Delivery management is the end-to-end planning, execution, and optimization of fulfilling customer orders from the warehouse to the doorstep, and back through returns.
For ecommerce retailers, handling deliveries effectively is more than a back-office function. It's a competitive differentiator that protects customer loyalty and brand reputation. Yet, many organizations still rely on fragmented systems that lead to inaccurate delivery dates, rising support tickets, higher parcel spend, and customers lost after one bad experience.
In this guide, we cover how delivery management drives ecommerce success, the challenges holding retailers back, six ways to improve performance, and the technology that enables accurate delivery promises, lower costs, and better customer experiences.
Key highlights:
- Delivery management is the end-to-end process of coordinating people, systems, and carriers to ensure orders are delivered on time, at the lowest cost, and with full visibility.
- Challenges such as poor inventory visibility, rising customer expectations, cross-border complexity, and fuel cost volatility strain fulfillment operations.
- Automation, scalable label generation, distributed fulfillment, customer communication, optimized routing, predictive modeling, and simulation tools all reduce costs and improve ecommerce delivery management reliability.
- Shipium provides an ecommerce delivery management software that unifies fragmented systems, improves delivery promises, and cuts parcel spend for leading enterprises.
Learn how to create a Prime-like delivery promise experience — from the people who built it at Amazon.
Why an optimized delivery management process is critical to ecommerce success
An optimized delivery management process is critical to ecommerce success because it impacts customer loyalty, operational efficiency, and profitability. When deliveries are delayed, inaccurate, or poorly communicated, shoppers lose trust and often abandon the brand altogether. In fact, McKinsey reports that 85% of consumers say they won’t shop with a retailer again after a poor delivery experience.
Modern logistics technology like the Shipium platform, which unifies fragmented fulfillment and carrier decisions, shows how much impact delivery optimization makes. Our customers have seen a 4% lift in cart conversion by presenting more accurate delivery promises at checkout, turning more accurate logistics execution into higher revenue.
What are the main challenges with delivery service management?
Delivery service management may seem straightforward on paper, but in the real world, it is often constrained by operational challenges. Inventory gaps, rising customer expectations, and volatile costs put constant pressure on fulfillment teams.
Main challenges when handling deliveries at scale include:
Inventory management issues
Stockouts and inaccurate counts remain one of the most common causes of delivery exceptions and failed promises. When inventory is wrong, systems split orders across locations, late shipments increase, and margins shrink due to unnecessary partial picks. Even worse, customers who encounter an “out of stock after checkout” scenario often don’t return.
Get started with these best practices for inventory management:
- Sync available-to-promise (ATP) inventory with the storefront to prevent “out of stock after checkout.”
- Ensure inventory allocation feeds into carrier selection and time-in-transit modeling, so promises reflect real capacity.
- Use historical order patterns to position high-velocity SKUs closer to customers, reducing late-ship risk and expensive splits.
Increased demand for fast delivery
According to VML, consumers demand delivery faster than ever: the expected delivery timeframe for online orders was 2.36 days in 2022, 2.16 days in 2023, and just 1.85 days in 2024. This push creates new complexity in routing, staffing, and facility siting for ecommerce businesses.
Rather than defaulting to the fastest option for every order, a better approach is to tier delivery windows at checkout and match shoppers to the most reliable option. By presenting accurate delivery promises instead of using only the “fastest possible option,” retailers can reduce failure rates while still keeping speed-conscious customers satisfied.
Cross-border ecommerce complications
International shipping introduces additional delivery challenges for ecommerce brands. Customs clearance, duties, and brokerage requirements create unpredictable lead times that are difficult to communicate to customers. Without the right systems in place, delivery promises made at checkout often fail once shipments hit border controls.
To manage these risks, logistics teams should treat cross-border flows as a core part of delivery service management:
- Automate customs documentation to reduce clearance delays and eliminate manual errors.
- Calculate duties and taxes at checkout so customers see the total landed costs before purchase.
- Partner with carriers that specialize in cross-border delivery, like Passport, to improve compliance and provide more accurate time-in-transit data.
