Though hundreds of shipping software abound in the market, there are few with such wide recognition as Aftership and Narvar. Both are multi-carrier shipping software placing a strong emphasis on post-purchase customer satisfaction.
Naturally, many eCommerce retailers try to compare them against each other and find out which software fares better- Aftership or Narvar. We had the same query as you. So, we decided to delve deeper into their features, merits, customer reviews, and drawbacks. The result is this comprehensive article about Aftership vs. Narvar.
Stick with us till the end to find out our final verdict of which software takes the trophy between Aftership and Narvar. Let’s get started.
Overview of Aftership
Aftership brands itself as a global shipment tracking software company. And for good reasons. It has one of the largest integration libraries among its competitors, amounting to over 1000 carriers, 3PL, and software apps. The list also includes freight forwarders, LTL carriers, and subsidiaries of major last-mile delivery software companies.
Aftership takes a proactive approach to shipment tracking. It leverages AI to automated delivery notifications, product recommendations on tracking pages, and auto-translate notifications in multiple languages. Apart from order tracking, Aftership focuses on three other areas, viz. Post-purchase enhancements, marketing automation, and shipping.
Aftership creates a streamlined shipping workflow, from checkout to returns. All of its popular services are designed to reduce shipping complexities, automate recurring processes, and delight customers. It works for well-known brands like Gymshark and Harry’s.
Top Features of Aftership
Let’s take a look at its most popular services:
1. Comprehensive EDD calculation:
Aftership’s AI algorithm predicts EDD with approximately 90% accuracy. It allows sellers to configure shipping rules with EDD factoring in distribution center locations, carrier service, and warehousing processing time. Thus, its EDD algorithm is dynamic enough to update delivery time if required. It places EDD results on the product page and the final checkout portal.
2. Returns Management:
Aftership users can set up conditional order routing rules, generate return labels, and accept returns for individual items. They can automatically create exchange orders and track shipments with 20+ carriers. Its return fraud prevention tool analyzes product return frequencies of designated customers, reducing unfair return practices.
3. Shipping Management Dashboard:
Aftership’s dashboard is the ideal platform for simplified shipping operations syncing orders from multiple sales channels for dispatch, label generation, and calculating carrier rates in real time. It’s also the place where merchants can auto-create commercial invoices and documents for international shipping.
4. Personalized Content
Aftership’s marketing facilities are tailored to create a hyper-personalized experience for customers in your eCommerce store. Integrating with its APIs lets you create dynamic product category pages, enable semantic search, and images as search queries. Customizable email templates are available for multiple contexts like cart recovery, back-in-stock, etc.
5. Simplifies Warranty Claims
Aftership streamlines the warranty claim and insurance addition. Retailers can process warranty claims from any sales channel and retail outlets on a central dashboard. Customers can place warranty claims on a branded portal provided by Aftership.
Key Benefits:
Automate carrier selection.
Access multiple delivery methods.
Send shipping notifications via email.
Pricing starts from $11 for 100 monthly shipments.
Pain points:
Order tracking lacks real-time information.
No multi-channel notification system.
Doesn’t have a smooth onboarding process.
Overview of Narvar
Narvar is a multi-carrier shipping software with dual abilities in managing post-purchase experience and tracking orders. Narvar supports 300+ carriers operating worldwide. It has 50+ pre-integrations with eCommerce marketplaces, order management software, and other apps. It has offices in 7 global locations.
Narvar gives its users many avenues to scale the post-purchase side of their business. For this, it offers solutions like flexible delivery dates, omnichannel shipping and delivery options, branded tracking pages, and more. The core philosophy of Narvar is to make its users champions of post-purchase customer experience.
With Narvar, merchants can craft engaging customer journeys and open up more channels for communication and customer support. From checkout to returns, all of Narvar’s amenities can be summed up into 5 broad categories targeting different stages of the buyer’s journey. Let’s take a look at them below.
Top Features of Narvar
1. Dynamic EDD
One of the most talked about features of Narvar is its highly configurable EDD (estimated delivery date). It uses an in-built AI algorithm based on multiple ML models to predict delivery dates with 95% accuracy. Moreover, it allows eCommerce store owners to set EDD ranges based on their delivery options.
2. Contextualized Order Tracking Pages
Narvar’s best feature is creating highly memorable branded tracking pages to elevate customer satisfaction for eCommerce businesses. Its branded tracking pages are personalized to match an order status or the consumer’s locale. Its various themes and templates give brands a perfect chance to establish their unique identities.
3. Omnichannel Notifications
Narvar offers multiple routes to customer engagement, particularly focusing on real-time shipment alerts. It helps ease customer tension when shipments are delayed or deliveries are missed by informing them before they happen. It has 40+ message templates for shipment updates, order updates, account-related changes, and return based alerts. Narvar sends customer notifications via email, SMS, WhatsApp, and Line chat.
4. Marketing Capabilities
Narvar intertwines notifications with purposive marketing for active customer engagement. It crafts marketing assets and campaigns like sales and discount alerts for its multi-prong notifications and tracking pages to drive sales. It also includes product recommendations there. Narvar allows customers to opt-in for proactive order status notifications via SMS.
