Cutting click to delivery in half

Situation

Dr. Squatch came to the team with a goal for speed: they wanted their average click to delivery under four calendar days, and their tail, meaning orders taking more than seven days, under 5 percent. They were explicit that they did not expect an immediate flip or a free one. They did expect urgency.

Click to delivery is two problems wearing one number. Half of it is how long an order sits before it leaves the building, and half is how long the carrier takes once it has it. Both halves were slow, for unrelated reasons.

In the building, order cutoffs meant orders placed after a threshold waited for the next day to be picked, packed, and handed off to the carrier. On the transportation side, the network leaned heavily on a single carrier, and carrier selection did not weigh transit time at all. It optimized on cost alone, which meant that on some lanes we were choosing a carrier two to three days slower to save three cents on a package.

Constraint

Cost was not a wall, it was a budget with an owner. ShipMonk was willing to absorb a reasonable increase to get the days down, because the days were the product. Buying up to a genuinely faster service level was a different conversation, since that lands on the merchant's invoice, and Dr. Squatch was open to paying for it.

That made the test comparative rather than absolute. Every hour we took out at a cost ShipMonk could absorb was an hour the brand did not have to buy, and the upgrade stayed on the table the entire time as the thing we were competing against. Buying air is the answer everyone already knows. The interesting question is how far the two free levers go first: when the package leaves, and which carrier gets it.

What I did

Work ran in two tracks with Operations, Transportation, Engineering, and Product together, trialing changes and keeping the ones that held.

On the operations side, we moved the cutoffs so more volume made the same day's carrier induction rather than the next one. Create to ship went from 53.5 hours in January 2024 to 23.9 hours in November, close to 30 hours taken out before a carrier ever touched the package.

On the transportation side, we rebuilt how carriers were chosen. Instead of selecting on cost alone, we looked at performance by warehouse and destination ZIP together, because a carrier that is strong out of one building is not the same carrier out of another. Where the default choice was losing days on a lane, those orders moved to a faster carrier for a small increase in cost, which is the trade that a three cent decision had been quietly refusing. That work also started a broader reshaping of the network's carrier mix, beyond this one brand.

Measurement was its own piece of the work. Click to delivery was measured in calendar days from order placed to order delivered, and we had dashboards segmenting every stage of the order flow, so each change could be attributed to the stage it moved instead of to the total.

Result

ShipMonk's published case study reports click to delivery on economy orders falling from seven to eight days to under four. That figure measures the partnership, the brand's prior provider against ShipMonk, rather than this project. Dr. Squatch reported roughly a 50 percent reduction in their own reporting to us, which is not a public figure and is theirs rather than mine.

The series I steered the work by is narrower and worth stating next to them. Between January and November 2024, create to ship went from 53.5 hours to 23.9, and ship to delivery went from 4.3 calendar days to 3.0. On that window the two segments together come to a reduction closer to 40 percent than 50, because January is already a partly improved starting point rather than the state the brand arrived in. Their worst month inside ShipMonk was 7.3 calendar days in September 2023.

ShipMonk absorbed the added cost, and Dr. Squatch never pulled the trigger on the faster service level they were willing to buy, because the average arrived without it.

The tail did not. Orders past seven days stayed above the 5 percent target, and what remained concentrated in rural destinations where carrier options thin out and no amount of mix shifting makes the ground move faster. The only lever left was buying up to a faster service level on those lanes, at the brand's expense. Dr. Squatch looked at the price and decided the tail was not worth it. The average target landed, the tail target did not, and the miss came down to a cost the brand chose not to carry.

What I would do differently

I would have gone after the selection rule before a brand had to ask. A rule that trades two to three days for three cents is not wrong for one account, it is wrong everywhere it runs, and we found it because a merchant with a specific target made us look. The general lesson I now apply is that a cost rule with no service term in it is a service decision nobody has made on purpose.