which is controlling the experience. I am trying to query the status of my goods as a customer. On Shopify, the one thing I can’t fault the platform for is the way it integrates with tracking information. When you install an app like AfterShip, within the Shopify ecosystems, or while you click Track My Order, you’re taken to the merchant’s website, and depending on what app you’ve installed and the configuration, you see the tracking information on site. You mentioned something about it being an opportunity to control the experience. What are the key things that should be on that landing page, which is on your domain? Should you have a customer service chat box there or should it focus on one thing which is tracking information?

Before, you could always put chatbots everywhere, but it’s not easy. Is it the best of the best? Maybe not. Let the customers find out somewhere to contact but once they read the information is key. The first thing is getting the right information out. One of the things that AfterShip does is to support over 900 plus carriers. Regardless of which carrier you use, we unify the data.

Whether a shipment is in transit, out for delivery, or delivered exception, having something simple immediately to let the customer know the status rather than get the customers to read something the carriers write which they sometimes don’t know how to read is basic. The second thing showing a more reliable estimated delivery date is also crucial. Whether it’s reverting the carrier’s delivery day or for us, having some merchants to estimate more accurate delivery dates is also key. That’s the basic thing for tracking the shipments.

Once you have done all these things, you can talk about engagement and about marketing assets. What kind of promotion are you doing? What’s the new product? For someone who’s selling a subscription model, let’s say you’re buying something one-off for that particular customer and you want to encourage them to do the subscription, can you do that? Having a dedicated tracking page to target people selling one-off and then get them to subscribe to more products and more orders is something that you can think of if your tracking experience is proper.

How does AfterShip consolidate what they are shipping? I know it’s proprietary but how do you know that there are so many carriers out there? How do you sync with their accuracy and how do you spot inaccuracies? I’m sure that it’s a two-way thing if you’re seeing patterns on DHL messing up you could give feedback to them and say, “We’re noticing some issues.”

We need to work closely with the carriers one by one. There are no magic ways for integration. For us, integration is working closely with the carriers. With the help of the customer introductions, they want us to onboard certain carriers. Every week, we onboard a few new carriers. You thought about how 900 is a lot but we’re still having new ones as well. Having to carry integrations or proper processes in place internally from onboarding new carriers to maintaining the carriers. An example for maintaining carriers is carriers certainly have a new status so then you have a new status that is for weather or COVID or something and then we need to handle it.

We have a monitoring system to monitor if there’s a new status that will come out. Internally, we have the AI to map that thing first but we also involve humans to map the status to not only seven statuses but in transit, out for delivery, etc., but we have over 40 sub statuses that we have so that we can break down the status into a more granular level, which is important for support. An exception to the one reason is different from the other reason.

You standardize the statuses where the humans still need to map how the query defines its status with your status so everything is unified and consistent. The second point is communicating efficiently or effectively. Is SMS a critical channel now for tracking? What trends are you seeing? How should merchants maximize communication that makes it so receptive for their customers to say, “These guys are doing a great job.”

SMS definitely has higher adoption rates from what we see. For email, it still continues to be the main channel. One thing about the email open rates, we see over 65% of the open rates for the delivery of these emails. It’s a crazy high compared to the email marketing type of notification so it’s crucial. It means that the customers care and then they want to see. 25% of them click the email as well so people want to see the updates in detail. In which they will see the page and then they will engage more and see about your brand recognition.

It’s email for sure. SMS, if you have the budget and then if you want to do more to be proactive. You can also let the customer choose if they want to do the SMS later on. You can also do so with us. We see some channels like WhatsApp increasing for some countries but for other channels we’re still observing. We see some channels trying but definitely email SMS and WhatsApp.

At checkout, the opt-in for SMS or WhatsApp should be there. I’m thinking that you need to let them know that they’re getting shipping updates via SMS and the opt-in goes higher.