Fuel cost volatility
Fuel is one of the most volatile cost drivers in parcel delivery. An International Monetary Fund (IMF) analysis found that shipping costs fluctuate almost 22% more than oil prices, meaning transportation expenses rise even faster than fuel itself. Combined with inflation, these swings put constant pressure on ecommerce margins and make cost forecasting difficult.
To limit the impact of cost fluctuations, follow these best practices:
- Consolidate shipments and stops to minimize empty miles and reduce per-order transportation costs.
- Optimize delivery zones and batching to group orders more efficiently across routes.
- Use driver guidance to reduce idle time, cutting unnecessary fuel burn without degrading service.
Explore modern strategies to minimize your shipping costs.
How to improve your delivery management process: Top 6 strategies
By treating delivery as a system to optimize, retailers can lower parcel spend and build the flexibility to adjust when demand surges or networks shift.
These six strategies show how to improve your delivery management process:
1. Automate carrier and service selection
Manual carrier decisions slow fulfillment and increase errors, leading to higher parcel spend and inconsistent performance. Automating carrier and service selection through delivery management software standardizes choices and ensures orders move quickly through the network.
Most legacy shipping technology locks carrier rules into static configurations, so any change — whether a new surcharge, an updated cutoff, or a shift in service performance — requires IT involvement or lengthy vendor projects.
Shipium takes a different approach, applying historical performance and real-time network conditions to recommend the best carrier and service on each order. As in the example shown in the image below, our software might recommend UPS Ground at $8.73 because it meets the delivery promise date just as a higher-cost air option would. This level of precision ensures that ecommerce businesses meet the delivery promise at the lowest possible cost.
2. Generate shipping labels with ease
For enterprise retailers, label generation requires flexibility. During peak season, logistics teams often need to create thousands of labels in a short window, and systems built for shipment-by-shipment processing create bottlenecks. When label throughput lags, everything downstream — picking, packing, staging, carrier pickup — slows down.
A reliable delivery management process requires labeling systems that process both single requests and high-volume bursts without breaking pace. Legacy logistics tools rarely offer this range. They handle individual shipments but falter when volumes spike, forcing operators into workarounds that cost time and money.
Shipium was built for these enterprise realities, with APIs that support both single-label generation and bulk endpoints that return thousands of labels in a single request. The result is faster response times, lower compute overhead, and label throughput that keeps pace with peak demand — all while giving teams control with customizable templates and instant reprints.
Learn how to boost enterprise throughput with batch label generation.
3. Use distributed fulfillment centers
Concentrating inventory in one or two warehouses forces many orders into distant shipping zones, which increases costs and stretches delivery times. A strong delivery management system accounts for inventory placement and regional demand to improve both cost and speed.
The challenge is coordinating inventory decisions with shipping logic in real time. Shipium connects these pieces, syncing inventory visibility with delivery promises so each order ships from the best node. Retailers cut parcel spend, reduce split shipments, and still protect the promise date for customers.
4. Keep your customers in the loop with real-time updates
Customers expect visibility from checkout to delivery. When they receive only generic carrier updates like “In transit” or “Out for delivery,” they don't know if the package will actually arrive on time. If bad weather closes a hub or a truck misses pickup, the status may still show as normal, leaving customers confused and prompting “Where is my order?” (WISMO) calls. This gap between the delivery promise and the updates customers receive is one of the biggest failures in delivery service management.
Retailers need systems that connect promised ETAs to real-time shipping performance. Shipium makes that connection by recalculating ETAs whenever conditions shift and passing that data back through APIs. Retailers then use their own customer communication tools to send branded notifications that explain changes and set accurate expectations.
Learn how to modernize your logistics operations with Shipium's shipment tracking API.
5. Optimize your route planning
Inefficient routing leads to wasted miles, higher fuel spend, and missed ETAs. Logistics tools that account for traffic, weather, and delivery cutoffs create more efficient sequences that lower costs and improve delivery efficiency.
An ecommerce delivery management solution should adjust routes as conditions change. Shipium, for example, introduces predictive analytics and adjustable rules that let modern teams model routes before deployment and adapt during execution, which keeps delivery promises on track while reducing per-order costs.
