By Rob Hango-Zada, CEO and Founder of Shippit
As the holiday rush fades away and the new year begins, retailers find themselves in a crucial phase: resetting and evaluating. The most successful retailers use this time to learn from the highs and lows of the recent peak season, setting a solid foundation for the year to come.
Delivery is no longer just a logistical task; it’s a pivotal part of winning and keeping customers. With consumer expectations higher than ever, data has become the cornerstone of delivery optimisation. The peak season’s high volumes provide invaluable insights, and retailers who can tap into these will be well-equipped to refine their operations, boost customer satisfaction, and set themselves up for success in 2025.
Using data to drive profitability
The economic pressures from 2024 show no signs of easing in the year ahead. Retailers are increasingly focused on protecting profitability while meeting growing customer demands. From shopping cart to doorstep, delivery operations are complex and can become costly without careful management. Data holds the potential to transform delivery from a cost centre into a profitability driver.
Now is the perfect time to dive into key performance metrics like order processing times, shipping costs, and carrier reliability. Identifying inefficiencies—whether in shipping costs across regions or in inventory coordination—can significantly reduce cancelled orders, refunds, and wasted time. Retailers who optimise high-demand shipping lanes and better align their operations can lower costs and improve delivery speed.
These efforts don’t just save money, they also create a better delivery experience for customers. Seeing delivery optimisation as an investment rather than a cost empowers retailers to stay competitive, strengthen their bottom line, and foster lasting customer loyalty.
Delivering exceptional customer experience
Once the foundation of bottom-line profitability has been built, retailers should then leverage data to help deliver an exceptional customer experience, a critical driver of top-line growth. Delivery has emerged as one of the most influential factors in consumer decision-making, second only to price. Research from Shippit and Jarden reveals that 50% of consumers won’t return to a brand after a poor delivery experience, while 33% now expect Amazon-level standards of speed and reliability. It is crucial, then, that retailers ensure their delivery operations meet—and exceed—customer expectations.
Achieving this requires retailers to track key data points such as delivery performance and times, which provide a clearer and more comprehensive picture of their shipping and fulfilment processes. This data allows businesses to identify and address bottlenecks in order processing, fulfilment and transit helping them optimise every stage of the delivery journey.
Additionally, data can highlight underperforming areas, such as late deliveries or slow fulfilment. These insights allow retailers to adjust their operations to further enhance customer satisfaction, whether by refining estimated delivery times to be more accurate, improving transit processes, or streamlining
fulfilment workflows. In doing so, retailers not only exceed customer expectations but also build the kind of loyalty and trust that drives long-term revenue growth.
Tools for the job
To harness the full potential of delivery data, retailers need the right tools to transform raw information into actionable insights. Tools such as Shippit Insights provide a robust platform that makes data accessible, intuitive, and tailored to meet diverse business needs. These tools feature pre-configured dashboards as an out-of-the-box solution for visualising key metrics such as average cost per shipment, or average charged weight. These dashboards are fully customisable, allowing businesses to adapt them to their specific goals while, if needed, also providing unprocessed data for deeper, more granular analysis.
By offering a single source of truth, Shippit Insights enables organisation-wide visibility and alignment. Logistics, operations, eCommerce, and finance teams can work from the same data, fostering seamless collaboration and ensuring all departments are aligned toward shared goals. Retailers can move beyond isolated data silos creating a unified strategy, leveraging data to streamline processes, reduce costs, and deliver exceptional customer experiences that drive repeat business.
Data as a differentiator
Running a retail business is challenging, especially in today’s competitive and complex landscape. It becomes even harder when retailers lack transparency and control over critical operations like delivery. The retailers who will thrive in 2025 will be those who harness the power of data to turn operations into revenue-generating, business-driving opportunities.
Delivery optimisation is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity for staying ahead. By utilising tools to make data-driven decisions, businesses can optimise operations, exceed customer expectations, and build long-term loyalty. As competition intensifies and consumer demands rise, leveraging real-time insights will be the key to driving success and surpassing 2024 results. Now is the time for leaders to assess their operations, embrace innovation, and position their businesses to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape.