Enabling e-commerce companies with all possible tools required in seamless delivery, Shipway is
simultaneously helping the customers by sending timely updates and getting feedback. Gaurav Gupta, Co-founder, Shipway has more to share.
Priyanshi Bana
Kindly elaborate on the services offered by Shipway.
Shipway is a shipping automation platform which helps in delivering excellent customer experience. We are helping the e-commerce sellers with all the tools like order management, printing labels, tracking & notifications, fraud prevention, returns & refunds and reducing the RTOs. We are helping brands to ship faster, more accurately and parallelly enabling them to be as close to the customers as possible, to proactively help the customers in case of any delivery issues, sending timely updates and getting feedback.
What are the challenges faced with returns/refunds?
Returns is a big problem for any e-commerce business, and specially for apparels and footwear categories, where almost 20% of the entire sales are getting returned. But the bigger problem is how to manage your returns, exchanges & refunds and how to add it to your advantage as compared to huge cost. It’s one of the areas where all the departments need to be in sync, be it the warehousing team, logistics, accounting or customer support. In today’s time no customer would like to reach out to customer support in order to resolve their queries and most of the times there is no self-service returns dashboard, resulting in a lot of to & fro communications over email or WhatsApp etc. Apart from that there are no timely reverse pickups of the returns as the majority of the D2C brands are manually processing the returns & exchanges and sometimes the turnaround time is almost 10-15 days or even higher. All of these not only result in bad customer experience, but it significantly hits your bottom lines as there is a lot of customer churn.
What are the expansion plans for 2021?
Currently, Shipway is working on developing an enterprise tech stack that manages the entire e-commerce operations under a single umbrella. Along with that we are focusing more on DIY e-commerce and AI, which will eventually decrease the dependency of a customer from the brand and hence enhance the customer experience.
How has digitisation played a crucial role during these difficult times?
There is no denying that the pandemic has only accelerated the adoption of technology. And e-retail is one such space which has benefitted the most out of it. Shopping online has now become a necessity rather than a convenience. As we looked more into the data, the trend that we have seen is traffic from tier-2 and tier-3 cities has increased to almost three times in a year’s time. There is a huge rush of players entering into the space, the D2C brands as well as the e-commerce enablers, thus together contributing to the growth of the ecosystem. When the ecosystem grows, everyone benefits out of it.
