Join Cameron and Michael Bernal for a focused session on turning order tracking into a real growth lever for your store. We'll walk through why the post-purchase and delivery experience matter so much for keeping customers coming back, and how proactive shipping updates increase LTV and cut down on "where is my order" support tickets.
Practical, actionable insights you can apply right away, whether you're looking to reduce support volume, boost customer retention, or simply give shoppers a better experience once they've hit "buy."
Recorded Thursday, August 6
Hosted virtually via Google Meet
Co-hosted with CWILL
All right. So, welcome to today's webinar on improving LTV and post-purchase experience with order tracking. This is really focused on turning your post-purchase experience into revenue. I'm here with Seawill and my name is Cameron. I'm from Minion Made here. I'm project manager at Minion Made, helping Shopify brands improve customer experiences, streamline operations, and unlock growth opportunities through Shopify strategy development and optimization.
And I'm here with Michael from Seawill. So I'm head of growth here, handle partnerships, new business, a few other things. We wear a lot of hats. We've been leaders in global tracking for 12 plus years. So, that's what we know best, but we also have a handful of Shopify apps, most notably our returns and loyalty solutions.
Above all, my opinion is everyone should have an order tracking app. And if you have one already, you might need to give it a little more attention, a little more love. The first overarching theme is that the sale is not over at checkout. If you go to conferences like I do, when they're not talking about AI, they're talking about how important the post-purchase experience is to getting someone to come back. We think so much about acquisition, but sometimes fall short on the post-purchase experience.
One of the most important, if not the most important aspects of the experience after checkout is the delivery. Amazon found that 47% of younger shoppers, so Gen Z and millennials, have abandoned a brand because of a bad delivery experience. And what's even more interesting is that most of them never complain, leave a bad review, or contact customer support. They just quietly don't buy from that brand again.
When customers do not get correct shipping notifications, they tend to create WISMO inquiries, flood customer support, and are less likely to purchase again. On top of that, there are negative reviews and chargebacks. If a product just takes longer than the customer expects to reach them, most stores end up with customers filing a chargeback with their credit card. You need to then respond to that and try to prove that this product was actually shipped, that they may have received it. That all becomes very challenging without a better dashboard or history record of where a shipment ended up and how it progressed.
When you have a smooth post-purchase experience for customers, it drives lifetime value, decreases the time to second purchase for customers. What we're looking for is repeat orders, higher lifetime value, stronger brand loyalty with an order tracking app.
Both shipping notifications and a branded tracking page are very significant opportunities for driving additional revenue. Shipping notifications are opened at a much higher rate than marketing emails. So if you can try to upsell in these emails like, "Hey, your order is shipped. Your order is out for delivery today. Your order was delivered," on the basic level, it actually drives a lot of sales. As does a branded tracking page which in short is a page on your store that shows all of the tracking history for a customer's order and you can also advertise other products, do some customer education on it as well. This is not something Shopify really provides out of the box.
We tend to see about every 2,000 to 3,000 order lookups a new sale from a tracking page and about double that for shipping notifications.
What Shopify has to do is get a carrier update related to the tracking number attached to its order and accurately determine based on this update what is happening with this shipment. Is it in transit? Is it out for delivery today? Was there a failed delivery attempt? And Shopify doesn't do a great job with that. With major carriers in the US — USPS, FedEx, UPS — it's mostly right. But even then, there are some shipping statuses and types of notifications that you just can't send without an order tracking app just based on what Shopify can do natively.
When you have bad data coming in, the notifications that you've set up that are dependent on Shopify's ability to detect the delivery status — if it's not getting correct data, customers aren't getting those shipping notifications. The reason for this is Shopify's faulty connections with carriers shipping those products. And again, if shipping notifications aren't sending to customers, they're left in the dark. You're flooded with WISMO inquiries and you're hurting your LTV.
There's no branded tracking page and there's no early warning system. A lot of the time when a shipment is delayed, stores don't tell customers before they tell you. The answer is almost always no. We just kind of cross our fingers and hope that it goes well.
