If you run an eCommerce store, one of the most crucial factors to provide a great customer experience and minimum cart abandonment is adding delivery order date and time slot options for your customers.
According to a UPS Survey, 12-28% of customers abandon their shopping carts because of the absence of estimated delivery dates before checking out. Your customers want to know when they can expect their orders or select a suitable date and time of order delivery per their convenience.
In fact, even eCommerce marketplaces like Walmart and Amazon display anticipated delivery dates and the calendar slots on checkout and product pages based on the customer’s location.
Hence, displaying delivery days and slots are essential features to ensure customer retention and sales – as they’re determining factors in customers’ purchasing decisions.
One of the most seamless ways to add the date and time slots before the checkout is through WooCommerce order delivery date plugins. But first, let’s see the different ways these plugins can benefit your online store, and your customers’ shopping experience
Why should you add delivery dates and calendar slots to your WooCommerce store?
When shopping online – estimated order delivery time and date matter a lot and can play a significant role in customers’ purchase decisions. Here’s how it can help:
- Increases customer satisfaction and experience – allowing customers to control when they should receive their order.
- Improves average order value by letting you charge additional delivery fees based on the delivery date and time.
- Avoids overloading of your store by limiting the total orders in a day.
- Improves repeat order rates and keeps customers coming back when you live up to their expectations.
So, if customers don’t know when they can expect their order – there’s a high chance they’ll abandon their carts.
To avoid this situation and ensure maximum customer satisfaction, here are some plugins you can use for your online store.
WooCommerce Delivery Slots
The Iconic WooCommerce Delivery Slots is an excellent plugin that allows you to maximize order capacity and let customers choose when they can receive their orders.
It lets you assign pickup and delivery settings to each shipping method (like local shipment) – which most competitive plugins don’t offer.
Moreover, it allows you to add flexible scheduling fees for the pickup and delivery for the same day and next date. For instance, you can charge additional fees for the same or next day deliveries, disable same day deliveries based on the current order capacity, or charge additional fees for specific time slots and dates.
Besides, this plugin comes with plenty of other features like preventing orders on holidays, providing an ASAP Delivery option to customers, choosing a suitable calendar style that matches your store theme, and creating flexible shipping schedules.
Top feature: The customizable reservation calendar allows customers to reserve a delivery slot before they even begin shopping.
You can also set and customize the reservation expiration time (in minutes) to ensure freed time slots if the customer cancels or doesn’t complete the order.
Pricing: The Plugin License costs $129/year. You can also go for the All Access Bundle plan, which costs $499/year.
YITH WooCommerce Delivery Date
YITH WooCommerce Delivery Date is a premium and robust plugin that lets you add user-selected delivery dates – allowing your customers to choose a suitable time and date for product deliveries.
It’s primarily created to reclaim back those customers who hesitate or fail to place their orders due to the absence of an option to select order delivery dates – especially when they’re not at their homes or out at work.
It allows you to add your delivery carrier’s availability and determine the business days you require to deliver the product. You can modify these settings for each product and category on your WooCommerce store. Hence, it’ll show your customers the days they can select to receive their orders.
In addition, you can also create time slots and set a limit for the number of deliveries you can process in each time slot – to avoid order overloads. Besides these features – this plugin also allows you to add additional fees for specific days of the week and time slots, provide a dedicated calendar to track shipping, make time slots fees taxable, and keep customers up-to-date about their orders shipping via email.
Thus, overall – it’s a feature-packed plugin that covers everything you need to add WooCommerce Delivery dates and time slots.
Top feature: The dynamic delivery messages show customers when the carrier will pick up their order and when they will receive it if they place their order within the next X hours.
Pricing: $99.99/year
Delivery Slots for WooCommerce
Delivery Slots for WooCommerce is an excellent plugin to enhance your site’s revenue and customer experience. This plugin allows you to offer faster delivery to your customers and charge delivery fees in return to earn additional revenue.
Besides allowing customers to choose their order dates and times – you can display an estimated order delivery date on your checkout page for their convenience.
Even though it comes with fewer features than the plugin mentioned above – it’s an ideal, convenient, and easy-to-use option for your store.
