Dropship Tracking 101

One of the biggest challenges that dropshippers face today is tracking the whereabouts of their shipments. This is quite understandable because, ultimately, dropshippers are not directly involved in the fulfillment of the orders. Instead, they rely on suppliers, which makes it very difficult to have complete visibility over package movement. And that’s where the need for effective Drop Shipping order tracking arises. 

In this post, we will understand everything about this concept, including its definition, benefits, and some tips to master it. 

What is Dropship Tracking?

Before we introduce dropship tracking meaning, let us quickly learn about the Dropshipping model. It is a business model where you connect a supplier to a customer. There are three simple steps involved in Dropshipping:

1. The customer places the order on your website;
2. You transfer the order to a Dropshipping supplier;
3. The supplier will ship the product directly to the buyer. 

Dropship tracking, as you would have rightly guessed, is the process of monitoring the shipment of these drop shipped products from the source (supplier) to the destination (customer). With the right dropshipping tracking tool, dropshippers and customers can monitor shipment statuses in real time, right from the time the parcel leaves the warehouse of the supplier to the time it reaches the doorstep of the customer. 

Challenges in Dropship Tracking

The below challenges can make dropship tracking a daunting endeavor for most people – 

Multiple carriers and global shipping complexities

The global shipping ecosystem is a complicated web comprising millions of moving parts. For starters, there are thousands of carriers operating across the world. If you are a dropshipper who handles multitudes of orders every day and deals with a plethora of suppliers, you will find it very difficult to track every package accurately. This is because each carrier selected by a supplier might have their own tracking systems, standards, and processes. Shuffling between them while accessing tracking details will often lead to fragmentation and inconsistencies.

Lack of direct control over the logistics process

Some may argue that the whole idea of Dropshipping is minimal intervention in fulfillment so that dropshippers can focus on sales and marketing. However, the lack of direct control over the logistics process can have its downsides. 

Since you face limited visibility and control over the shipment’s journey, you cannot anticipate and rectify issues that can hamper customer experience. Sometimes, your supplier may partner with certain carriers with no publicly available tracking information. This means you might be at the mercy of the supplier to get the latest package location. This lack of direct oversight and control can result in delays, errors, and miscommunications with customers. 

Ensuring real-time tracking updates

In this era of Amazons and Alibabas, real-time tracking is no longer optional. Customers expect real-time tracking updates to stay informed about the status of their orders. But when your shipment visibility is already low in Dropshipping, offering granular, real-time, and accurate tracking information to customers is not easy. You will often be fed delayed or inaccurate tracking information from time to time by the supplier, which, when shared with customers, can lead to dissatisfaction. Or even worse – they might even undermine the trust they have in your reliability as a dropshipper. 

Maintaining transparency with customers

Transparency is the ultimate key to fostering trust and loyalty in Dropshipping relationships. However, maintaining transparency with customers throughout the shipping process can be challenging due to restrained authority on shaping post-purchase experience. For instance, the lack of access to seamless tracking information can prevent you from proactively communicating with customers and addressing inquiries promptly and transparently. As a result, you will find it difficult to remain transparent and manage customer expectations regarding order status at the same time. Failure to maintain transparency can result in negative feedback, diminished brand reputation, and, ultimately, loss of business.

Benefits of Efficient Dropship Tracking

When you adopt an efficient Dropshipping tracking tool, you enjoy a variety of benefits. Here are the benefits you can expect.

Enhanced Shipment Visibility

Efficient dropship tracking provides real-time visibility into the movement of the order from the supplier’s warehouse to the customers’ doorsteps. With access to such accurate information, both you and your customers can monitor the status of the orders at every stage of the shipping process. This access to information also helps to minimize delays, prevent lost shipments, and improve overall delivery reliability.

