Ecommerce is the perfect vessel for gifting.
Customers can scroll your shop’s entire catalog, pick the ideal gifts for lucky recipients, and ship ‘em off to doorsteps everywhere all without ever fussing with gift wrap or ribbons.
Dreamy, right?
It truly is if you ignore the exceptionally annoying part between shopping for gifts and sending those gifts: the checkout.
Shopping for gifts to send to many people online is easy. But trying to pay for gifts and enter their respective addresses is very frustrating. Why, with all the mega-technological strides and penchant for optimizing everything in the ecommerce stratosphere, is shipping things to multiple addresses still a profoundly bad customer experience?
We firmly believe that sending gifts to two or 200 hundred people should be as stress-free as shopping for yourself (which is exactly why Zest has soothed the multi-ship headache once and for all).
Read on to see what multi-ship means, why ecommerce stores need it, and how you can give your customers a better gifting experience while sprinting ahead of your competition.
What Is Multi-ship? (Or Multiple Ship-to, or Multiple Address Shipping, or…)
The act of buying products online and shipping them to multiple addresses in a single order is called multishipping (if you’re on this page because you want to know more about connecting several fanfic relationships, you could be better served here. Sorry.).
The multi-ship feature, also called multiple ship-to, isn’t something consumers see too often in their online shopping journeys. However, the concept is as simple as you’d imagine, and it resolves friction-filled scenarios like this one:
- Your customer comes to your store and sticks three boxes of gourmet chocolates for mother’s day in their cart. One is for their mom, one is for their grandma, and one is for their mother-in-law.
- They get to the checkout to pay for their three boxes. However, there’s only one address field, but they need three separate ones.
- They’re now faced with a choice. They can either place one order and have everything delivered to their house, tasking them with the fulfillment of these gifts. Or they can go through the checkout three separate times, sending each order to a new address. (Alternatively, they could just abandon their cart altogether.) Whatever they choose, they’re also treated to a fat serving of friction.
This is where multi-ship comes in and gives shoppers the power to buy all three gifts, sent to three different addresses, in one easy checkout.
Like I said, the concept is simple, so why don’t more online stores have a solution for this fairly common scenario?
The multi-ship mystery revealed.
One reason could be that some online brands know they don’t have the most giftable products. This means that not many customers need a feature like this in order to have an enjoyable checkout experience.
Another reason (the main reason, IMO), is that there just hasn’t been an awesome solution to add to your store’s tech stack.
Historically, multi-ship features aren’t baked into a website builder or ecommerce platform. This feature could be found as a third-party app, but those are also typically platform-dependent and prone to bugs or breakage, which definitely doesn’t make for a great customer experience.
Other times, these apps may simply feel like a disjointed part of your brand or checkout flow. If your shoppers are suddenly jolted into a multi-ship form that looks off-brand or even out-of-date, they could quickly lose trust and flee.
And in even more instances, these apps don’t fit your team, processes, or customer needs perfectly. Multi-ship mastery has eluded ecommerce for decades, from flawed financial reporting to inventory reduction to broken discount codes and beyond.
Until now.
The Best Multi-ship Checkout in Ecommerce
When you look back at the history of ecommerce, every single one of the tools and optimizations we barely even notice today has been a hill once viewed as too big to clamber. Heck, the entire concept of ecommerce was unfathomable not too long ago.
Platforms like Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace have made ecommerce an accessible venture for pretty much anyone wielding an internet connection. The ecommerce ecosystem has expanded exponentially, and full-blown industries have been built around every path branching off the core shopping experience.
Payment processing, inventory management, email marketing, customer support, web design, order protection, paid ads — each factor of the ecommerce flow has been dissected, studied, optimized, and modernized to fit the exact needs of today’s consumers.
It’s about time someone toppled the final enigma: shipping gifts to multiple addresses in one order.
Say “Hey!” to Zest, a gifting platform made for modern brands.
