Why your Shopify store needs real ETAs to be successful
Vaishali Ravi
·February 19, 2025
Online shoppers are, by and large, obsessed with tracking their orders.
How do we know? Well, 96% of shoppers track their orders at least once after making a purchase—and 43% track status daily. In fact, order tracking is so essential to the customer experience that 29% of shoppers said they wouldn’t place an order at all if they weren’t able to track its arrival.
That means, if you’re simply providing a rough delivery estimate, you need to do better. In this article, we’ll talk through why you need to provide accurate ETAs to your shoppers—and how to give them accurate data they can rely on.
The importance of order tracking
Shoppers have high expectations of the post-purchase experience, beginning as soon as they hit the “buy” button on their purchase.
While shoppers prefer fast shipping, it’s not always a necessity: 37% of shoppers said they didn’t have a problem waiting five business days for an order, while 15% were even comfortable with 10 business days.
More important than shipping speed, however, is shipping accuracy: Customers want to know that their order has been confirmed immediately, and when they can expect to receive it. Over 59% of online shoppers said that they were more likely to revisit a brand that offered real-time online order tracking.
In many cases, a customer may have ordered an item in anticipation of an upcoming event, or purchased a gift for a birthday or holiday—so failing to deliver the item on time will seriously impact their experience as a shopper.
By providing them with an initial delivery estimate at the time of order confirmation, and following up with real-time updates at each stage of the logistics journey, you’ll be able to give your customer access to enhanced visibility that will boost their confidence in your brand.
How to increase the accuracy of your ETAs
It’s no longer good enough to provide a general delivery estimate based on your carrier’s average time frame for shipping. And simply passing your customer off to the shipping carrier for updates will result in a disjointed experience that may leave room for error and miscommunication.
Instead, you can use Loop to provide a branded, real-time order tracking page directly on your website, where shoppers can see the status of all their orders in progress. With our acquisition of Wonderment, a proactive customer experience and advanced order tracking platform, you can effortlessly build custom, no-code branded order tracking pages that give you customers real-time updates around their delivery status.
Wonderment integrates with all carrier data and provides your team with alerts if an order is delayed, stalled, damaged, or returned to sender, so that you can trigger notifications for your customers via email or SMS and set follow-up actions. For instance, if a shipment shows up as “stalled” for more than three hours, you can send an automated alert to your shopper to let them know that you’re shipping a new item to ensure that it arrives on time.
Your customers won’t have to wonder whether their order is safely on route—with our holistic order tracking capabilities, they’ll have complete visibility into their order at any given time. And, if anything goes off-track, you’ll have all the data at hand to immediately offer the right resolution to your customer, whether that means shipping a replacement item, offering a refund or bonus credit, or offering free return shipping on a return.
Rather than offering a vague delivery estimate, you can offer Loop’s AI-powered Delivery Promise that uses real-time order tracking to accurately predict your customers’ delivery time windows. With Delivery Promise, you’ll be able to ensure that carrier issues don’t cause your customers pain—you’ll be able to instantly address and resolve delivery problems to keep your shipments on schedule and maintain an open line of communication with your customers.
Benefits of a real-time ETA
Your customers will love getting access to an enhanced order tracking experience—and the benefits for your brand are just as positive.
- Reduced support ticket volume
- Because shoppers can easily track their order status, they won’t need to check in with your customer support team for help. Our merchants see an average 40% decline in “where’s my order” tickets—helping your CX team conserve time for high-priority needs.
- Improved customer loyalty
- Shoppers have such a positive experience with our order tracking solution that they’re even more likely to come back to your brand: We’ve seen a +20% lift in same-month conversions from shoppers who use our Delivery Promise.
- High ROI
- The time-savings through automation and increase in customer retention translate into a high return on your Wonderment investment: Merchants using the solution see an average ROI of 23x.
By using Loop’s shipping and logistics tools to streamline your shoppers’ post-purchase journey, you’ll be able to offer them a delightful experience with your brand every step of the way.
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