Importance of Delivering your orders on time

It was 6th October 2013 afternoon, 2:50 PM to be precise and it was just another Sunday, except that it was also my birthday.

I was trying to kill time while my wife was making our baby sleep, while she herself was barely able to stay awake. There rang the door bell. While everyone else at home was asleep, I was wondering who could it be at that time. If you know anything about India, you would know Indians love their sunday afternoon naps.

I went to the door & surprise!! Someone had sent me a cake. After reading the delivery receipt, I realised that it was my wife who had planned for a surprise for me. She had asked the cake to be delivered at exact 3:00 PM – so she could keep it a surprise. However, the person delivered 10 minutes earlier, just when my wife was almost asleep. That difference of delivering 10 minutes earlier spoiled the surprise for her.

So why am I telling you what happened on my birthday a year back?

You can blame me for the delay of a year. But the point I am trying to make is how important it is, in some businesses, to deliver on the exact time.

These could be businesses like sending flowers, cakes, or any gift articles to your loved ones. But not all businesses might require the delivery timing precision.

With WooCommerce, there are several plugins that help you for ensuring that your order is delivered on-time.

WooCommerce Delivery Date

There is one available on WordPress.org (not ours), it’s called WooCommerce Delivery Date. It’s a nice plugin. It allows you to add a datepicker, select delivery week days & also select a couple of categories where you want the delivery datepicker to show.

They do have a PRO version as well, Woocommerce Delivery Date Pro. It is priced fairly low at € 19,95 / year (about US$ 25), with addition of a couple of features like showing the delivery date in the email. There are some more in the Pro version, but not so significant like showing 2 months on the calendar, select unlimited categories as opposed to only 2 categories in Lite version & others.

Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce – Pro

Another plugin is the Order Delivery Date Pro for Woocommerce. This one is the first WordPress plugin from Tyche Softwares. It has a Lite version too. The lite version adds a datepicker on the WooCommerce checkout page & allows users to select any date in the future. It’s our fault that we haven’t updated that since quite some time now, but that update should be out anytime now in the next couple of weeks.

The Pro version has a lot more features & capabilities that allow the admin to control the dates. It has an admin dashboard that allows to select delivery weekdays, add time slots, add holidays, same-day, next-day deliveries along with cut-off times. The most important ability it has is to limit each date and/or time slot to a specified number of deliveries. This is very useful for small businesses that have limited resources for deliveries.

Apart from this, the plugin allows you to specify additional charges for same-day, next-day deliveries as well as for weekdays & specific dates. If you want to charge customers for weekend delivery or deliveries on public holidays, you can do so. It’s priced at $99 with yearly renewal at 50% of the price. It’s expensive compared to the others, but offers a lot more flexibility as well.

Admin can also enable the time capture so that users can specify exact time of delivery instead of a time slot. For example, many users would like flowers or cakes delivered to their loved ones right at the stroke of midnight! Or many others, like my wife would want it to be delivered at a specific time so they know when do they have to open the door & hide the thingy so it stays a surprise.

Woocommerce Delivery Time Picker for Shipping

There is another plugin available on CodeCanyon, Woocommerce Delivery Time Picker for Shipping. It allows to add a datepicker & timepicker on the WooCommerce checkout page.

It has the ability to enable the datepicker for selected shipping methods. I haven’t got the chance to try this one yet, but that could be a handy feature for someone who wants to enable the datepicker only for specific shipping methods. That is also a feature that we at Tyche Softwares are considering to add in our plugin. This one is priced at $15. CodeCanyon is the one that determines the prices of plugins that are sold through their site.

Some people simply prefer to write the code to add a datepicker field on the WooCommerce checkout page instead of buying any of the above plugins. That’s fine as far as you don’t require any control over your delivery dates & just show all future dates.

For any type of ecommerce business selling physical goods with WooCommerce, my recommendation would be to go for one of the above delivery date/time plugins. So you can deliver to your customers at their preferred date and time, gaining an extra point in customer service.

Surprise your customers & help keep alive their surprise too!