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The Importance of Shipment Tracking in Health and Wellness Industry
Introduction
Valued at $1.8 trillion, the health and wellness industry spans beyond fitness and nutrition to include our holistic well-being. The market is flooded with products designed to meet the growing customer expectations around sleep, beauty, fitness, preventive healthcare, and mindfulness.
Emerging trends, such as at-home diagnostic kits that provide personalized feedback, wearable biometric rings with sleep tracking sensors, and clinically proven ingredients for supplements, are dominating the space. Technological advancements, like Generative AI, have empowered brands to offer highly customized products and customer experiences.
However, all of this innovation can be undermined by one simple problem: customers asking "Where is my order?" (WISMO) due to lack of visibility in shipping. In a market driven instant gratification and demand for effective products, mastering shipment tracking is crucial for business growth.
This article explores how health and wellness brands can leverage shipment tracking and tracing to boost business growth and enhance customer satisfaction.
Key Challenges in Health and Wellness Supply Chains
Whether your medicines, biopharmaceutical products, personal health trackers, skincare products reach customers on time depend on the complexity of your supply chain. In many instances, it is fraught with challenges leading to high turnaround times (TAT), shipping delays, inventory mismanagement, and issues with returns.
Some of the hurdles many health and wellness brands grapple with include:
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Lack of Traceability: Health and wellness supply chains are complex with a mix of intermediaries and logistics service providers involved. It's difficult to establish an auditable trail linking multiple processes— manufacturing, distribution, omnichannel logistics, and delivery.
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Regulatory Compliances: Safety, quality, and efficacy of health and wellness products, particularly medicines and biopharma products are strictly regulated. Being compliant to regulations like Good Distribution Practices requires proper storage with appropriate temperature control, safe transportation that prevent damage, contamination, and tracking throughout the supply chain.
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Customer Expectations for Speed and Transparency: 58% of global customers demand next-day delivery. This rate is even higher for health and wellness supplements and consumables. eCommerce brands in the area to fulfill quick deliveries within hours of placing orders, setting up systems for real-time visibility of shipments.
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Inventory Visibility: Many businesses face tough challenges in maintaining an optimal level of inventory. Without a proper inventory management system that traces inbound and outbound, it’s easier to overstock or run out of stock.
How Health and Wellness Brands Grow Faster with Shipment Tracking?
There are many benefits of implementing a shipment tracking system. Here are some of these:
1. Get Real-Time End-to-End Order Visibility
According to DHL’s global customer survey, while 46% of customers worldwide want quick delivery, a close 43% of them expect real-time shipment tracking. With end-to-end parcel tracking, you keep your customers engaged in their post-purchase journey from the moment their order is dispatched.
Every order is assigned a unique tracking number with the airway bill and receipt. These tracking numbers are just for convenience. It's so the order can be tracked with the click of a button, just by entering the tracking number and checking the status. Instant visibility gives them an easy way to monitor their order’s location. Increased post-purchase satisfaction naturally translates to better customer retention rates for your brand.
2. Enhance Order Fulfillment Speed
Most customers abandon their cart if they don't get an estimated delivery date on the website, prior to making payment. If you want customers to do more than just visiting your site, make sure you can stick to the displayed EDDs. Your shipments get a headstart on their shipping journey when the fulfillment process is completed on time.
Pairing your shipment tracking system with inventory management software can help expedite the order fulfillment process, while giving you a clear picture of your inbound and outbound inventory. With the proper inventory count, you can ensure there are no mishaps like stockouts or delays, providing faster deliveries and a smooth customer experience. Couples with courier data, it can also ensure EDDs are more accurate.
3. Safeguard Sensitive Products with Precise Tracking
Be it medicines, vaccines, or collagen supplements, many health and wellness products are temperature-sensitive, needing proper cold logistics infrastructure. To preserve product quality and safety, brands have to deploy refrigerated containers, reefers, and air cargo, keeping temperatures as low as -196°C. Shipment tracking coupled with state-of-the-art sensor technology gives you an integrated view of your shipment condition, ideal temperature, and on-time performance for delivery.
4. Support Seamless Omnichannel Fulfillment
Many health and wellness eCommerce companies sell their products on multiple platforms, particularly online marketplaces. Syncing multiple stores and sales channels requires stringent monitoring of stocks and parcels dispatched. Real-time inventory tracking along with order traceability, from the moment a parcel leaves the place of origin till it reaches the customer, will help you maintain high order accuracy and a strong brand image.
