Shipping delivery experience is a key driver of customer retention and brand trust. Shoppers judge retailers not just by what they sell but also by how reliably and transparently those orders arrive. Expectations are clear: accurate delivery dates at checkout, real-time tracking, fast and flexible shipping options, and painless returns. When any of these factors fail, so does the customer relationship.
But while expectations have evolved, most enterprise retailers are still operating with tools that weren’t built to support agile delivery experiences. Legacy shipping systems rely on static carrier service-level agreements (SLAs), can’t adjust logic in real time, and require outside support for even minor changes.
Improving your customers’ experience starts by taking back operational control and making every delivery more accurate and customer-ready at scale. Here’s how to get there.
Key highlights:
The customer delivery experience, or just delivery experience, refers to everything that happens from the moment a customer clicks "buy" to the moment the order is delivered — and returned, if necessary. This post-purchase journey includes a series of relevant touchpoints that influence how clients perceive your brand, including:
A bad delivery experience leads to lost revenue, “Where is my order?” (WISMO) tickets, repeat order hesitation, and rising return costs, jeopardizing profitability and eroding brands’ margins.
The shipping experience matters more than ever because it directly influences whether your customers return or churn. According to McKinsey, 85% of consumers won’t shop with a retailer again after a poor delivery experience. For enterprise operations teams, that means that shipping is no longer just a cost center, but a core part of how brands drive repeat purchases and defend market share.
A great delivery experience should deliver on six key factors:
These are the standards customers expect every time they place an order. According to VML, 63% of consumers say delivery has become more important since shifting to working from home, which has increased their reliance on consistent fulfillment. At the same time, market leaders like Amazon brought the scale and consistency that reshaped what many shoppers consider a “normal” delivery experience, raising expectations for speed and reliability.
| Factors that make a great delivery experience | What they look like in practice | Their business impact |
| Speed | Orders arrive in 1-2 days without paying a premium fee | Higher customer satisfaction and NPS |
| Accuracy | Businesses deliver orders on the promised date and time | Fewer WISMO inquiries and negative reviews |
| Visibility | Proactive updates at every milestone | Visibility builds trust and reduces customer service volume |
| Flexibility | Choice of delivery windows or speeds at checkout | Improved cart conversion rate and reduced cart abandonment |
| Convenience | Box-free, label-free returns with fast refunds | Convenience boosts repeat purchases |
|
Transparency |
Clear costs, accurate delivery promises, no surprises | Transparency increases trust and drives long-term loyalty |
For retailers and third-party logistics companies (3PLs), customer delivery issues rarely come from a single point of failure.
From inaccurate delivery promises to slow returns, the causes of bad delivery experiences usually trace back to inflexible tools and disconnected processes in a company’s supply chain solutions. Here are the four most common issues that directly impact customer satisfaction:
Most retailers still generate EDDs using static delivery SLAs from carriers — without factoring in origin location, cutoff times, or current performance trends. The result? Promises that don’t match reality, leading to missed expectations and WISMO tickets.
The problem compounds when ecommerce brands can’t control or influence the delivery promise logic. Without precise, data-driven EDDs that reflect real operational conditions, conversion rates drop and support costs rise. Customers expect accurate information at the point of purchase, and when that breaks, so does their trust.
Shipping rules, carrier assignments, and fulfillment logic should be adjustable in real time. But for many retailers, making even a small change — like shifting volume away from a congested carrier — requires weeks of IT work or external support. During peak season or unexpected disruptions, that delay is costly.
This lack of agility leads to missed savings opportunities and weakens the brand’s ability to respond to customer needs. Whether it's enabling a new promotion, rerouting around macro-environmental changes, or adjusting carrier mix to meet volume caps, operations teams need fast control. Without it, fulfillment becomes a bottleneck instead of a growth lever.
Most legacy fulfillment environments are a patchwork of disconnected systems, each with its own logic and interfaces. This fragmentation slows down logistics decision-making, makes data hard to trust, and increases the risk of human error.
When marketing and operations can't work from the same ruleset or visibility layer, campaign goals conflict with fulfillment reality. The result is reactive execution, an inconsistent customer delivery service, and internal friction that stalls innovation.
Volume caps, regional service gaps, and volatile performance make it risky to depend on a single carrier provider for all shipments. Still, many retailers stick with one or two carriers because their tech stack can’t easily support more.
Regional carriers often offer faster transit times and better rates, but without the infrastructure to onboard and manage them quickly, retailers miss out. Customers, in turn, get slower service or fewer shipping options, even when better alternatives exist for providing timely delivery services.
To enhance the consumers’ delivery experience, retail brands must show precise delivery dates, offer relevant shipping options, proactively resolve issues, and make returns seamless. These factors aren’t marketing perks; they’re logistics capabilities that drive repeat purchase behavior and reduce operational waste.
