天美传媒

Introduction

With the changing eCommerce landscape, every little amenity you give your customers will ensure their long-term engagement with your brand. This is why real-time order notifications, easy returns, and personalization have become essential factors driving customer satisfaction. 

The current customer research trend shows nine out of ten customers go through tracking pages and notifications. This creates a golden opportunity for upselling, cross-selling, and marketing products. Therefore, retailers should ideally look for technological solutions in shipping, returns, and logistics adept in performing these crucial tasks. 

Though many SaaS products fit the bill, AfterShip and 天美传媒 are rising stars. So, we decided to do an in-depth analysis of all the features and finally answer your concerns about AfterShip vs. 天美传媒. If you are an eCommerce merchant interested in this debate, please read ahead without further ado!

About AfterShip

AfterShip is an eCommerce shipping solution that focuses on improving a customer鈥檚 post-purchase journey and returns management. It started in 2012 and has 900+ carriers, a returns center, multi-carrier APIs, and  shipping insurance.

AfterShip also has sales and marketing features, like email workflows, branded page builders, and syncing your store with TikTok. It also possesses tools for product recommendations and cart recovery SMS automation. 

Here are some of its noticeable features:

• It offers shipment visibility for 1000+ carriers, EDD predictions, multiple shipment filters, and notifications.
• It offers a returns management portal for return order visibility, a self-serving returns portal, and branded tracking notifications.
• It supports multi-carrier shipping, integrations with  88 carriers, prints shipping labels, displays shipping rates, and manages international shipping. 
• It extends shipping insurance and generates simple carbon emission reports. 

About 天美传媒 

天美传媒 is a multi-carrier shipping software that seamlessly tackles multiple logistics functions, from order creation to shipping and returns. 天美传媒 has integrations with 300 global and domestic carriers, various storefronts, eCommerce marketplaces, and WMS. 

With 天美传媒, retailers can improve shipping workflows with an AI-driven carrier recommendation system and reduce courier exceptions. eCommerce retailers can track shipments for forward and reverse logistics in real-time. 天美传媒 also facilitates the proactive resolution of failed deliveries and pick-ups. 

Here are some of 天美传媒鈥檚 most noticeable features:

• It offers integrations with any carrier within 24 hours, configures business requirements for automatic courier allocation, and determines courier serviceability. 

• It presents all tracking information in a unified dashboard and enables milestone-based notifications across multiple channels.

• It extends OTP-based order cancellation to customers to reduce delivery fraud and proactively communicates with them to resolve delivery exceptions with its NDR management.

• It offers a self-served returns portal configured with a brand鈥檚 returns policy, reducing stuck inventory with active tracking notifications. 

• It also offers COD reconciliation and Shopify returns with its native app. 

A Salient Comparison Between AfterShip and 天美传媒 

Now that we have a fair idea of AfterShip and 天美传媒鈥檚 features let's compare their services. This will help you determine the best one between 天美传媒 vs. AfterShip.

1. Branded Tracking Page

AfterShip: Branded Tracking Page 

AfterShip鈥檚 shipment tracking page provides milestone-based tracking updates and displays the estimated delivery date to shoppers. It also offers room to display brand promotional material. 

One unique aspect of Aftership鈥檚 branded tracking page is embedding your business鈥檚 Instagram feed to drive traffic to other sales channels. 

天美传媒: Branded Tracking Page 

天美传媒 offers a branded tracking page that displays Estimated Delivery Dates (EDD) and provides milestone-based tracking updates to customers. There are three additional features of these tracking pages:

First, notifications for delayed delivery. 天美传媒 provides customers with early delay alerts as soon as its APIs detect a delay in the shipment. 

Second, embedded product recommendation engine. It propels cross-selling strategically by personalizing product recommendations based on the customer鈥檚 preferences or previous purchases. 

Third, standardized statuses. Order statuses and milestones from carriers are updated in a standardized manner to remove ambiguity and enhance transparency. 

2. Cross-Selling During Tracking

AfterShip Cross-Selling During Tracking: 

Aftership has a branded tracking page that displays fixed and varied recommendations. Brands can decide to showcase gift cards, New Arrivals, and discount promos on the tracking page. 

