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Case Study
Accurate Delivery Dates Increase Conversions for Large North American Retailer
Customer Profile
One of North America’s oldest and best-known retailers, with $7B in annual sales and locations throughout North America, tapped Nextuple to help them improve promise capabilities for its online lifestyle shopping destination.
Before engaging with Nextuple, the retailer’s legacy order management system only provided conservative estimated delivery dates during checkout. Studies show that consumers expect to see delivery dates at the product listing level and often make purchase decisions based on the soonest delivery.
The Challenge
Providing accurate delivery dates was a major pain point. The retailer’s online shopping destination offers more than four million products, distributed across a network of nearly 100 stores and four distribution centers, delivered by ten carriers over 1500+ forward sortation areas. Managing this complex environment with a legacy order management system that was not built for today’s shopper expectations was proving challenging.
In a recent study, 78 percent of online shoppers rated “fast shipping” as a key component of a positive buying experience. Without the ability to offer accurate delivery dates at the product listing level, the retailer knew that the current shopping experience, which did not provide delivery dates until checkout, was likely costing them sales. In addition, they were also aware that the promised delivery dates being provided were inaccurate and too conservative, resulting in lost opportunities.
The Solution
Microservices provide an effective way to build new capabilities on top of the existing tech stack. The retailer chose the Nextuple Order Management Studio (NOMS), a modern cloud-native suite of flexible and scalable Order Management microservices. The technology allows omnichannel retailers to quickly and effectively respond to consumer demands for speed and convenience while optimizing the cost to serve. Any national retailer can serve up a list of over 20 items with estimated delivery times in under one second.
Using the Promise Tuple, the retailer was able to support a high-performance EDD calculation on product listing pages, product detail pages, cart, and checkout and optimize based on speed, cost, and specific service-based rules, and adjust volume configurations during holidays, sales, and special events.
The Results
Today, the retailer offers faster, accurate delivery dates throughout the buying journey. In fact, over the 2022 holiday season, they successfully leveraged Nextuple’s Order Management Studio and Promising Engine microservice to provide accurate delivery dates at a sub-100 millisecond performance. They have also enabled a “Get it Fast” filter on the product listing page.
Visitors to the retailer’s website can now filter product listings for the fastest delivery and check availability and estimated delivery date at any point in their shopping journey, including on the product detail page, in their carts, and at checkout. In addition, estimated delivery dates were far more accurate than in the past, giving shoppers increased confidence in their purchases and the ability to track and receive them when promised.
