Order to Deliver is the Most Important Metric to Customers

Here at Shipium, we spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about Order to Deliver times. That's for a good reason. We know – both as students of ecommerce and as customers – that what matters most is how long it takes to get someone what they order! Customers don't care if your FCs ship in hours if their delivery takes weeks. Customers buy things so they can have them – not so they can track their progress with your outbound shipment carrier.

So, how best to really understand and dig into that most critical online retail customer experience? Our answer to that question is to use Shipium's Order to Deliver Reports to understand the experience that your Customers are seeing both in absolute terms and relative to your SLA. We want to help you understand how that experience is distributed across all Customers – not just the worst, the best or the average.

To that end, we provide two reports for top-line understanding of Order-to-Deliver metrics: Order to Deliver Performance and Order to Deliver Percentiles. Each report provides insights into how your Customers experience their deliveries but with different focuses. Let's look at each in turn.

Order to Deliver Performance Report

Overview

The Order to Deliver Performance Report provides a detailed look into the performance that your Customers are seeing relative to an SLA that you configure, from the time that they place their order until the time that it is delivered to their home or business. There are three major components on this page, each of which gives you a slightly different look into your order-to-deliver performance.

Breakdown

OTD Performance Breakdown

This wheel chart panel will give you a quick visual overview of how your organization's order-to-deliver times are distributed relative to your SLA. Everything at or below the SLA will appear in the bucket "Within SLA" and beyond that you will see buckets by days of missed SLA. This chart is intended to help you understand how your organization is performing against the expectations that you have set.

Order to Deliver Performance Summary

This tabular report panel provides a breakdown of how your organization is performing against SLA. This is meant to give you a more specific breakdown of the same data that you see in the OTD Performance Breakdown wheel chart and includes both the specific percentages for each bucket as well as order counts.

Order to Delivery Performance Over Time

This line graph panel gives you one more take on the same order to deliver performance information that you see in the other charts, by providing the same data graphed over time. This can help you better understand how your organization has performed over time. Are there worse times and better times on a monthly or weekly basis? Have you started to trend up in terms of hitting SLA? Down? This chart will help you understand what the near-term and long-term trends are.

Order to Deliver Percentiles Report

Overview

The Order to Deliver Percentiles Report takes you from understand how you are performing v. SLA into the nitty-gritty details of exactly what percentage of your customers are seeing what kind of performance over the time period in question. The data and the presentation is not complicated, but this is one of the best tools for really understand how you are performing for your Customers from the best-case performance to the worst-case performance.

Understanding Percentiles

If you are not familiar with percentiles, let's do a quick refresher. A percentile represents the value at which some percentage a given data set falls. For instance, the 20th percentile represents the value that the best 20% of a population sees. In other words, 20 percent of the population sees a value at or below this value. We use percentiles because they help you understand the performance across your entire customer population in a way that single-point statistics like the average just can't do. They let you say things like "The best 20% of Customer Deliveries happen in under {N} days" (the 20th percentile) or "10% of our Customers are seeing deliveries happen in over {N+} days" (the 90th percentile).

The Reports

Each of the report panels will show you the performance that Customers are seeing for Order to Delivery over the time period and other filters that you have set in the Reporting Configuration at the top of the page.

Order to Deliver Percentiles Columnar Chart

This columnar panel gives you a quick graphical representation of the order to deliver times at each 10th percentile mark. This gives you a quick way to see both what your customers are experiencing for order to deliver and understand how the best performance and worst performance looks for your customers as well. We find that it is frequently the case that much can be learned about what should be changed in looking at what is different between the best 20% and worst 20% performance. Is it just based on distance? Is it dependent on day of week that customers are ordering? These questions can help point you in the direction of changes that will help your customers and your business.

Order to Deliver Percentiles Table

This tabular report gives you the same information, but in tabular form. Its uses are the same, but this makes it easier to look at the numbers once you have looked at and understood the overall pattern. It is also easier to pull into excel if you need to do your own custom reporting.