With the staunch belief that shopping for gifts online should be as easy as shopping for yourself, Zest’s roadmap has eradicated the biggest gifting pain points in ecommerce, including multi-ship.
Illustration by Ben Stafford
Ecommerce companies get a fully optimized (and fully white-labeled) one-to-many gifting experience when using Zest. Instead of finagling your DTC experience to make it fit the needs of shoppers sending gifts, send gifters to an experience tailored to what they’re buying.
Once on your page dedicated to a mind-blowing gifting experience, your shoppers are free to…
- Shop from your curated gift catalog.
- Jot down a personalized digital or printed gift message.
- Upload one or hundreds of recipients via CSV in seconds.
- Choose a date to deploy their e-gifts or schedule shipping.
- Pay one time (instead of placing many single orders).
…all in one intuitive checkout that looks and feels like your trusted brand.
While the Zest gifting experience strips away any whiff of friction for your shoppers, it also gives your internal team much-needed reprieve.
When gift orders are placed on your Zest-powered gifting storefront, your ecommerce platform automatically processes the orders. This means inventory is accurately updated, scheduled shipping dates are locked and loaded, gift messages are pushed in, and you'll be able to actually decipher which of your sales are gift sales.
Group gift orders were a 10- to 15-step process that needed a lot of handholding. Because everything had to be done manually, the team was spending a ton of time on each order instead of outreach or re-engaging customers. It was a very tricky process, and then we met Zest.
— Amelia Heller, Corporate Sales Manager @ Milk Bar
Word on the street (the street = years of conversations with top ecommerce brands) is that the biggest pain with bulk and corporate gift orders is the sheer amount of time they eat up. From hammering out personalized details to collecting and checking addresses to scheduling and manually entering each gift for processing, the whole shebang takes the typical brand weeks to work through.
But when the entire flow is automated and processed in minutes, your team is free to tackle stuff that’s probably been on the back burner for far too long, like outreach, client re-engagement, or more highly customized concierge gift orders.
As an added bonus, Zest integrates with pretty much any ecommerce platform, so you’re never stuck with the tough choice to migrate your whole store in order to get the multi-ship solution you need.
Multi-ship Is an Ecommerce Must-have for the Holidays
Don’t get us wrong, we know 100% that having multi-ship functionality that’s smooth as butta’ is a great idea all year long. However, if your website is a gifting destination in Q4, multi-ship is a game-changer. We know a lot of ecommerce tools claim to be, so let’s run down exactly why multi-ship truly lives up to the hype:
Extend your holiday shopping window.
The holiday season is the super bowl for ecommerce brands. Typically, online stores sell the most between Thanksgiving and the new year, and those sky-high sales let them soar into the year ahead with strong financial footing.
A purpose-built gift-buying checkout is a foolproof way to encourage more gifting from shoppers and reduce your team’s manual tasks. Zest’s frictionless multi-ship checkout plays a huge role in ensuring gifters can buy gifts for a bunch of people in as little time as possible. And with e-gifting as a gift-sending option, shoppers can buy gifts on Christmas morning and digitally deliver them (with personalized gift message) within minutes of checking out.
This self-service gifting model also means your team spends less time in back-and-forth emails with your customers, double-checking order accuracy in your ecommerce backend, uploading addresses one by one, and following up with manual gift tracking details. Instead, they can rest assured that everything from inventory to gift delivery is running perfectly.
You can move your gift-buying cutoff back a week or two (or even eliminate it entirely) with less time needed to get gifts out the door, which adds up to more gifts sold throughout the season.
Reduce gift processing times.
Zest slashes your bulk gift processing and sales time to a fraction of what it currently is, related to extending your store’s gift-buying window.
For example, traditional corporate gifting journeys require gifters to fill out a form and your team to embark on a journey of endless back-and-forth emails and phone tag. All that time adds up — especially if this is the standard process for every gift order, whether it’s six gifts or 600.