One thing for the shipping notification is considered transactional. Meaning, the customers don’t need to subscribe to it and by default, you can let them and let them unsubscribe if you want to. That’s a little bit different from the marketing notification.

You mentioned the fact that you’re seeing 68% open rates in email. There’s a lot more real estate in email than the other two channels we mentioned, WhatsApp and SMS. Is that an upsell opportunity or do you deal with informing?

There’s a 65% open rate. We do see the brands having some marketing but not hot selling marketing. That’s introducing the product recommendations, something you may like. It’s okay but you don’t want to be too salesy on these transactional emails. We do see that brands find a way, even getting back to the store to show the logo and it’s clickable. Come back to the store. It’s something basic that you want to let the customer know that they can come back to the store and shop more.

The next point is to monitor and resolve. The customer service teams have a lot on their plate as you can imagine. They’re firefighting. Why would they be looking for problems? Are there alert systems that would let them know that there’s a pending problem? “This status has been like this for longer than it should. Attend to it. Check it.”

There are many problems. How do you do it? For example, you can customize alerts in our system. Each merchant is different. For example, if the status is stuck in unfulfilled, not even fulfilled, or stuck in exceptions for a certain time period, email your support team and then create a ticket. You can do that within our system.

The other way is we have the dashboard. You can do a granular level of filtering and then find out those problems and then resolve it one by one. It depends on your operation team. They can do different things. You can create a subset of the shipments. Let’s say you have a tag in Shopify as a VIP, you want to notify the VIP customers and then look at those VIPs you can do so as well. Prioritize those customers that are important and high value first and then go from the top-down.

If the merchants haven’t looked at the VIP customers, whether they deliver it on time or have exceptions or deliver it successfully, I highly recommend starting doing it. You will be surprised how much money you’ll save. Loyal customers contribute 80% of the revenue. You don’t want to lose it. Those customers, if they see those delay problems, exceptions, handling, would walk away rather than complain. If they complain, they probably are not happy. Your team can do something proactively.

The fourth point you mentioned was deliverability reports. What percentage of our deliveries got to our customers on time? When do you start looking at this data and what do you do about the data?

The one key metric that we help the merchant monitor is called on-time rates. On-time rates, with 100 shipments that you have, how many of them are delivered on time or early? You want to aim for 80% of those shipments that are on time or early and not late. That’s something basic that you want to look at. You want to see how many of them are late and how late they are. You want to get into the granular level and then see okay, “Those are late but why? Is it this carrier, this service type, or this shipping to this country or state having issues?”

You then can think about two things. One is to change your carrier service strategy or upgrade the service. The second thing you can do is to tell the customers a more realistic estimate of the delivery date at the checkout or before the checkout. Setting up the right estimation, even giving them alerts, “This is unstable during COVID time. I hope you understand it.” Set the expectations rather than not doing anything. That’s something that’s key with this report that they can do their actions about.

That’s handy. Thanks for that. The number five is automated return flows. Returns could be an issue, particularly in fashion eCommerce. What’s your advice on automation? There are some dedicated Shopify apps for automated returns. What are the net benefits particularly to customer experience first and then the bottom line second?

We ask the customers what are things that frustrated them when they’re doing online shopping. One key thing is the complex return process. It makes customers feel like, “Do I want to come back to you if the return is such a pain in the ass? I got the money back but do I want to buy again?” Imagine you have a smooth process. In a few clicks, they can even do the exchange. What it means is not only are the customers happy but they don’t even refund it. They choose to exchange their product instead. Having an automated flow is crucial to make the customers come back to purchase again.

In the past, the standard exchange or return process was email customer support and the customer support is like, “Let me generate the shipping label. Wait for a bit.” The new process is creating a page and allowing the consumers, no question asked, that they can come here. With a few clicks, you can generate a label.