5. Seamless Returns and Exchanges
Narvar runs a concierge service incorporating more than 200k retail locations and carrier offices like Walgreens into its network. Customers get the choice of both home pickup and store drop-off. It offers instant credit and gift cards to incentivize exchanges. It detects return fraud and routes products to different warehouses based on business preferences.
Key Benefits of Narvar
Amps up customer conversion rates.
Proactively monitors and resolves delivery issues.
Access to 200k+ locations for reverse logistics needs.
Instant returns with the Narvar Intelligence module.
Pain points:
Its pricing policy is most appropriate for enterprise-graded businesses.
Customers may require more carrier integrations than what it offers.
Aftership Vs Narvar: Salient Comparison of their Services
1. Carrier and API Integration Capabilities
Aftership: Aftership has a bigger library for carrier integrations, encompassing over 1,176 logistics providers. Aftership offers seamless integrations with 70+ eCommerce storefronts and 50 technology partners. Its APIs offer comprehensive order management services and shipping like address validation, shipping rate calculator, stores sync up, etc.
Narvar: Compared to Aftership, Narvar’s integration library is limited to 300+ carriers and 50+ eCommerce sales channels and service providers. However, it surpasses the former in its API integrations with communication channels for SMS, WhatsApp, Emails, and Line.
Key takeaway: In terms of integrations, Aftership takes the lead.
2. Order Tracking Expertise
Aftership: It uses website scraping bots to extract order tracking details from the carrier’s website. This causes delays in tracking information and reduces their accuracy. It has greater visibility across carriers in its forward journey of shipments but not for return order tracking.
Narvar: It has direct carrier API integrations enabling accurate and on-time delivery of order statuses to customers. It also has a ton of pre-designed templates for order notifications and standardized statuses for uniformity.
Key takeaway: In terms of real-time tracking and accuracy, Narvar trumps over Aftership.
3. Customizable Notifications
Aftership– It focuses heavily on providing a personalized branded tracking experience. As such, its tracking pages are tailored to different customer segments. It creates a specialized tracking experience for VIP customers. Aftership provides predefined templates, marketing assets, and proxy, white-labeled URLs for improved SEO.
Narvar– Narvar equally concentrates on optimizing its tracking pages, embedding them with marketing assets like product recommendations, custom tracking pages centered around orders, and even customer locales. At the same time, it focuses on giving customers early alerts in cases of shipping delays or missed deliveries. Narvar has more notification mediums than Aftership.
Key takeaway: Aftership has a more dynamic and powerful tracking page but Narvar offers greater options for customer notifications.
4. Returns and Exchange Management
Aftership– It focuses on optimizing every aspect of reverse logistics. It has perks like instant exchanges, automated refunds, return fraud detection, and 3PL integrations for order routing. It has over 310k+ drop-off locations. Aftership also offers easy shipping label generation and automated returns management. It also has a reverse logistics app.
Narvar: It equally excels at returns and exchanges management as Aftership. It offers 200k+ drop-off locations in its network plus 300 carrier services for reverse logistics. It also gives instant store credit for exchanges, proactive return/exchange order updates, and fraud detection. It also routes items to warehouses, distribution centers, or any other location a business prefers.
Key takeaway: Both Narvar and Aftership offer excellent returns management services.
5. Depth of Reporting and Analytics
Aftership– It offers shipping analytics and actionable marketing insights to improve the post-purchase experience. Aftership’s reports shed light on delivery rates, delivery exceptions, transit times of carriers, and on-time delivery percentages. It also provides customer engagement data like the Click Through Rates for marketing campaigns. Businesses also get quarterly account reviews.
Narvar: Its analytics and reports are centered around a complete breakdown of the shipment’s journey from dispatch to delivery/pick-up. It also uses predictive analytics to give businesses early signals of shipping disruptions. It also provides specialized data visualization reports regarding carrier performance, customer engagement with the brand, etc.
Key takeaway: Both Aftership and Narvar have strong data analytics and reporting capabilities, but Narvar provides shipping delay information that is absent in Aftership.
Final Verdict
Both Narvar and Aftership are reliable, efficient, and high-performing shipping software, particularly for post-purchase optimization. Given their overlapping services and proficiency in easing operational stress, it may be difficult for businesses to decide which one to adopt.
We think Aftership displays a greater number of features when it comes to shipping optimization for forward and reverse logistics. Its multi-tier pricing structure makes it suitable for all sizes of businesses with varying budgets.
On the other hand, Narvar excels in returns management and order tracking plus notifications. If you are looking for an expert in these two domains and can spend more bucks, then Narvar can be a better choice for you. We hope this article gives you the clarity you’ll need to decide whether Aftership or Narvar is right for you.
Parameters
Aftership
Narvar
No. of Carrier Integrations
1000+ carrier integrations
300+ carrier integrations
Shipment Tracking
Greater order visibility across carriers
Real-time order tracking with more accurate results
Notifications
Supports delivery notifications via emails and highly personalized branded tracking pages.
Provides shipping notifications across multiple channels- SMS, Emails, WhatsApp, Lime, and branded tracking pages.
Carrier Recommendation Engine
Automated carrier recommendations based on custom rules
Offers carrier recommendation but with limited parameters.
