Shiprocket launches AI-platform Engage to help sellers reduce returns to origin

NEW DELHI : Tech-enabled logistics startup Shiprocket on Wednesday launched an AI-driven platform Engage to help sellers reduce returns to origin (RTO) up to 40-45 per cent, automate operations, and enhance post-purchase customer experience.

A dedicated post-purchase order processing platform, Engage allows sellers to scale their e-commerce business through automated workflows and AI-based order analysis for risk scoring, Shiprocket said in a release.

According to the company, a high RTO rate is one of the most prominent challenges that all e-commerce brands/sellers face in India. All sellers, irrespective of their size, face considerable losses due to the cash-on-delivery (COD) orders that are shipped but not delivered.

Observing that most sellers follow manual processes to review and filter orders to prevent excessive RTO losses, it said these returns happen for various reasons, including incorrect addresses, impulse shopping by customers, manual errors, duplicate orders, courier network challenges, customer refusals to accept shipments at the time of delivery, among others.

Brands have been facing multiple hurdles due to the lack of a robust system to flag orders with higher RTO risk, Shiprocket said.

Engage, an automation suite powered by an AI system trained on over 1-billion data points, automatically flags orders with high RTO risk and provides a seamless post-purchase experience for end customers by reducing these returns significantly and
improving their profit margins, it added.

“With the rapidly growing demand for e-commerce, sellers often struggle to reduce RTO’s as they manually carry out their process, which hampers their efficiency and affects their ability to connect with customers,” said Saahil Goel, Co-founder-CEO, Shiprocket.

The company wanted to address this issue by launching Shiprocket Engage, operating on cutting-edge technology, which will ensure a seamless and enhanced post-purchase experience by automating the manual processes, resulting in error-free, efficient operations and enhanced customer engagement, he said.

Engage powers the entire post-purchase journey over WhatsApp, enabling sellers to confirm orders, verify and correct addresses, increase prepaid orders, send tracking notifications, and manage non-delivery reports’ flows to collect delivery reattempt preferences from customers automatically, the company said.

This leads to sellers’ reduced inbound (tracking-related) and outbound calls (NDR – rescheduling deliveries). The platform also helps merchants process and ship their orders in an expedited manner, which helps in lowering the RTO rates, Shiprocket added.