Ensure 100% of Shipments Have Estimated Delivery Dates in This BFCM

With customer expectations rising at a brisk pace in the eCommerce space, many customers prefer getting an accurate estimated delivery date (EDD) from the online stores.

If you are confused about how to reduce WISMO tickets in your business, EDD can significantly reduce WISMO queries and improve customer experience.

Why is an estimated delivery date valuable to eCommerce businesses?

Shoppers are eager to have an estimate of the delivery date once they place an order. And most importantly, EDD reduces WISMO (Where is my order) requests significantly, freeing your customer service team from unnecessary queries, and increasing the shopping experience satisfaction rate.

The bad news is, NOT all carriers are able to provide EDD.

The good news is that AfterShip, with daily processing of around 3 million shipments, has trained an up-to-date Artificial Intelligence (AI) model to predict EDD for shipments. This AI prediction is 91% accurate on average.

On top of the AI EDD, we also provide a Custom EDD feature wherein you can manually set the transit times based on different shipping methods, carriers, and destinations.

With the flexible combination of AI EDD and Custom EDD, you can achieve a 100% EDD coverage rate and give all your shipments a reliable EDD.

Note: This is a premium feature and is only applicable in our advanced plans.

Where can you find the EDD?

Once you have enabled the feature in your AfterShip Admin, you can find the EDD in the tracking page, email, SMS, shipment detail, API response, and Webhooks.

There will always be one type of EDD provided by:

• Carrier
• AI predictive, or
• Based on the setting in the Custom EDD feature

The display priority for EDD will be Carrier EDD > AI EDD > Custom EDD. Once the higher priority EDD is available, it will override the existing EDD.

EDD on the tracking page

EDD in email

EDD in API & Webhooks

How many carriers are supported by AI EDD?

Currently, the AI predicts EDDs for the shipments carried out by the 43 major worldwide carriers when they’re being transported to 41 countries and regions.

AI will support more and more carriers in the future. Contact Us if your target carriers are missing!

What if AI EDD does not support your carriers?

The Custom EDD feature allows you to set your estimated transit times based on different shipping methods, carriers, and destinations.

Best practices for EDD

Here are some of the best practices we recommend for EDD:

• Enable both AI EDD and Custom EDD features so that Custom EDD can cover carriers or countries/regions that AI doesn’t support. Hence, you get a higher (or even up to 100%) EDD coverage rate.
• Utilize AfterShip notifications (Email & SMS) to include the EDD message to make sure your shoppers can always anticipate when the shipment shall arrive
• View our On-time report regularly to analyze how many shipments have been delivered on the same date as predicted by the EDD. The report dives down to EDD provided by carriers, AI, or your Custom EDD.

If you need more information on using the EDD feature effectively, feel free to contact our customer support team.