4 Best Order Tracking Apps

Aesop

Skin, hair and body care products of the finest quality; they investigate widely to source plant-based and laboratory-made ingredients, and use only those with a proven record of safety and efficacy.
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Used By
40
Top Brands
Tool Category:
Post-Purchase

Aftership

Keep your customers updated of the status of their orders
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4 Best Order Tracking Apps

I've narrowed down the list to 4 "Where's My Order" tools. Now it's your turn to pick the right one. See the differences here.

Once D2Cs start getting a steady stream of 100+ orders per month, they’ll need to consider an order tracking tool. Because with the increased volume of sales comes an unavoidable barrage of customer support tickets around “Where’s My Order” (“WISMO” if you want to sound cool). 

Those tickets can crush your customer support team. Without good systems in place, you can spend hours chasing packages and leaving your customers frustrated in the process. On top of that, your customers will blame you (the merchant) and not the delivery partner. So if you don’t take control of the post-purchase order tracking experience you risk leaving the success of your business in the hands of carriers (UPS / Fedex etc). 

There are a few order tracking tools out there, but I only highlight the best ones. And if you were wondering, I’ve personally met and demo’d each of these tools.

The 4 tools that I’ve selected below differ in their pricing and feature-sets. So just read up on the differences and pick what fits your business best. Without further ado:

The 4  best order tracking apps available today: 

  1. Aftership
  2. Wonderment
  3. Narvar 
  4. Route‍

Aftership

Brief summary: 

Aftership is really really good at pure-play order tracking. Their team is obsessed with maintaining incredibly deep relationships with hundreds of carriers around the world - So you can send your customers local order tracking updates in France, China, the US and in every other corner of the world. With this data - Aftership also gives you insights on which of your carriers are outperforming others on “on-time” deliveries and other metrics. This helps you negotiate with carriers and cut out the weak ones that are causing your business headaches. 

For Where’s my order updates, you can send them automatically via email and text, either by using their product (which is very user-friendly and already reasonably customizable) OR by pushing the order meta-data information into Klaviyo (they have a direct integration) to send custom email marketing emails - with all your branding and personal touch. This is extremely powerful. 

With Aftership you can also create a custom order tracking page, in a no-code way, for your customers to quickly find out what’s happened to their order. See the example from Gymshark. 

Gymshark order tracking page via Aftership


Finally - Aftership also handles returns for an extra cost. The return product is highly sophisticated. You can customise which products can be returned, how they can be returned (via a shipping label or in-store) and many other components. 

Used by # of brands: 24

Notable D2C's using Aftership : Aesop, Thinx, Gymshark

Key differentiators: 

  • Best in class for order tracking
  • No code order tracking pages
  • They offer returns
  • Integrates with Klaviyo for order notifications via email
  • Reasonable pricing
  • If you do 500 orders per month, you’ll only pay $29/mo (without the returns)

Potential deterrents: 

  • None. Extremely well rounded solution. 

Pricing: 

Aftership - detailed pricing


Wonderment: 

Brief summary:‍

A new kid on the block. Already shaking things up with amazing brands on their roster. They offer a classic order tracking product, and they have plans on offering order tracking pages very soon. 

Their core product is a Shopify app that enables you to filter all of your order shipments by their order status: ex: “In transit”, “Delivered”, “Not yet shipped” etc. From here, you can also identify which carriers are outperforming others and get great analytics to strengthen your operations. 

What’s powerful is that you can feed this data directly into your favorite tools: Klaviyo, Postscript, Gorgias and even Slack if you connected to Zapier via their Webhooks. With those integrations you can create flows to give customers updates on their orders statuses, even before they ask your customer support team. Because some of the leadership at Wonderment is ex-Klaviyo, the integration is immaculate. For example, Wonderment gives you template flows to do things like preemptively send a personalised email when an order is scheduled to arrive 3 days laters than anticipated. 

The D2Cs that care a lot about their brand look & feel opt-in for Wonderment because you are in complete control of customisation of messaging via Klaviyo, Postscript and more. 

As mentioned, what’s coming very soon are order tracking page. Each customer-facing tracking page will live under your own domain and automatically pull in your store's styling and design so it's on-brand. You'll be able to customise the page further by adding CTAs, FAQs, Upsells, and more - all within Shopify. That’s going to be a game-changer. Another reason to try out Wonderment if your brand means everything to you. 