One key step is to ask the customer, “Do you want to exchange for another item?” You don’t want to ask them for a refund first. It’s like, “Do you want to exchange it for another color or size? Do you want to exchange two more items?” If they choose to exchange for more items, you may want to encourage them for extra coupons, extra credit so that they choose exchange over a refund. Those simple things make the customer happy and then also capture the lost revenue for the merchants as well.

What we used to do was also exchange for coupons. The only way they could use a coupon is to be on the site, which does help. It gives them a bit more credit to shop. All five points are drilled out. There was a question I wanted to ask in regards to international shipping. I’m not even speaking in the context of drop-shipping because we don’t talk about drop-shipping on this podcast. We predominantly talk about D2C eCommerce brands.

Gymshark is one of your customers. Due to the nature of their business, they ship as far out as Australia from the UK. From a documentary I was watching, they use DHL. Their fulfillment center is an hour from me. It’s fascinating and that’s because they’re not selling anything clunky. Most of the packages are under one kilo for people who shop reasonably.

For operators reading this podcast that are in that similar position with Gymshark where their products are not too bulky, they’re concerned about customer service, they’ve selected the right carriers, what should they expect when they automate? What tips do you have for them in terms of post-purchase experience, particularly speaking to this tracking automation that you guys do? It’s a scale for Gymshark. Gymshark is an outlier there. There are some brands that are shipping or thinking about shipping internationally because there’s no real barrier besides tax. What tips do you have for them?

For multicountry that carries support, sometimes you may not use one carrier. Even GymShark is not using a single carrier. Everyone uses multi carriers when you grow bigger. Having vendors that can support your growth, whether in which country or which carrier, is something important. The second thing is about the post-purchase experience. It comes to multiple languages. Reaching the customers, we have laid the right language, write emails the right language, and user experience. This thing is basic when you scale it. You may not expand to a big team so you need a system that can support multi-language and multi carriers when you scale.

When your strategy changes, increase in a new country, new language, or a new carrier, these are things that you should consider. The post-purchase experience is like shopping. It’s quite universal. You buy something, you click the button, you get it shipped, and then you can be notified. You want to see visibility. Those things won’t change. The things that change are the language and the carrier so focus on those.

Thank you. Andrew, we can go on and on. This is the tail end of this conversation, which I thoroughly enjoyed. You have a wise experience. You guys have been doing this for a long time. We come to our evergreen, rapid-fire question section of the show. I’m going to ask you about 5 or 6 questions. If you could use a single sentence to answer them, it’d be brilliant.

Sounds good.

What advice would you give yourself five years ago?

Hire smart fire and fire fast. Hire A-grade people and don’t think too much.

Are you a morning person?

Hell yeah. I love mornings. I prefer to wake up and exercise.

Do you have a daily morning routine?

Yeah. We get up at 6:45, be in the gym at 7:00, finish the gym at 8:00, get to the first call at 8:15 or something like that, and then get the momentum going. Also, clean up the email by 11:00.

What book are you reading or listening to?

I’m not listening to anything right now. Before, I read a book called Who. It’s a book about a dedicated process to hiring A-grade people. I recommend it.

The final question is, what has been your best mistake? By that, I mean a setback that is giving you the biggest feedback.

If you look at my career, I keep changing my job at the beginning. The mistake is I don’t know what I want and I don’t know what I like. With IT consulting, I launched a sex toy shop online. I worked as a PR. I did a pay marketing strategy and random things. I like the mistakes, in some way. It helps me to be what I am right now. I enjoyed the mistakes. So far, all the mistakes helped me learn. The key thing for me is not to make the same mistakes again.

Andrew, it’s been a pleasure having you on the 2x eCommerce Podcast show. For those people who want to find out more about AfterShip, it’s AfterShip.com. Are you active on any social media platforms?

I’m active on LinkedIn. Reach out to LinkedIn.

Andrew Chan from AfterShip, it’s a pleasure having you on 2x eCommerce Podcast. Cheers.

Thanks so much. Cheers.