Optimized Supply Chain Management

Order tracking is not just a valuable asset for customers awaiting delivery but also important for dropshippers who need to troubleshoot supply chain problems with ease. The ability to efficiently track your dropship orders, that too, in real-time, allows you to identify issues at the earliest fulfillment phase. For instance, you could identify a possible delay in the port of departure. This way, even if you have to reship the order, the delay will be minimal.

Reduced Logistics Costs

This benefit is particularly important in cross-border dropship models where the financial impact of errors is extremely high. For instance, if the product is shipped to the wrong address in another country, you need to ask the supplier to reship the product, which can shoot up your logistics costs. But with efficient dropship tracking, you can prevent errors like misrouted or lost shipments much earlier, thus saving on logistics costs. 

Improved Customer Service

Efficient dropship tracking equips your customer service team with all the required shipping data to satisfactorily answer customers looking for the latest order updates. Also, when your team has key tracking information at their fingertips, they can close a WISMO call sooner and spend their time handling more complex customer queries. Such experiences will increase the number of repeat customers as they have more confidence that their orders will arrive on time.

Tips for Order Tracking in Dropshipping

Here are some tried and tested strategies that you can employ while implementing order tracking in your eCommerce Dropshipping business – 

Choose the right tracking software

The right dropship tracking software is the one that closely aligns with your tracking requirements. It must not only offer all your must-have features like branded tracking page and automated notifications but also provide a handful of nice-to-haves like keyword hiding that make your tracking more customized and secure, elevating the overall customer experience. The platform must also integrate seamlessly with your existing systems to ensure that tracking and order-related information flow freely between the systems. 

Additionally, the software must not have a learning curve. It should be beginner-friendly and be usable from day one with minimal training. This will ensure that you can straightaway derive value from the platform.

Provide a tracking page on your website

There are numerous benefits to this strategy. For starters, it saves a lot of time and effort for the customers as they need not visit one website to place an order and one website to track the location of the package. With a dropship tracking number, customers can track their orders on their own without the need to ask the customer support team for help. It also boosts trust in your dropshipping store by offering a consistent experience with a tracking page on your website, personalized with your brand assets.

The other major advantage is that by not sending them to an external website, you increase the session duration of the customers on your website. This not only increases the chances of them making another purchase but also improves the SEO score of your website, as page session duration is an indirect factor impacting search rankings.

Implement automatic tracking updates

If you are a busy dropshipper, then it is practically not possible to keep checking the latest location of all your drop shipped packages. This is where tracking updates help. When you set up automatic tracking alerts, you get instantly notified about all the shipment milestones of an individual package. You can even set up automatic shipping notifications for your customers so that they need not visit the tracking page repeatedly or call your customer service team multiple times to know the latest status of the order. 

Customize tracking information for customers

One of the biggest challenges faced by dropshippers is gaining the trust of customers. Customers, in several parts of the world, still prefer to deal with a seller than an intermediary like a dropshipper. The most effective way to get out of this situation without compromising on the quality of tracking information is by customizing the tracking information and keeping the seller and their details away from the customers’ eyes.

Best Dropship Tracking Software for Cross-border eCommerce

Now that you know how to select an order tracking software for your Dropshipping business, it is time to pick the best one in the market. Thankfully, you need not scrounge the internet to find one or spend hours and hours researching the features and benefits of it. Because the de facto choice for most dropshippers across the world today is TrackingMore.

#1 Dropshipping Order Tracking Software –  TrackingMore

TrackingMore is the world’s leading one-stop dropship tracking software that comes loaded with a rich feature set for Dropshipping companies. We support 1,200+ carriers from across the world. This means it doesn’t matter from where you run your Dropshipping store or where your suppliers are located, the only platform you need for tracking orders seamlessly is TrackingMore. 

And the best part – irrespective of which carrier your supplier chooses; you can easily access the tracking information without any disruptions, maintaining transparency and keeping customers informed at every step.

Here are some of the key features of TrackingMore.

