How To Plan Local Delivery Routes With eCommerce Online Orders

Efficient local delivery is critical to the success of eCommerce businesses competing with major carriers like Amazon and UPS. Poorly planned routes lead to higher costs, delayed deliveries, and customer churn. With the right route planner for eCommerce, you can automate order syncing, optimize routes in minutes, and offer real-time tracking. From Shopify to WooCommerce, Magento to BigCommerce, Route4Me helps you simplify the entire eCommerce delivery process, from order import to routing and scheduling to final drop-off.

Integrated route planning helps eCommerce businesses turn online orders into fast, trackable, and cost-effective local deliveries.

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Why Fast Local Delivery Matters For eCommerce Customers

Customer expectations for fast, reliable delivery keep rising, driven by industry leaders like Amazon, UPS, and USPS. To compete, eCommerce businesses need highly efficient local delivery routes. Poor route planning can increase shipping costs, cause late deliveries, and damage customer satisfaction.

Slow delivery often leads to canceled orders. According to Tinuiti.com, over 40% of potential online sales are lost due to high shipping costs, and nearly 25% of customers will cancel an order if delivery isn’t fast enough. Optimizing local delivery routes helps prevent these losses and keeps customers happy.

 

Shopify Local Delivery Options

Some Shopify store owners can use the Shopify Local Delivery app to manage order fulfillment, provided they meet certain criteria:

  • Up to 20 delivery locations
  • Customers pay with Shop Pay
  • Delivery addresses are within the same state or province as the store
  • Inventory at each location can fulfill entire orders

When eligible, Shopify’s Local Delivery app makes it easy to manage delivery locations, order lists, and optimize delivery routes within the platform.

If your business exceeds these limits or requires more advanced route planning, Route4Me, the best route planner software for eCommerce stores, can handle complex local delivery needs, streamline operations, and optimize routes for multiple drivers, vehicles, and delivery schedules.

 

How to Plan Routes for Local Delivery With a Route Planner

Route4Me‘s business route optimization software makes route planning and dispatching local delivery routes fast, efficient, and accurate. Follow these 9 steps to streamline your eCommerce deliveries:

 

1. Integrate Your eCommerce Platform With Your Route Planner

Connect your store to Route4Me to sync customer orders automatically. Supported platforms include Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and Big Commerce, ensuring all delivery addresses are ready for routing.

eCommerce platform integration for syncing online sales and online order with route planner for local delivery

 

2. Add Delivery Drivers And Fleet Vehicles To Your Route Planner

Create a detailed team structure for your eCommerce business. Route4Me allows helps you create roles and customizable visibility settings for dispatchers, route planners, regional managers, delivery drivers, administrators, and analysts. You can also add vehicles with their capacities, loading limits, and schedules to optimize route planning.

Build a custom team hierarchy in Route4Me by assigning default user types based on roles and rearranging them as needed.

 

3. Map Online Orders And Optimize Routes

Visualize orders on the map using Route4Me’s business routing api and group them into territories. Plan routes by considering team availability, customer time windows, vehicle carrying and loading capacity, workload, and number of depots. With these optimization constraints, you can efficiently sequence deliveries, balance resources, and maximize overall route performance.

Easily plan routes with orders by drawing a shape around the preferred orders on the Orders Map and seamlessly planning a route.

 

4. Dispatch Local Delivery Routes To Delivery Drivers

Send optimized local delivery routes directly to your drivers’ iOS or Android route planner apps. Drivers get accurate voice-guided turn-by-turn driving directions and can mark stops as visited, departed, or delayed.

Dispatch routes to drivers.

 

5. Customize Your Track & Trace Customer Portal

Brand your customer portal with your company logo to maintain a professional appearance. Customers can track deliveries in real time through your portal.

Add a custom logo to your online order status updates.

 

6. Send Delivery Alerts And Notifications To Customers

Keep customers informed with SMS or email notifications. Automated delivery alerts and customer notifications reduce inquiries and improve customer satisfaction by providing real-time updates on order status.

Use placeholders to send SMS notifications with order number and link to the tracking page.

 

7. Collect Electronic Proof of Delivery (ePOD)

Collect paperless POD in multiple formats, including eSignatures (Sign on Glass), images, audio recordings, video recordings, or text. This ensures compliance, reduces disputes, and keeps all delivery confirmations digital and easily accessible.

Attach electronic signatures as proof of delivery, visit, or service to route stops on Route4Me's multi-address route planner app for drivers.

 

8. Track Driver Progress In Real Time

Use Route4Me, the quickest truck routing software, to monitor driver locations on a live map or review tracking history video. Quickly identify delays, detours, or idle time to ensure efficiency and keep drivers aligned with planned local delivery routes.

Tracking en route field service technicians and field service officers on a live map with route planning software

 

9. Analyze KPIs And Local Delivery Metrics

Measure planned vs. actual distance, planned vs. actual visited stops, planned vs. actual route time, and POD files collected. Route4Me’s route analytics and KPI dashboard provides actionable insights to improve route efficiency, reduce costs, and boost customer satisfaction.

Use your Route4Me GPS routing Dashboard to view route tracking GPS analytics for your business on a centralized control panel. First, filter routes by date range and user.

 

 Last Updated:

About author: Alex Yasko

Alex Yasko is the Go-to-Market Product Manager and Information Architecture Manager at Route4Me. With thousands of hours of experience, Alex specializes in breaking down complex last-mile optimization and routing scenarios into simple, actionable instructions, helping last-mile businesses streamline their operations effortlessly.

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About Route4Me

Route4Me has over 40,000 customers globally. Route4Me's Android and iPhone mobile apps have been downloaded over 2 million times since 2009. Extremely easy-to-use, Route4Me's apps create optimized routes, synchronize routes to mobile devices, enable communication with drivers and customers, offer turn-by-turn directions, delivery confirmation, and more. Behind the scenes, Route4Me's operational optimization platform combines high-performance algorithms with data science, machine learning, and big data to plan, optimize, and analyze routes of almost any size in real-time.