If you’re using one of the many shipping carriers that Shopify doesn’t support, your customers see little to no tracking information on the standard Shopify order tracking page. Rather, the tracking page only shows a tracking number that redirects to the carrier’s site.
To provide your customers with order tracking information, you’ll need an app from Shopify’s App Store. Naturally, we recommend our order tracking app, Tracktor.
Tracktor provides order tracking right on your Shopify store. It has been proven to eliminate 100% of WISMO support tickets in customers under age 50.
Once you have an order tracking app installed, there are a few things you can do to give your customers the best order tracking experience. (Going forward, we’ll be assuming you’re using Tracktor. However, some of these tips can be applied to other services.)
1. Provide tracking information for carriers that Shopify doesn’t support.
Currently, Shopify supports around 50 carriers to provide tracking information on the native Shopify page. That leaves 800+ carriers unsupported.
This is where Tracktor comes in. Tracktor uses a feature called carrier mapping to provide tracking information for 900+ carriers.
Carrier mapping allows you to provide tracking information for carriers that otherwise wouldn’t show on Shopify’s native pages. It also allows you to display that information directly on your Tracktor page, saving customers from scouring your carrier’s website for information. Carrier mapping saves customers from straying away to other, often confusing, carrier websites for their order information.
Instructions to set up carrier mapping
First, go to the Carrier Mapping section of your Tracktor Settings tab.
Next, in the Actual Carrier field, enter and select the name of the carrier you’re using to fulfill orders on your store.
Then, enter and select the name of the Shopify carrier that you want to override in the Shopify Carrier Name field.
Lastly, on your Orders page, you’ll just need to make sure the orders you’re fulfilling with your actual carrier are represented by the same Shopify Carrier Name that you entered in your carrier mapping pairing. This allows the Actual Carrier you’re using to provide it’s information on the order for the Shopify Carrier Name you’re using to fulfill orders on the Orders page.
You can get more familiar with carrier mapping by checking out our in-depth guide here.
2. Provide shipping information with email notifications.
Communicating tracking information and order status through email is important to keep your customers informed about their order whereabouts.
To provide tracking information to customers, you’ll first need to add the tracking information into Shopify’s backend. Locate any unfulfilled orders. To do this, go to the Orders tab in your Shopify admin, and then sort the orders by their unfulfillment status.
Once you find the orders you want to update, simply add the tracking number associated with the order to the Tracking Information section on the page after you click ‘Mark as fulfilled.’
You can also add a tracking number to an order that’s already fulfilled, which gives you the option to send a new shipping update. To do so, check the ‘Send notification email to customer’ checkbox selection.
With Tracktor, you can navigate to the app dashboard to enable certain email notifications that provide tracking links for fulfillment events.
Alternatively, you can also manually update your Shopify email templates to include Tracktor tracking links by following this guide.
3. Provide order tracking on a user-friendly page.
The order shipping process is a fundamental moment in establishing trust with your customers. It’s important for customers to be able keep tabs of their package whereabouts with ease.
As mentioned earlier, Shopify provides a standard tracking page for all of your orders on the Order Status page. On this page, customers can see basic order status updates to learn about the progress of their orders. The page also features an interactive map if Shopify supports the carrier.
(Shopify)
Again, if you’re fulfilling orders with an unsupported carrier, customers only see a link to your carrier’s website.
Tracktor, on the other hand, allows you to display detailed information on a custom page. This page is hosted on your website and supports 900+ carriers. The page offers beautiful layout showcasing the order history in timeline format, accurate shipping details, a map of the order’s location, and additional information relevant to the order.
Beyond that, the page can be customized through the Tracking Page Editor tab of the app dashboard. Adjust colors, layout, map styles, CSS, tracking information details, and custom statuses.
Get Started
You work extremely hard to earn customers’ trust in the buying process, so reward that trust with a great post-purchase experience. If you haven’t already, you can installing Tracktor on your store today. No tracking for orders is no fun, but a bad tracking experience isn’t any fun either. Request our free Tracktor Expert Install Service to get setup with a great post-purchase experience today.
