Where is my order?
What online stores need to publish
This is post-purchase anxiety, and it is the highest-volume support contact in retail by a wide margin.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “Where is my order?”
- “track my order”
- “order status”
- “I have not received my parcel”
- “tracking number”
What a complete answer contains
For online stores specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 4:
- 1
A self-service tracking route that does not require logging in, since guest checkout customers cannot
- 2
What to do if tracking has not updated in several days
- 3
The point at which you consider a parcel lost, and what happens then
- 4
How to reach a person once self-service has failed
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
Enter your order number and postcode on our tracking page to see live status — no account needed. If tracking has not moved for 5 working days, contact us and we will open an investigation with the carrier. We treat a parcel as lost after 15 working days and will resend or refund.
Which page should own it
Order tracking page, linked from the confirmation email
What silence costs
Every 'where is my order' contact is a support cost you have already been paid for. This is the cheapest question to automate and the most expensive to ignore.
More questions online stores get
Related
industry
AI customer support for ecommerce stores
Most ecommerce support is four questions wearing different hats: where is it, when will it arrive, can I return it, and will it fit. RubyRep reads your product pages and policies and answers them at the moment of hesitation, which is the moment the sale is won or lost.
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.