Delivery, AI and Sustainability at the Scurri Meetup

The Scurri Meetup held in London last week was packed and standing room only and gathered a range of online retailers from across the spectrum as well as some industry veterans who who it was great to catch up with.

Rory, CEO of Scurri, was the star speaker sharing some of the results from the recent Tamebay survey. He had three key messages to share:

Embed customer excellence into your delivery strategy

77% do negative online reviews are about post-purchase services such as tems not arriving on time, failed deliveries or lack of tracking updates. The recent Scurri/Tamebay survey revealed that ‘Where is my order?’ makes up 30% of retail customer service calls. However 77%
of retailer respondents did not routinely receive exception notices for problem deliveries and only 14% provide integrated tracking on their own website.

AI, invest in innovation and automation e.g. chatbots for sustained growth

Providing a route for consumers to track their own delivery is a tick-in-the-box first step but investing in automation such as chatbots to proactively keep customer informed as to when their product will arrive will soon be a prerequisite.

Sustainability, an emerging trend

Consumers are ever more concerned about the environment and whilst ecommerce is undoubtedly not environmentally friendly, consumers are ever more concerned about packaging being recyclable (or better still reuseable) and prefer carriers who can offer carbon neutral deliveries. If you are not already measuring the carbon impact of your operations and starting to ask carriers what their carbon footprint is then it’s time to start doing so. For many products there is little to differentiate one retailer from another but promoting your green credentials will make an ever more relevant reason for people to choose to buy from you.

Joining Rory was Brendan O’Brien, COO of Vision Direct who talked about the real world challenges from a retailer perspective and the ever informative Chloë Thomas from eCommerce MasterPlan who emphasised the need to focus on traffic, take action and keep optimising. That struck a real chord, so often we hear from a marketplace seller who’s sales are declining and yet they’ve never tweaked and updating their listings which they put live months or sometimes years ago.

Doubtless there will be another Scurri Meetup in 2020 so keep a look out for them and make sure you get along to the next one. We’ll update you as soon as we know dates.