The high volumes can make the Peak period a challenging time to ensure on time fulfillment. And with a hard deadline of Christmas, it's really not the time of year to be delivering late.
With carefully managing your product availability and setting realistic delivery timescales hopefully you can avoid issues but if unexpected delays DO occur, here's the 3 steps you must take to minimise unhappy customers, costly refunds (and avoid refund charges).
Important reminder: if orders are not managed correctly in this way refund charges may be levied on your account.
1. Update your customers as soon as possible
Make sure you get in touch with all impacted customers to inform them of order delays as soon as you realise the delivery timescales on their order are not possible.
Give them the choice of either waiting a little longer to receive their order (give them a realistic revised timescale) or have it cancelled. Don't automatically assume they want it cancelled.
2. Update the order
If you don't know by when you can ship the order yet change the order status to BACKORDERED.
Alternatively, update the delivery estimate of the order to the revised timescale:
3. Revise your product availability OR delivery timescales
If you are not able to fulfill your current orders on time then you need to make adustments to prevent incoming orders becoming a backlog too.
You have 3 options:
- Change products to Out of stock
If you need to make an item temporarily out of stock to catch up with orders, set the quantity to 0, in the Available to buy field. Find out more about this here.
- OR, update your shipping times:
If you wish to keep getting orders but factor in longer dispatch leads times to set the right customer expectations then update your # Days to Dispatch in your shipping settings. (Just remember to update them again when you are back on top).
You can adjust your # days to dispatch within you shipping options here.
- OR, use Holiday mode to temporarily adjust your delivery times until you catch-up
To extend fulfilment time, you could instead use the holiday settings to automatically adjust all estimated delivery dates for new incoming orders to a later date when you feel you will be on top of your current orders. Find out more here.
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