Choose The Best WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Plugin
With this article, we’ll help you choose the best WooCommerce Shipment Tracking plugin by listing out the necessary order tracking features. Read along to know more.
The Need to Provide WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Updates to Your Customers
WooCommerce has changed the way business owners handle their orders. A few witty WooCommerce Shipping plugins could help you build the online store you’ve always dreamt of. But likely so, managing orders has become one of the most demanding tasks for an e-commerce store.
With businesses delivering locally as well as internationally, it has become very important to keep track of your orders. It not only saves a ton of trouble for business owners in case of any mishappening but also helps in providing customers with the whereabouts of their parcel.
But now the question that arises is how to keep track of your shipments. Is there any way WooCommerce store owners can save their time as well as their customer’s time in trying to track their shipments? The answer is the WooCommerce Shipment Tracking plugin.
What is a WooCommerce Order Tracking plugin?
Shipment tracking has become such a necessity that today there are a lot of options when it comes to the WooCommerce platform. There are tons of WooCommrce Shipment Tracking plugins available for businesses varying in scale, investment, and functionality.
Having decent options is not the real question when it comes to WooCommerce tracking plugins. Instead, choosing the one that suits your business requirements requires additional effort.
Let’s discuss the factors that make up an ideal WooCommerce order tracking plugin. This should help you in choosing the right WooCommerce shipment tracking plugin which will strengthen your business to its core.
The Must-have Features of an Ideal WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Plugin
Every once in a while we get confused by the options available to us. Today we will discuss some of the most important features that will help you in choosing the best WooCommece shipment tracking plugin for your website.
Support for Multiple Shipping Carrier Tracking
One of the key features to look for in a WooComerce Order Tracking plugin is the ability to support different shipping carriers. Today, most of the business owners are using some of the most popular shipping carriers in the world, such as FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc.,
An ideal WooCommerce tracking plugin must be flexible enough to allow business owners to add or remove a particular shipping carrier based on their convenience. There are a few carrier-based WooCommerce Shipping plugins that are capable of providing shipment tracking.
But the only catch is that they work only with their respective shipping carrier. For instance, the WooCommerce UPS Shipping plugin offers an extensive tracking feature that only works with UPS shipments.
Share Tracking Details with Your Customers
It is very convenient for business owners to have the tracking details of each and every order they ship. However, it still doesn’t solve the problems for the customers.
Every time the customers want to track their orders, they will have to contact the owner of the store or customer support and ask for the tracking details of their order.
For a small to medium-scale business, spending this much time and money on entertaining such customer queries is never the best option. Instead, for an ideal WooCommerce tracking plugin, it must make the tracking details readily available to not only the store owner but to the customers too.
Dedicated Shipment Tracking Lookup Area
An ideal WooCommerce shipment tracking plugin should allow you to add a personalised order tracking lookup page on your website. Your customers will be able to view the order tracking status on your Tracking Page instead of the shipping carrier’s website.
Customers should also be able to enter their tracking number whenever they want to check out the status of their orders. You can read this article on shipment tracking lookup page to know more about it.
Customization of Tracking Message
Since we were discussing the customer and their convenience, one of the most important factors responsible for the success or failure of a business is how satisfied their customers are. Sending the tracking details to the customers is very convenient for them. However, adding a personal touch will only add to that convenience and will result in overall better customer experience.
An ideal WooCommerce tracking plugin must provide means to customize the way tracking details are sent to the customers. Be it an email template or a custom text message, it is always great to make your customers feel that you care about them.
Automatically Mark WooCommerce Orders as Completed
Automation is one of the most important aspects that should be considered as the standard for an ideal WooCommerce tracking plugin. As we discussed earlier, with the number of customers and orders a WooCommerce store owner handles in a week, it becomes very tedious to handle every task manually.
Hence, even if there is a task as simple as completing the orders that can be automated with the use of a plugin, it could be a game-changer for most of business owners.
Compatibility with Popular Shipping Software
Many store owners use the shipping software provided by the shipping companies to manage their shipments and provide tracking. If you are using a similar software like the UPS Worldship or Royal Mail Click & Drop, or any other third-party shipping software for e-commerce order fulfillment, you should be able to import the tracking data to WooCommerce.
A good WooCommerce shipment tracking plugin would allow you to create a CSV file containing the tracking data, upload it to your system, sync the details to WooCommerce orders and then mark the orders as Completed.
