Vograce Cut WISMO by 73% and Shipping Time by 65% with ParcelPanel

Business Profile

Established in 2012, Vograce is an established animation peripheral manufacturer specializing in personalized customization. Vograce employs about 200 people, runs a large factory equipped with 100 production machines in Yiwu, Zhejiang, China, and ships to over 80 countries. Its offers of low MOQ for high-quality custom keychains, charms, enamel pins, etc., appeal to numerous anime fans, small artists, gamers, and corporations around the world. 

Brand: Vograce

Industry: Toys & Hobbies

Platform: Shopify Plus

Country: China

Year Founded: 2012

Employees: 200+

Usage: Since March 2021

Carriers: 20+

Shipping to: 80+ countries

Integration: N/A

As a traditional export-trading manufacturer, Vograce was dedicated to selling custom products on Alibaba until the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on its cross-border B2B business. As a result, the brand had to start building relationships with direct customers by setting up its own sales channel. By early 2021, Vograce’s official Shopify store was full-blown, equipped with all the necessary features to submit custom designs and choose from various options. Here came the golden opportunity of marketing. As expected, the number of orders rose with the gradual increases in advertising expenditure.

The challenge: Development hindered by huge increases in WISMO tickets

In early March 2021, Vograce’s official website was well on its way towards the monthly sales goal — getting hundreds of orders from anime fans. Motivated by a rosy future, the company’s sales manager planned to increase the advertising expenditure by 4 times in April. However, she was upset at the fact that due to the long production time and lack of shipment visibility, the majority of customers’ patience wore out, and the sales team in charge of the website operations was overwhelmed by the increased number of WISMO tickets. The problem continued to develop in mid-March, further limiting the sales team’s bandwidth to communicate with customers to get quotations confirmed and proofs approved. This caused delays in communication; in consequence, most customers felt worried and contacted customer service to investigate the progress. 

With WISMO tickets pouring in, the sales team realized the urgency to implement an effective order tracking solution and turn customer support into customers’ last-ditch attempts.

Looking for an ideal solution to supply chain optimization

In the beginning, Vograce’s sales team shouldered the responsibility of searching for an order tracking solution that worked. With wider concerns raised internally, the search was complicated by the company’s need to shorten the production time and identify the most cost-effective shipping method to distribute samples. 

“In the past, we have been committed to bringing customized designs to life and improving product quality. Top-class personalized experience is the center pillar of our business. That’s why we decided to devote plenty of time to optimize supply chain operations and post-purchase experience.”

Jerry Hu, Chief Supervisor

Vograce’s sales and supply chain teams worked closely and started evaluating existing order tracking solutions with the following criteria: 

• Automatic Multi-Carrier Tracking: The ideal tracking solution must support end-to-end shipment tracking across 20+ couriers Vograce has been partnered with, such as USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, and so on. Shipments bound to over 80 countries should be accurately monitored, especially those to the major markets.
• Shopify Native Email Delivery: The tracking solution should seamlessly integrate with Shopify to trigger automatic email notifications in real time for shipment updates, including “Out for Delivery” and “Delivered.” In this way, customers can stay informed of the fulfillment progress, from shipment creation to final delivery.
• Centralized Order Management & Analytics: For one thing, the perfect tracking solution that Vograce’s team was looking for should pull necessary order information to keep track of the improvements in production time and shipping time by courier; for another, it should provide comprehensive analytics to support decision-making and CSV export for data storage and tracking improvements over time.

The solution: ParcelPanel – the best ecommerce order tracking solution

Vograce’s search for the best order tracking solution was limited to apps available in the Shopify App Store because the famous anime peripheral product manufacturer wanted to find a solution that required minimum setup. After judging various Shopify order tracking apps’ user base, ratings, features, operating, and pricing, Vograce’s team decided to install and test the top 5 apps, including ParcelPanel. After testing, a series of meetings were held to exchange ideas, and finally, ParcelPanel won the majority of votes.  

“Unlike other order tracking solutions, ParcelPanel is an embedded Shopify app, which guarantees seamless integration, order data synchronization, and easy access. With the Essential plan, we can access all fundamental features. What’s more, as sales grow, this is the second-to-none choice in terms of cost saving. Last but not least, ParcelPanel is so easy to use that our sales team didn’t encounter any trouble implementing it.”

Jerry Hu, Chief Supervisor

The results: Impressive improvements in customer experience & operational efficiency

“Since onboarding with ParcelPanel, we published instructions and a video tutorial on shipment tracking. To our surprise, the number of support tickets dropped by 73%. What’s more, both our sales team and the supply chain team have been liberated from the manual order tracking tasks. With ParcelPanel’s reports on shipments by country and transit times by courier, we easily identified the most lucrative market and the most cost-effective shipping solution. In this way, we managed to reduce Vograce shipping time by 65% and streamline the production process. Thanks to ParcelPanel, we are empowered to elevate customer experience and business operations.”  

Hui Xing, Sales Manager

Since cooperating with ParcelPanel, Vograce has made great progress. Its achievements include:

• 73% Fewer WISMO Support Tickets: Shortly after implementing ParcelPanel, Vograce immediately started raising customers’ attention on the 24/7 order tracking self-service and published detailed guides. Apart from the 24/7 tracking self-service, Vograce has also enabled ParcelPanel to trigger Shopify to send shipment notification emails. Additionally, in January 2023, Vograce launched a calculator for estimated production & Vograce shipping time, whose development is largely based on data provided by ParcelPanel. All these measures contributed to significant decreases in support tickets.
• 87% Lift in Tracking Efficiency: Regardless of courier services, once a tracking number is uploaded, ParcelPanel will monitor the entire shipment progress and retrieve updates autonomously. Setting aside addressing WISMO inquiries, Vograce’s customer service team also benefits greatly from ParcelPanel’s order tracking automation – Vograce has a 90-day return policy, with the availability of all tracking information for orders in the past 30 days, things became much easier.
• 65% Faster Shipping Time: By referring to ParcelPanel’s “Shipments” and “Transit Time” reports, Vograce started to work more closely with top-performing express couriers to offer fast shipping at relatively low costs. It also successfully boosted its business presence in Japan and Russia. Moreover, as for large orders, customers can opt for ocean shipping now. Not to mention, it established a strategic partnership with a 3PL company in the US market to get samples delivered as soon as possible.

The future: Effectively scale & continue to improve customer experience with ParcelPanel

With the growing demand for personalized products, Vograce invested 100% more in production machinery and expanded its production lines. The business expansion effectively boosts Vograce’s annual export capacity and enables it to cater to a wider range of customers, i.e., anime, gaming, and pop culture enthusiasts. 

As customer experience is key to success in the customization industry, Jerry Hu, Chief Supervisor at Vograce, promised to provide more options and faster lead times by partnering with ParcelPanel.