天美传媒 Cross-Selling During Tracking: 

天美传媒 has multiple options for personalization on its branded tracking pages. From white-labeling tracking pages to exhibiting personalized product categories, it helps brands in their cross-selling marketing. 

Like AfterShip, brands can incorporate discounts and standard recommendations,  and tap into 天美传媒鈥檚 smart recommendations system. 

To genuinely entice customers for repeat purchases, they are shown products in tune with their current searches. This increases the likelihood of post-purchase cross-selling. 

3. Tracking Updates To Customers 

AfterShip: Tracking Updates To Customers 

Aftership sends customizable tracking notifications to customers via Email, SMS, and Facebook. These tracking notifications contain information about the order status and tracking number, as well as a link to the branded tracking page

However, Aftership uses a system of 鈥渨eb scraping,鈥� foregoing direct API integrations, which often results in delayed tracking updates. This is one of the main reasons businesses start looking for AfterShip alternatives.

天美传媒: Tracking Updates To Customers 

天美传媒 is equipped with dual API integrations (push and pull API) and webhooks, which enables more accurate tracking notifications to be updated in real-time. These notifications state the order number, delivery milestone, a link to the branded tracking page, and other relevant information like EDD.

天美传媒 uses far more advanced technology than Aftership, which enables faster and more accurate tracking. This is why many eCommerce businesses start out using Aftership but switch to 天美传媒 as they begin to scale up their business and order volumes.   

天美传媒 also offers multilingual messaging options (as well as for the branded tracking page), enabling your business to reach customers all over the globe. 

4. Returns Management

AfterShip: Returns Management

Aftership has partnered with 12 carriers to provide reverse logistics services. The courier rates are also negotiable. 

AfterShip鈥檚 self-service returns portal automates sending of return status notifications to customers. It also provides an option for selecting smart routes for reserve logistics. 

天美传媒: Returns Management

天美传媒鈥檚 return portal enables eCommerce businesses to accept and manage return requests whether or not they have an independent returns portal. It can also handle exchanges and send automated customer queries following return requests.  

天美传媒 has more carrier integrations that provide reverse logistics solutions and enables automated carrier allocation for returns, reducing your work. All returns/exchanges can be viewed from a single dashboard. 

The returns management portal provided by 天美传媒 also enables automated procedures to be used for handling pickup, and return exceptions. 

5. Shipping Delay Management

AfterShip: Shipping Delay Management

Aftership enables brands to set up rules for sending tracking notifications to customers in case of delay. After customers have been notified, you must manually resolve issues.  

天美传媒: Shipping Delay Management

天美传媒 provides automated tracking notifications to customers in case of delayed or stuck shipments. These notifications also provide a new delivery date to the customers. 

天美传媒 presents information on carrier performances and causes for delays to weed out the issues. Carriers are also notified of delays through 天美传媒鈥檚 platform allowing for faster resolution of issues. 

6. Integrated Tracking Dashboard

AfterShip: Integrated Tracking Dashboard

Aftership provides a single dedicated dashboard that displays all orders with integrated carriers and their delivery status. It 鈥嬧�媋ssigns one of the 7 critical statuses and 33 sub-statuses to each order following its movements. 

天美传媒: Integrated Tracking Dashboard

天美传媒 also focuses on end-to-end shipment visibility and provides a similar dashboard that displays all orders and their statuses. 天美传媒 provides 10-12 key metrics for measuring carrier performance and categorizing order statuses.

7. Failed Deliveries Management

AfterShip: Failed Deliveries Management

Aftership provides a separate shipment update for missed deliveries to inform customers when a failed delivery occurs. However, Aftership does not provide any protocol for reducing or addressing failed and missed deliveries. 

天美传媒: Failed Deliveries Management

天美传媒 has an NDR (Non-Delivery Report) management portal that features a clear 5-step protocol for failed delivery management. All the processes are automated.