6. Simulate network changes before deploying
Adding carriers, opening new fulfillment centers, or adjusting service-level agreements (SLAs) without testing introduces risk to large operations. A modern delivery management platform lets operators simulate changes before launch, showing cost and service trade-offs in advance.
Most teams rely on spreadsheets or after-the-fact analysis, which makes changes reactive instead of strategic. Shipium’s Simulation tool enables forward-looking planning, from peak-season volume shifts to third-party logistics (3PL) onboarding, so logistics leaders understand the impact of changes before they commit.
Manage delivery operations with Shipium
For many retailers, legacy logistics systems make it challenging to manage delivery operations at scale. Static SLAs, rigid carrier setups, and siloed systems create inefficiencies that inflate parcel spend and erode customer trust.
Shipium offers a modern approach to delivery service management by connecting order, inventory, and carrier data in real time, enabling smarter decisions that keep delivery promises accurate and costs under control.
With Shipium, enterprises can:
- Automate carrier and service selection to reduce manual work and eliminate errors.
- Use predictive time-in-transit modeling to set more accurate delivery promises at checkout.
- Onboard new carriers or fulfillment nodes in hours, not months, to stay agile as demand shifts.
- Monitor parcel spend and carrier performance with analytics tools that inform SLA enforcement.
This level of control helps retailers keep customers happy by ensuring faster, more reliable delivery windows — without overspending to get there.
Book a demo to see how Shipium transforms delivery management for enterprise ecommerce operations.
Frequently asked questions
What is delivery management software?
Delivery management software is technology that coordinates the planning, execution, and monitoring of order deliveries. These platforms automate tasks like routing, carrier selection, label generation, and tracking updates to improve accuracy, reduce costs, and enhance visibility across the fulfillment process.
Just keep in mind that not all shipping platforms serve the same purpose. Many tools focus only on last-mile routing, local fleet dispatch, or other specific functions. Shipium, for example, is an enterprise-grade ecommerce delivery management solution that connects fragmented fulfillment systems, predicts accurate delivery promises, and orchestrates parcel shipping across carriers. In other words, our system goes beyond driver dispatch to manage the full customer delivery experience at scale.
What should you look for in a delivery management system?
For Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs) and operations leaders, the right delivery management system must unify fulfillment, carrier management, and customer communications while remaining flexible enough to adapt as networks grow.
Key capabilities to prioritize include:
- Local delivery integration to support same-day or regional shipping.
- Robust customer support features, including proactive notifications and branded tracking pages.
- Flexible delivery processes and frameworks that handle split shipments, order cutoffs, and complex returns.
- Efficient route optimization powered by time-in-transit modeling and carrier performance data.
- Multi-carrier connectivity to quickly remove or add new carriers and avoid single points of failure.
- Actionable shipping analytics and reporting for parcel spend, carrier performance, and SLA adherence.
- Exception management workflows that detect delays early and automatically trigger recovery options.
- Scalability across networks to support new fulfillment nodes, 3PL partners, or international lanes without rebuilding the stack.
What is the best delivery management software?
The best delivery management software is the one that fits a retailer’s specific needs, whether that’s lowering parcel spend, improving delivery promises, or streamlining returns. For some ecommerce businesses, that means prioritizing automation of carrier selection. For others, it means stronger inventory visibility or faster label throughput.
When evaluating the best software for delivery management, retailers should look for tools that unify order, fulfillment, and carrier systems while using predictive analytics to adapt to changing demand and meet delivery promises, like Shipium does.
What are the emerging ecommerce delivery management trends?
As ecommerce growth continues to reshape logistics, modern ecommerce delivery management must keep pace. These shipping trends signal a shift away from static routing and toward data-driven, customer-centric delivery strategies:
- Personalized delivery windows and communication, giving customers more control over when and how orders arrive.
- Phygital options like Buy Online, Pick Up In Store (BOPIS) and local courier integration, blending online convenience with local fulfillment.
- AI/ML mechanisms for routing and forecasting, enabling faster, more efficient delivery promises.
- Multi-carrier strategies and white-label tracking, reducing reliance on single providers and keeping the customer experience consistent.