Comprehensive Dashboard Overview

Imagine having a bird’s eye view of all your dropship parcel details so that you can make accurate and quick decisions if any delivery exceptions occur. This is very much possible thanks to the dedicated shipment dashboard of TrackingMore. 

The TrackingMore’s intelligent tracking system automatically collects tracking details from the supplier’s carrier and classifies them into one of the common and readable statuses such as  “Transit”, “Out for Delivery”, “Delivered”, “Failed Attempt”, etc. Businesses can filter the shipments using parameters such as delivery status, carrier, etc in the dashboard to identify any obstacle hindering the delivery efficiency.

Seamless API integration

Thanks to the robust multi-carrier shipment tracking API offered by TrackingMore, you get access to a more dynamic and direct way to access tracking information from more than 1,200 carriers. This means, you need not integrate your order management system with the individual tracking API of every carrier. Instead, just integrate it with TrackingMore so that you can access any carrier’s tracking data from a single portal. The data flows freely from the carrier’s system to TrackingMore so that you are always one click away from real-time dropship package data. 

Customized Tracking Experience

TrackingMore offers a completely personalized tracking experience to end customers. TrackingMore lets you create a branded dropshipping tracking page that can be designed to include your logo, color and other brand assets to have a uniform look. Apart from increasing the lifetime value of the customers, it also offers a great avenue to upsell or cross-sell products to customers. 

Moreover, you can also hide or replace certain keywords in the tracking information to personalize the experience even further. This feature is particularly useful for those dropshipping stores who want to hide or replace the supplier’s name so that they will remain the seller in the customers’ minds. 

Ecommerce Platform Integration

Whether your Dropshipping website is hosted on Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce or Klaviyo, TrackingMore can be quickly integrated to that eCommerce platform. This means you do not need advanced coding knowledge or even take the help of developers to bring tracking data into your Dropshipping website. All it takes is a few clicks to display tracking data on the dashboard of your eCommerce platform. Since the data is synchronized in real-time, it becomes easy for users to access accurate and up-to-date tracking information in either platform without any discrepancies.

Customer Success Story

In exploring how TrackingMore has revolutionized logistics tracking for e-commerce businesses of all sizes and types, it’s particularly worth mentioning our partnership with Aliexpress, which is not only a globally renowned e-commerce platform, but has also emerged as one of the best dropshipping suppliers. By working closely with TrackingMore, Aliexpress is able to provide its large dropshipping customer base with a more efficient and secure logistics tracking experience, ensuring that goods shipped to customers from all over the world are tracked in real time, thus significantly increasing customer satisfaction and trust.

>>>Learn More About the Aliexpress Success Story

After globally renowned e-commerce platforms like Aliexpress demonstrated the great potential of optimizing logistics tracking processes with TrackingMore, we are also seeing the practical value of applying these solutions in more personalized dropshipping businesses. 

Take the example of another one of our customers – Printify, a dropshipping company specializing in custom printing services, in contrast to Aliexpress Dropshipping. While Aliexpress operates a vast network of suppliers, Printify focuses on a refined marketplace strategy and highly personalized customer service to develop its business model. The challenge for Printify was how to maintain the uniqueness of its brand while ensuring that customers could enjoy transparent and timely order tracking. By introducing TrackingMore, they not only achieved centralized management and real-time updates of information from multiple carriers, but were also able to enhance customer experience with customized tracking information and quick response to delivery exceptions. 

>>>Learn More About the Printify Success Story

Conclusion

As you have seen in this post, the importance of tracking in eCommerce Dropshipping cannot be understated. Automated dropshipping tracking enhances customer confidence by providing complete visibility into package status. This not only fosters trust but also enables dropshippers to quickly address any potential issues that may arise. With the right dropship tracker like TrackingMore, it becomes extremely easy to ensure customer satisfaction, build operational efficiency, and achieve sustained growth in the dynamic world of Dropshipping. So start tracking your dropship orders by creating a free TrackingMore account to have a free trial for 14 days!