What is Failed Delivery?
Failed delivery is when an attempt to send a product to its customer was not fulfilled. Lack of customer presence, inability to establish contact during the last-mile delivery, and incorrect address are some common reasons for a failed delivery.
Significance of Failed Delivery in an E-commerce Shipping and Delivery
Failed delivery has a ripple effect and allows businesses to determine what went wrong. It helps to improve the delivery process. It also plays utmost significance in the following factors:
- Delivery optimization: There are several locations and spots where a company might need help delivering due to local issues. As one cannot monitor these issues through a system, first-hand experience allows a brand to tag specific spots as unserviceable to overcome future problems.
- Branding: Lack of a customer’s presence or the inability to establish contact are two significant reasons for a failed delivery. Brands that try to overcome such issues with the customer on their own accord inevitably paint a good brand image.
How Failed Delivery Works
Following are the steps involved in managing a failed delivery.
- A delivery attempt is failed due to reasons like incorrect address, inability to contact the customer, the customer not being present to receive the delivery, and so on.
- After a failed delivery attempt, a brand can reach out to the customer and decipher the issues to try delivering the product again.
- The number of delivery attempts varies, but two re-attempts are taken on average in case of a failed delivery.
- When the following re-attempts fail, a brand initiates reverse shipping.
Use Case With Failed Delivery
For instance, a clothing accessory was ordered and dispatched for last-mile delivery. However, due to some reason, the courier failed to establish contact with the customer, resulting in a failed attempt. Any instance where a product was not delivered during the last-mile delivery can serve as an example of a failed delivery, like the one mentioned above.