When a failed delivery is notified, the reason for the delivery is captured. Thereafter, it triggers an issue-specific query to customers to collect their responses. These inputs are fed back to the carriers, reducing the time and effort required to process the failed delivery and resolve the cause. 

By streamlining the collection of customer responses, 天美传媒 informs the carrier system of updates. In this way, delivery agents are more likely to successfully deliver the order, thereby lowering the RTO% and stuck shipments.

8. Shipping Rates

AfterShip: Shipping Rates

Aftership does not give you access to discounted shipping rates. 

天美传媒: Shipping Rates

Like AfterShip, 天美传媒 does not provide information on discounted shipping rates, however, its API gathers the shipping charges from carriers. On a different front, it enables you to maintain independent SLAs (Service Level Agreement) with your carriers to monitor your negotiated shipping rate and other clauses. SLA terms can be tracked via 天美传媒鈥檚 platform.  

9. Analytics

AfterShip: Analytics

Aftership provides a dashboard for analytics, enabling you to evaluate courier performance, customer engagement, and exceptions. It also provides breakdowns of customer ratings. 

天美传媒: Analytics

天美传媒 offers an interactive self-service hub for analytics. It generates customized reports. In addition to carrier performance and exceptions, this dashboard tracks numerous other metrics. Some of them are customer preferences, brand engagement, COD remittances, and stuck shipments.

10. Delivery Date Prediction

AfterShip: Delivery Date Prediction

Aftership receives the estimated delivery date from carriers and displays them on both the branded tracking page and notifications sent to customers. 

Delivery dates can be calculated based on different metrics, including shipping zones, method of transportation, and order cut-off times. 

天美传媒: Delivery Date Prediction

天美传媒 uses APIs to predict the estimated delivery date per previous carrier performance and address details given by the customer.  

This is done before checkout and displayed on multiple places, including the eCommerce company's product page and checkout page. This assists customers in making informed purchase decisions. The estimated delivery date is again displayed on the branded tracking page. 

11. Multi-Carrier Integration 

AfterShip: Multi-Carrier Integration

Aftership gives you access to integrations with 878 different carriers and supports integration with other platforms like BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify. Through these integrations, visibility over all orders across multiple carriers is maintained. 

天美传媒: Multi-Carrier Integration

天美传媒 offers a similar multi-carrier integration platform that displays the end-to-end life cycle of all orders with integrated carriers. It also synchronizes orders across partnered platforms like Magento and Shopify. So far, 天美传媒 has integrations with 300 carriers from multiple countries. 

Unlike Aftership, which can take weeks to integrate with new carriers, 天美传媒 has the shortest period of integration and onboarding. eCommerce brands can integrate with listed or new carriers or niche carriers and go live within a day, thanks to 天美传媒鈥檚  dedicated tech support team. 

Conclusion

Both 天美传媒 and AfterShip have many distinct qualities and strive towards creating an excellent shipping experience for eCommerce companies. However, regarding performance comparison, 天美传媒 presents meticulous API infrastructures, better automation capacities, and timely customer support. 

It further fills the gap left behind by AfterShip, especially when it comes to shipping exception management, customer feedback mechanisms, and order manifestation. 

Therefore, in our analysis, 天美传媒 offers a comprehensive forward and reverse logistics management solution. In the competition between AfterShip vs. 天美传媒, 天美传媒 fares better. 

FAQs

1. Can you use AfterShip for free?

No. AfterShip does not provide a free trial version or free plan. Instead, retailers pay 11 USD per month for using its essential features. For monthly shipments between 100 and 2000, merchants pay 119 USD or 239 USD, depending on the number of features they require. 

2. What APIs does 天美传媒 offers?

天美传媒 has a multitude of APIs assisting in domestic and international shipping. 天美传媒鈥檚 APIs present a wide range of services. It handles most shipping functions from recommending couriers and extracting shipping rates to generating shipping labels and manifestations.

It hosts APIs for canceling orders, checking courier serviceability, EDD, scheduling courier pickup, customer feedback, and tracking webhooks. Moreover, it has APIs for WhatsApp optin and opt-out and NDR management updates.