55. The Ecosystem of Delivery Times and the Customer Experience with Irina Poddubnaia, Founder of TrackMage

Irina Poddubnaia is the founder of TrackMage.com, a shipment tracking software for e-commerce businesses. She joins E-Commerce with Coffee?! to chat with host Nate Svoboda about delivery times and how they impact the customer experience and all other aspects of the post-purchase experience.

Listen to the full episode to hear how it all comes together—and what brands today should do.

What to listen for:

• Nate first asks Irina about TrackMage.com. Listeners learn that Track Mage provides real-time tracking information for e-commerce businesses to share with their customers without sending people to carrier portals or relying exclusively on carrier information.

• The origin of Track Mage is a personal one. Irina explains how, when she started a business to help retailers source products from China, one of the biggest headaches for her team was fielding the “where’s my order” requests from clients. With goods shipping to every time zone, it was a deluge of inbound requests. To answer their questions, Irina and her team had to rely on carrier updates. It was the team’s own pain point that Track Mage was developed to solve, first as an internal solution and then as a stand-alone product offered to e-commerce businesses.

• The interview then shifts to the impact of delivery information on customer lifetime value (CLV), and what other communications play into the post-purchase experience. The key, Irina says, is “bridging any communication gap.” She describes how the customer is entertained while browsing social media, then on your website, then placing an order. After that, entertainment stalls, and all customers receive is a confirmation email. Eventually, the customer will wonder, “did they get my order? Do I have to do anything else? What’s the status of my order?” The solution: use delivery updates as an opportunity to stay in touch and communicate more than just delivery status.

• Irina elaborates on this key point explaining that emails on order status are not seen as marketing emails, so they get huge open rates. Brands can use this to provide a superior post-purchase experience with delivery updates while also cross-selling and providing more value to the client through added content.

• “A poor post-purchase experience not only damages your brand,” Irina says, “it also eliminates the possibility of selling to that customer again.” Listen to the full interview for her own recent experience with a particularly bad post-purchase sequence.

• When asked what a brand can (and should) do to impact their delivery times for the better, Irina states that “most of the delivery rules have changed” in the last few years. Everyone knows why: the pandemic. Delivery became so popular in global markets that new logistics innovations were introduced by big brands like Amazon. Now, customers expect same-day and next-day delivery, but as Irina says, “not a lot of household brands can compete with that capacity.” The solution, she says, is in strategic inventory.

• Delivery time is also a deciding factor for some consumers to even purchase a product, “especially around the holidays,” Irina adds. She does note, though, that the exception is for “truly unique” products or those with killer brand loyalty. In those cases, consumers will wait a month or two, and they’ll even rally behind pre-order offers.

  ➡️ Timestamps:

  0:00-0:27 Intro

  0:28-1:16 Introducing Irina

  1:17-2:23 Irina's relationship with caffeine

  2:24-5:44 Irina's background and how TrackMage.com began

  5:45-14:11 Customer lifetime value (CLV)

  14:12-17:36 Delivery times: what can (and should) brands do?

  17:37-21:03 How do different business models impact delivery and logistics?

  21:04-26:34 How to reduce customer support costs

  26:35-29:10 How brands can improve reviews and get more of them

  29:11-30:19 Where to get in touch with Irina

  30:20-30:37 Outro

  💬 Get in touch with Irina at:

  - Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/irina-poddubnaia/