Top feature: This plugin lets you add several features – including but not limited to Order Delivery Estimate, Order Delivery Date Picker, Product Delivery Estimate, Product Delivery Date and Time Picker, and Product Delivery Date and Time Slot Picker.
Pricing: $79.00 (billed annually)
WooCommerce Delivery
This simple plugin makes adding delivery dates and time slots for your customers effortless. While a few plugins mentioned in this article let you place widgets anywhere on the page and display delivery slots options on the product page – this plugin provides this option during the checkout process.
You can easily set time and only accept orders during business hours, allow local pickups, and charge extra for today and next-day delivery fees. In addition, you can also set the limit for the maximum orders per date and time, leverage the custom time and date format per your requirements, exclude holidays, and set store opening hours with two different time frames in a day.
Overall, it’s an affordable, convenient, and simple plugin that’s translation-ready and supports WPML compatibility.
Top feature: The radius shipping that lets you deliver orders to customers within a specific radius of km or miles.
Pricing: The Regular License costs $39 while the Extended License costs $199.
WooCommerce Estimated Delivery Date Per Product
WooCommerce Estimated Delivery Date Per product is a premium plugin that allows you to set an estimated delivery date message for a single product or per product variation.
You can either display the estimated product delivery date on the product page, cart, order page, or the checkout page – including the order email. It’s important to note that while other plugins allow your customers to choose specific delivery dates and time slots – this plugin doesn’t.
However, displaying delivery date and time on different pages, specifying store holidays for better delivery estimation, and customizing the delivery date format, text, font color, and font size helps enhance customer experience on your WooCommerce store.
Top feature: You can add product time for specific products and delivery days specific to different time zones.
Pricing: $17.
Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce
Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce is a powerful plugin that helps reduce cart abandonment rates by 50% and improve customer service. It lets your customers select relevant delivery dates and times on the cart and checkout page.
It allows you to make the delivery date field mandatory on the checkout page via settings and set the minimum time required for delivery (in hours).
Besides these features, you can also auto-populate the available delivery date and time selection, enable an “As soon as possible” delivery option for customers, limit the number of deliveries and orders for each day, and set holidays in the delivery calendar to disable deliveries on those days.
While the free version provides basic order delivery options – the Pro version lets you enable same-day and next-day delivery with cut-off time, view upcoming deliveries in the delivery calendar, and separate cut-offs and delivery charges for weekdays.
Top feature: Unlike other plugins – this plugin lets you disable delivery for featured and virtual products.
Pricing: Free, but the Pro version costs $99.00 (billed yearly).
WooODT Lite – WooCommerce Order Delivery or Pickup with Date Time Location
What’s unique about the WooODT Lite plugin is that besides allowing customers to choose delivery time and date – your customers can also choose a preferable self-pickup location if you offer multiple pickup points.
In addition, it also provides the flexibility to disable the pickup location and time slot option and only keep the date-picker option. Besides, you can also restrict the delivery and pick up on specific weekdays or holidays and mark the delivery and pickup field as non-mandatory for your customers.
Another handy feature is the WooCommerce App Support Using Oder note, as the WooCommerce app doesn’t support custom information and note. However, if you use this plugin, you don’t need to worry about order delivery and pickup details if customers order via the WooCommerce app.
Other unique features include displaying custom pickup and delivery messages in email and viewing order details like customer name, order number, and order time in a delivery calendar view.
Top feature: Offers a customizable widget which you can place on any webpage, sidebar, or post to collect product delivery or pickup date time – instead of the checkout page.
Pricing: Free, but the Pro version costs $85.
Conclusion
If you want to improve your WooCommerce store sales and take your business to the next level – give your customers a choice to select preferable delivery dates and times for their convenience.
12% of consumers in the USA and 25% of consumers in Asia abandon carts at checkout due to the absence of estimated order delivery dates. While Iconic’s WooCommerce Delivery Slots allows your customers to take full control over their delivery time and dates, Yith’s WooCommerce Delivery Date lets you add delivery estimates besides giving your customers a choice.
So, check out the seamless and feature-packed plugins mentioned above and choose the best-suited plugin for your store per your specific requirements and budget.