Upload Shipment Tracking Data in Bulk
WooCommerce store owners can easily scale up their business to any part of the world. Moreover, there are businesses using WooCommerce that deal with more than 50 orders per week. Besides, having different shipping carriers providing different quality of service in various regions also forces the store owners to use not one, but multiple shipping carriers to fulfill their orders.
Hence, this requires advanced functionality where the business owner can handle the tracking data in bulk. One of the ways to do so is by using some mechanism to import the tracking details for hundreds of orders using a CSV file. This will help decrease the time spent on just updating the tracking details for the orders to a great extent.
Automatically Schedule WooCommerce Tracking Import
As we discussed, how automation can help to decrease the workload of business owners, the ideal WooCommerce order tracking plugin must have a way to automate the task of updating the tracking details.
Not only that, the best option that a store owner can think of would be to schedule the process of updating the tracking details just once. This way it would be more convenient for the store owners to just schedule importing the tracking details once so that it can automatically start after some interval of time.
Consolidated view of the WooCommerce Orders Tracking details
View all your orders in one place with live shipment tracking status, and make sure your shipment get delivered without any delay. This page will help you track and monitor all your shipments from a dedicated view within your WooCommerce store.
The ideal WooCommerce shipment tracking plugin should also plugin provide a consolidated view of all the shipments based on their tracking status so that you can make sure your shipments are on time.
Easy of Use
One of the most underrated features in any WooCommerce Shipping plugin is how easily it can be used by business owners. Dealing with the online business, the store owners may or may not be technically sound. Hence, the interface, as well as the working of the plugin, must have a pleasant and easier approach.
Being the ideal plugin a WooCommerce tracking plugin must have an easy-to-use interface. Moreover, since WooCommerce covers a large geographical area, it would be great if the plugin supports multiple languages.
Value For Money
As we discussed earlier, WooCommerce is used by small, medium as well as large-scale business owners. Hence, in the case of small to medium-scale business owners, which make up the most share of WooCommerce users, it is very important that the ideal WooCommerce tracking plugin must be budget-friendly.
Especially when it comes to small-scale business owners, who don’t really require the advanced features that most of the plugins provide. The cost of the ideal WooCommerce tracking plugin must directly reflect its value for money.
The Best WooCommerce Shipment Tracking plugin
WooCommerce Shipment Tracking by PluginHive is the best plugin that comes close enough to be called as the perfect WooCommerce tracking plugin. The following things make the plugin stand out from its competitors and make it the best option business owners can have.
Shipping Carriers Support
With more than 85+ Shipment Carriers preconfigured in the plugin, WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro plugin allows store owners to add or remove a shipping carrier based on their preference.
Providing Tracking Details to Store Owners and Customers
WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro allows store owners to either manually enter tracking details or upload them automatically. This way the tracking details will be visible on the orders page of the respective order(s).
Moreover, the plugin also provides customers with the shipping details on the My Accounts page along with the order details. And once the order is marked complete the tracking details are automatically attached to the Order Completion Email sent to the customers.
Custom Tracking Message
WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro allows you to customize the tracking message that is attached to the Order Completion Email. This way you can set a template message and make sure your customers get a sense of personal touch while checking the email.
Automatically changing the Order Status to Complete
The plugin while importing the tracking details of the orders, provides an option to automatically mark the updated orders as Complete. This way if in case there are a lot of orders, it saves a lot of time of the store owner to manually mark the orders complete. Also, since the Order Completion Email sends the tracking details automatically once the order is complete, the whole process is automated to save a lot of time per order.
Automatically Importing Bulk Data
WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Pro plugin is a pro when it comes to automating the process of updating bulk orders with tracking details. For this, the plugin provides an option to import the tracking details via CSV Import. This way the store owners can update the tracking details in the CSV file and import the file to update the tracking details.
However, the plugin provides an advanced feature to schedule when the tracking details will be updated automatically for the orders using Tracking Data import via FTP. The plugin allows store owners to choose the time interval when the import will begin and after what interval should it start again. This way the only thing that the store owners need to do is update the CSV file on the server and let the plugin do its job.
Summary
We’ve discussed some of the advanced and necessary features that you should look for while searching for a WooCommerce Tracking plugin. With all the factors mentioned, it must be less confusing now when choosing the best WooCommerce tracking plugin.
If you need help in setting up the WooCommerce Shipment Tracking on your online store then Contact PluginHive Customer Support. Our support team should be able to help you out.
Good luck!