5. Deliver Personalized Customer Communication
The key to success for any health and wellness brand is deep customer engagement, and that starts with personalized communication. Shoppers today expect to be kept in the loop—knowing when their order is dispatched, when it's in transit, and when it's out for delivery.
Without clear order confirmation emails or shipment updates from you, they’re left relying on your delivery partner, which disrupts your connection with them. That's why it's crucial to keep customers informed through a real-time tracking portal and streamlined communication channels—whether it’s SMS, email, or WhatsApp.
6. Handle Shipping Exceptions with Ease
Shipping exceptions are more common than businesses except. Traffic congestion, weather anomalies, customs delays, carrier issues, and lack of route planning can cause delays and disrupt the shipping process. Moreover, incorrect customer address or customer unavailability can further lead to delivery failures, in the worst case, RTOs (Return-to-Origin).
However, shipment tracking gives you transparency needed to better coordinate with carriers,resolve issues quickly (like correcting the customer’s address), and minimize disruptions.
7. Strengthen Health-At-Home with Timely Deliveries
More and more health brands are transforming their services to cater to health-at-home services. Diagnostic kits, health supplements, fitness equipment, health monitoring devices, and personal care products, are all shipped to the customers at their home. This is where shipment tracking becomes important to implement, helping you to monitor the shipment journey. It ensures timely deliveries and provides proof-of-delivery.
8. Meet Customer Expectations for Quick Deliveries
Health and wellness brands aren’t exempted from customer demands for quick deliveries within hours of placing orders. Especially in urban centers, 88% of customers are willing to pay for same day delivery. As you streamline the shipping and fulfillment network, end-to-end shipment tracking becomes crucial.
It improves operational efficiency and ensures smooth shipping by helping you coordinate between warehouses, retail outlets, and shipping carriers, and end customers. With a tracking portal for quick deliveries you can send rider details, OTPs, and map the parcel journey in real-time for your customers. This reduces customer queries about their order status while proactively resolving delivery issues such as incorrect address.
9. Ensure Compliance with Regulations
Health and wellness logistics involves special handling, storage, and transportation requirements to maintain product integrity. This is why there are regulations addressing limited shelf-life, batch expiring, sourcing, and inventory management.
Shipment tracking helps ensure compliance with Good Distribution Practices, leaving a clear audible trail throughout the supply chain for product expiry, returns, accurate labelling. Tracking helps you stay vigilant of cybersecurity threats and maintain data-integrity. As every product is recorded and traceable, it also helps you combat circulation of counterfeit products.
10. Optimize Supply Chain with Data Insights
Shipment tracking offers important data insights, such as on-time delivery, proof-of-delivery, Return to Origin (RTO), return rate, delivery delays, and more. You get a clear picture of your carrier partner’s performance—TAT (Turnaround Time), total delivery time, NDR (Non Delivery Report), return reasons, pickup report, etc. With such deep insights, you can create better plans for distribution and transportation, address customer returns, and proactively address RTOs.
How ClickPost Boosts Delivery Efficiency for Health and Wellness Companies?
ClickPost is a multi-carrier shipment tracking platform that is integrated with 500+ global and regional carriers. It is trusted by 450+ brands and offers a range of services in tracking, shipping, returns, and NDR management, especially for health and wellness brands. It is equipped with the latest advancements in push and pull API and webhook technology. Its shipment tracking mechanism offers real-time and integrated tracking for your shipments across the supply chain.
ClickPost helps health and wellness retailers craft an exceptional shipping experience, especially in the post-purchase phase. It offers branded tracking portal with real-time tracking insights and marketing tiles to place personalized product recommendations for customers. It also sends multichannel notifications in real-time at every milestone through four prominent communication channels—SMS, WhatsApp, Email, and IVRS.
Moreover, ClickPost enhances your operational efficiency deploying automation for carrier allocation, returns management, and proactively resolving delivery issues with real-time customer communications. For more details you can connect with us here.
Key Features of Clickpost
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Identifies the most suitable carrier as per specific business requirements
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Automates tasks like order creation, shipping label generation, order tracking, failed delivery management, and returns management.
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Provides milestone-specific delivery updates to shoppers via multiple channels
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Reduces RTO% by solving NDR cases
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Offers a branded tracking page to shoppers with personalized product recommendations
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Provides data-driven insights into every aspect of shipping
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Offers a dedicated return app for Shopify business owners, named Shopify Returns Plus.
Conclusion
There are many use cases of shipment tracking for health and wellness businesses, from optimizing your supply chain to maintaining customer satisfaction. With the right shipment tracking system in place, such as ClickPost, you can stay compliant with regulations, ensure data security, and integrated tracking throughout your supply chain.