When there is a problem with a shipment, it could fall into a delivery status we call exceptions, which is basically a catch-all for anything that went wrong. It could be as minor as the truck didn't get from warehouse B to warehouse C in time, so this order is going to be delayed today. That is actually a type of status that Shopify cannot identify.
Being able to tell your customers and keep them informed when something actually goes wrong can allow you to turn a potential churn risk into a moment to build trust with a customer and even upsell on those additional notifications that you're sending.
With the early warning system, this is something that even a lot of order tracking apps can't do, but Quill can. If your average delivery time in the US is say 3.5 days or four days but you do have some orders that take longer, you could set up an automatic notification to the customer or to your customer support team. As soon as a shipment hits day six or day seven, send an email to the customer like, "Hey, this order is taking a little longer to get to you. We're talking to UPS. Sorry for the inconvenience. Don't worry, it's still on its way. Here's 10% off anything else you want from the store while we sort this out for you." That type of notification, which is basically a lack of update, there's no way to send that with just Shopify's native notifications.
Not being able to direct customers back to your store from shipping notifications is a huge missed opportunity. Most shipping notifications will have a link to track your order and it will either take them to the carrier's website or sometimes to the Shopify order page which is buried in the account where you don't have that much flexibility.
The order tracking traffic is a very high-touch opportune moment to actually upsell. There's no reason that this customer, this traffic that you fought hard to get, should be sent off to a carrier's website. The fix: have a page on your store, a branded tracking page where they see all of the history of the tracking, they get all the tracking updates and see more information from the store, other products as well.
When I tend to talk about order tracking, I usually am met with two main types of responses. The first is, "Oh snap, we actually get a lot of WISMO inquiries. We have issues with shipping notifications. This is a problem." The other type is something along the lines of, "We get very few customers reaching out asking about their order. 97% of our shipments arrive on time. My WMS has good tracking data in there. I think we're good on order tracking."
What I tend to surface is the following questions: That 3% of orders that don't get there on time, what happens? Do you tell customers before they tell you? The answer is almost always no. If an order has a tracking number that just stops getting updates for a number of days, do you reach out and tell them? And lastly, how much revenue are you bringing in from shipping notifications and a branded tracking page?
Exceptions and failed attempts are really important moments to contact customers. A failed attempt is when the carrier tries to deliver a package, but the customer wasn't there or they couldn't get access to the building. They will reattempt to deliver that product. But we need to make sure the customer is aware because every carrier is different, but it's usually two or three failed attempts before they are just going to send it back to the store. That's expensive for you. The customer is probably going to be dissatisfied and you're going to eat the cost of an extra shipment, which for some stores is like half or all of their margin on the product. Shopify natively does not have a way to send emails for failed attempts or exceptions.
Info received is a delivery status when a tracking number has been created, but the carrier hasn't actually scanned it. The reason this matters so much is so many stores that have problems with WISMO inquiries happen here. It's not during the actual transit. It's that they print a shipping label and then it doesn't actually ship for two days. The customer gets a notification like, "Hey, your thing is shipped" and then there's no movement for two days. That leads to the customer being confused and reaching out.
What you're able to do with an order tracking app like ours is if it goes one day or two days still in info received, send them a notification saying something like, "Hey, your order is still being prepared" or "The carrier is about to pick up your package soon. We're just waiting for them. Hang tight. Sorry for the delay." We're both cutting down on WISMO inquiries and helping customers feel taken care of.
We're getting out in front of it. We're talking to you before there's a problem that you're even aware of. Standard notifications tend to just be milestone notifications. It goes from in transit to out for delivery. Goes from out for delivery to delivered. The proactive notifications are based on a lack of that progress. Stalled shipment alerts are when a tracking number stops getting updates. A transit delay is when it's just gone past a certain number of days that we consider concerning. You can differentiate this based on the country.
One thing you can also do is if you're not comfortable with the idea of sending these directly to customers, you could decide to just have them sent internally through customer support. I worked with an underwear brand, like premium expensive underwear, where they have close relationships with their customers. They don't want them getting an automated email. They wanted to get the email themselves and then actually call the customers and have a conversation with them.
This is a page on your store where customers can see the progress of the shipment and other products advertised. Some percentage of that tracking traffic will purchase again. The concept is keep the traffic on your store, stop gifting it to USPS or whoever it may be. Recommend other products and get a full history of each update from the carrier.
This is useful even if your store has 100 to 200 orders a month. Far more useful and crucial if you're having thousands of orders a month. Whatever the state is right now in order tracking gets amplified during high season — Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We're in August. Something to start thinking about now. You'll see higher WISMO inquiries. Carriers take longer to deliver packages during high season and loyalty can effectively be won or lost. A bad shipping experience leads to customer churn and you're most vulnerable during these high seasons.
Another thing that order tracking apps deliver is really good analytics around shipping performance. That could be broken down by carrier, by country, even by state to help you better understand any problems with shipping. If we need to consider using a new 3PL because they're taking too long to fulfill orders, need to renegotiate SLAs, or maybe we need a different carrier for a certain route. This lives within Shopify, super easy to navigate. What we're trying to do is help you be more proactive and strategic around all things shipping — identifying slow lanes, any routes where you're having too many problems, or countries and selecting a carrier that actually works for you.
A store I recently worked with sells supplements — they're like drinks that you take with supplements and vitamins. They were having an issue where their carrier was often not scanning packages throughout the journey consistently. The carrier scan is how that tracking update actually gets pushed to the carrier and then eventually to us.
What we did was set up a stalled notification email. We said if a package goes 3 days without any tracking updates, send the customer an email saying, "Hey, USPS has not been updating your tracking number. We're sorry about it. We're keeping an eye on it. If you already got the product, let us know." Not only did it decrease WISMO inquiries, they actually started getting emails from customers like, "Oh my god, thank you for letting me know. This is such good customer service." It also took almost no time for these results to happen. I put 30 days here. It was probably more like 10. The only work was setting up a Klaviyo flow with this trigger and getting it running.
With orders that don't get to the customer on time, what happens? What is the strategy? Have you evaluated whether these customers are less likely to buy from you again? With those delays, are you telling customers about them before they tell you? If not, why not? Do you have any notifications for orders that do not get updates for too long or stay in info received for too many days? And lastly, what revenue are you getting from order tracking traffic and shipping notifications? If you can't answer all four of these confidently, please talk to me. I would love to help.
Visibility and trust: proactive communications build trust with customers and drive loyalty, and even short-term second purchases. Notify them when nothing's happening. Own your traffic. And your data protects you against chargebacks.
This is the name of our app, Quill Order Tracking. We provide real-time order tracking for over 1,600 carriers around the world. So, if you're shipping internationally, that is huge. And again, a branded tracking page. If you want to see this in action, I'm happy to meet with you, provide a free audit, and you don't need to sign up for anything. You just install the app. We go through all of your data and I'll point out what's good, what's bad, or you're welcome to start a free trial. Also can build an ROI calculator for you. You just tell me how many orders you have, WISMO inquiries, AOV, and I'll calculate your potential savings, revenue, and the impact on the customer service side.
Thanks a lot, Michael. Really insightful presentation and a very powerful app that can be used for order tracking. I want to introduce the Minion team. We are Minion Made and we're a team of strategists, developers, and designers helping you grow your Shopify brand.
Our process goes through a number of steps to help you get to success. We start with an onboarding call. We have a teamwork dashboard. We set up a project roadmap and think of meetings as on demand, giving you access to help when you need it and offering you real-time feedback.
We help Shopify brands in a number of different ways: Shopify development, conversion optimization, store redesign, systems integrations. We do a lot of custom app development and offering ongoing support. And so I'd love to invite you to schedule a strategy session with us. You can head over to minionmade.com/contact where we'll take a look at your store. We'll look at the highest impact opportunities and build your roadmap for growth in 2026.
Thank you for attending this webinar and learning a little bit about Quill's order tracking and how Minion Made can support your store. Thanks again for joining us today and check out the order tracking app and schedule time with us to chat through growth in 2026.
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