Your team should be spending more time on the high-volume gifts or projects for your MVP customers. Instead, they’re knee-deep in small group orders that need just as much handholding and processing time as the big ones.
Eliminating the bulk of the time required by your team with a gifting storefront that handles the tedious stuff like uploading hundreds of addresses and creating a gift order for each one minimizes processing time (and the amount of tension your sales team is carrying in their shoulders riiiiiight about now).
Differentiate your store from competitors.
When you’re shopping for pants on the internet, you have a lot of options. You finally whittle your choices down to Brand A and Brand B. They have comparable quality, styles, and prices.
However, Brand A’s checkout is neither easy nor intuitive. In other words, it’s loaded with friction. On the other hand, Brand B’s website boasts a one-tap checkout and you’re in and out in 45 seconds flat.
The next time you need pants, do you even bother with Brand A? Absolutely not. You go right to Brand B (until they discontinue your favorite style and break your heart).
This is the same thing that happens with gifters. People who have to buy a lot of gifts, especially corporate gifters who have a lot riding on a gift order going smoothly, aren’t going to return to online brands that make them fill out a form, make a phone call, or place a billion individual orders for gifts if they know an easier alternative exists.
In other words, gifters are going to beeline to your gifting storefront the next time they need to order presents ASAP.
“Customers can go and see what products are available, see any available discounts, and know how long fulfilling their corporate gift order will take. Just seeing the platform made them convert because they had total control. Everyone loves the experience”
— Jillianne Estevez, Customer Experience Manager @ Brightland
Capture a whole new segment for year-round engagement.
Zest’s multi-ship checkout has another fancy trick up its sleeve aside from its ease and delightful CX: gifter and gift recipient marketing opt-in.
For 99% of your online purchases, I bet there’s a big honkin’ marketing opt-in box on the checkout page. This is great for consumers who want to stay in the loop about product drops and discounts, and it’s even better for brand owners who want keep curious customers engaged and coming back to shop again.
In your standard DTC checkout, though, you don’t have much insight into the individual shopper. You should be able to pick out details like what they purchased and how much they spent, but there’s no way to tell if they were gifting the item or not.
With little to no insight about who’s gifting or not, it’s impossible to re-engage just gifters with messaging that’s personalized to their experience as well as send comms to them in the future around gifting events.
To put it bluntly: you have no idea who’s gifting. And that’s hurting how personalized you can get in your marketing campaigns to this super lucrative audience.
When a gifter buys through your Zest storefront and checks the marketing opt-in when they make a purchase, you know, without a doubt, that person is a gifter and they want to hear more about your gifts. And if their recipient opts into marketing when they accept a gift? You definitely know that person is a gift recipient.
(Unlike when you sell through third-party gifting marketplaces, you own this data. This is your customer, so you should go ahead and build the best relationship you can with them.)
Being able to see who is opting into marketing as a gifter or recipient is a massive opportunity for you. You can now leverage this data and launch whole new campaigns that weren’t previously possible, like:
- introducing your brand to gift recipients who may have never heard of it before getting this gift.
- sending gifters similar gift ideas or new, limited-edition gifts in your catalog.
- rewarding gifters after sending XX number of gifts to build loyalty.
- sending gift recipients a discount code to use on your store and shop for themselves.
- sending gifters comms about new gift drops, gifting discounts, gift inspo, and anything that keeps your store top of mind for any gifting occasion.
Zest Multi-ship Eliminates One of Ecommerce’s Biggest Pains
Every piece of the ecommerce ecosystem is continuously tested, tweaked, and optimized by the hundreds of tools and platforms in the space. With the exception of a few bold Shopify apps, the multi-ship problem has been largely ignored, causing shoppers to face friction and brands to settle for a sub-par gifting experience.
Zest is a first-of-its-kind tool purpose-built for better gifting on any ecommerce platform. From shopping, personalizing, processing, and entering multiple addresses in one single order, it finally makes ecommerce gifting as dreamy as it should be.