Follow these three proven best practices to improve the delivery experience:
Showing real, data-backed EDDs at checkout sets the tone for the entire service delivery experience. Yet most retailers still rely on broad delivery windows disconnected from actual warehouse readiness or carrier performance. This creates a credibility gap — and it’s one that’s immediately noticeable to customers.
To fix the issue, retailers need to connect fulfillment logic directly to the front end, factoring in carrier cutoffs, transit times, inventory location, and order timing in real time. When customers are shown specific dates they can trust, cart conversion goes up and WISMO inquiries go down. More importantly, the brand delivers on its promise.
The Shipium Platform helps retailers achieve this by connecting front-end promises with actual fulfillment conditions.
See how our Delivery Promise feature can help you show trustworthy EDDs at checkout — without sacrificing speed or margins.
Whether responding to marketing requests, reacting to disruptions, or shifting volume due to carrier caps, agility is key for logistics teams. But with legacy shipping technology, even simple rule changes can take weeks.
By giving logistics and transportation teams real-time control over carrier selection, shipping rules, and fulfillment logic, retailers can act faster and reduce operational risk. This kind of agility is especially critical during peak season, when customer expectations are high and the cost of delays compounds.
Shipium makes this agility possible by allowing teams to adjust logic instantly across locations, carriers, and customer segments — all from the same interface.
See how your team can move faster with our Universal Rules Engine.
Returns carry significant weight in how customers judge what a great delivery experience is. A slow or complicated returns process creates friction, increases support volume, and damages brand loyalty.
According to NRF, improving consumers’ returns experience tops the list of retailer business goals in 2025, with 40% agreeing that a better return experience means customers will spend more with their brand over time.
Ecommerce leaders need to make returns easier to initiate, faster to process, and more transparent end-to-end, including solutions like:
Seeing what great delivery experience examples look like helps clarify where to invest and how to execute. Explore case studies of retailers who’ve improved their shipping experience by focusing on speed, reliability, and control, without compromising cost.
Saks OFF 5TH needed to raise its delivery experience to the same standard as its shopping experience. Before the brand started working with Shipium, its website showed a vague shipping window at checkout, and a reliance on a single national carrier limited both speed and flexibility. With more orders shifting online, these constraints were holding back customer satisfaction and increasing shipping costs.
The team reworked their approach by expanding to a diverse network of 12 regional and national carriers, enabling faster, more targeted delivery nationwide. Nearly half of all orders now arrive in three days or less, and with more accurate delivery dates, as shown in the image below, customers now know exactly when to expect their packages.
Duluth Trading Co. entered peak season facing a familiar challenge: how to stay flexible and cost-efficient while handling massive holiday volume.
With legacy logistics systems, operational changes like adjusting carrier volume caps or configuring shipping rules required external support and could take weeks. Each warehouse operated with site-specific logic, making network-wide updates slow and error-prone. With teams in finance and marketing depending on timely fulfillment, these constraints risked both cost overruns and missed customer expectations.
So, in preparation for the 2023 Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Duluth overhauled how it managed logistics operations with Shipium. When marketing requested guaranteed Christmas delivery mid-December, the logistics team was able to adjust rules across the entire network in under three hours, without system downtime or service disruptions. That same flexibility allowed them to optimize delivery speed while containing costs, even under peak pressure.
Compare Shipium vs. typical legacy systems.
Atomix built its reputation on high-touch, tech-led fulfillment for fast-growing brands, but as customer expectations around shipping speed and reliability grew, so did the operational complexity. Meeting delivery date commitments, managing cost tradeoffs, and customizing shipping logic per client were all critical to sustaining the 3PL’s service model.
To meet those demands, Atomix restructured its shipping approach around dynamic cost modeling and flexible carrier management. By using fully loaded rate calculations — including fees and surcharges — they improved pricing decisions and built more trust with clients. At the same time, AI-powered delivery estimates improved on-time performance, while freeing up internal teams to focus on fulfillment execution.
The final result: better delivery accuracy, improved margin control, and a more agile foundation for client growth.
Delivery experience management (DEM) is the strategic coordination of fulfillment, shipping, and communication that ensures every order arrives as promised. Unlike traditional delivery management, DEM focuses on the whole delivery process and how it impacts the customer, not just the logistics backend. That’s important because in today’s market, brand perception, repeat purchases, and profitability are all shaped by what happens after checkout.
In practice, DEM means:
This strategy combines order fulfillment, delivery service metrics, and customer communication into one coordinated effort to make the delivery experience consistent, transparent, and aligned with buyer expectations.
Shipium helps enterprise retailers deliver on what matters most to shoppers: precise delivery dates, fast shipping options, and consistent execution. During peak season, our customers achieved a 99.1% on-time delivery rate despite weather disruptions, labor constraints, and carrier variability.
This level of reliability is made possible by combining dynamic carrier selection with predictive delivery date modeling based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, so retailers can align checkout promises with real operational capabilities.
Whether the goal is faster delivery, lower costs, or greater control, Shipium gives operations leaders the tools to move quickly and execute with confidence. Book a demo today to see how we can make better customer delivery experiences possible.