Used by # of brands: 10 

Key D2C's using Wonderment: Hydrant, Doe Lashes, Fly By Jing

Key differentiator: 

  • Deep integrations to Klaviyo, Postscript and Gorgias which enables design flexibility
  • Pricing: You’ll realistically be paying $20 or $40/month depending on your Shopify plan. Which is very affordable.
  • Excellent shipping / carrier data to analyse your efficiency

Potential deterrents: 

  • No order tracking pages (yet - this is coming very soon)
  • No returns

Pricing: 


Wonderment detailed pricing


Narvar: 

Brief summary: 

Narvar is arguably the most comprehensive tool on this list. With this complete feature-set, their pricing is custom to your business needs - But expect to be entering in more of a yearly “enterprise” contract with a custom support rep to help you out throughout the year. They engage with clients who will be paying at least $3,000 per year, which breaks down to $250 a month. So that’s on the higher end vs. other options, which makes sense considering their thorough offering. 

Now the important bit about the feature-set: 

For one they have deep relationships with all carriers. They pay hefty fees to keep the data flowing in almost real time, so you can track your customers’ packages seamlessly. You can even feed this data into your product pages to give customers a heads up of when their orders are expected to arrive. Just check out what that looks like for Ralph Lauren below.  

Narvar uses this data to give you a highly sophisticated insight into your shipment & logistics efficiency. When you’re moving product like Ralph Lauren is - their analytics tool becomes vital. 

Ralph Lauren product page using Narvar


For order notifications, Narvar sends emails and texts to your customers about their order updates. These are done via their team however, which might be a deterrent if you like to keep things in your control. You can just send them your preferred designs and copy, however for any changes - you’d have to go through them to modify them.  

Narvar can also create a custom page for your customers to enquire about order tracking. Those pages are also created by their design team and having these pages on your website is a huge time-saver for your customers and your customer support teams.

Finally, their returns product might be the most sophisticated in the world. Your customers can choose to return in-person or via a partner store (they do this via a Happy Returns partnership) - and the experience to retrieve labels + the data on return behaviour is top notch. 

Used by # of brands: 8

Key D2C's using Narvar: Vuori, Away, Frankies Bikinis

Key differentiator: 

  • Custom order tracking page 
  • Great returns product

Potential deterrents: 

Pricing: 

  • Custom. But starts at $3,000 per year. 

route: 

Brief summary: 

route is the most popular order tracking app on 1-800-D2C with 85 brands using it. Route is unique in that order tracking comes in a package deal with their core product: Insurance coverage. 

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route covers the cost of all lost, stolen or broken items that have been insured, which protects your bottom line. At checkout, a customer will be prompted to cover their order shipment with Route and that’s how they make money. From there, in order for their insurance product to work - they naturally need to track the order shipment, and that’s how their popular order tracking app came to be. One more thing on the insurance product: It works worldwide. Because they have relationships with most of the carriers worldwide, your store can protect packages from anywhere. 

route has a popular app for smartphones which gives you order updates on all your packages purchased on stores connected to route. You can even connect your Amazon account to Route which allows you to display the details of your Amazon orders - pretty neat, right?

But you don’t need the app to get order notifications. On your order confirmation page a customer will have a link to check back in on their order status. In those messages, a customer is prompted to either download the app to track their order or to go on a sleek, branded tracking page - designed by the route team using your assets. 

For the emails and text messages that get sent to update you on your order: Those are controlled by Route, which - similar to Narvar - may be a slight deterrent if you want to create custom email or text flows and control the design & messaging. 

Used by # of brands: 85 

Key D2C's using route: Topicals, Mud Wtr, The Sill

Key differentiator: 

  • Product insurance coverage
  • Completely free for merchants - They make money on the insurance 
  • Direct integration to Shopify

Potential deterrents: 

  • No order tracking page to install on your website
  • No returns 
  • No ability to integrate with Klaviyo, Gorgias, Postscript to control flows and designs.  

Pricing: 

Free. Yup, really (see above - "They make money on the insurance"

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So there you have it. Once again, each of these 4 tools is excellent. So I recommend all of them. It’s just that the tools do differ in small ways, whether that’s on features or pricing. So now it’s your turn, analyse your needs and pick your poison! 

‍

-Tim