Our Case Study
Metal Family’s first comic book launch was a sensation, selling out 9x faster than expected. Unfortunately, the team didn’t have the capacity or processes to handle this volume of orders, leading to:
- PROCESSING DELAYS
- TRACKING ISSUES
- MISSING PARCELS
- RETURNS AND FINES
- ANGRY CUSTOMERS
Metal Family didn’t just overcome every one of these problems with TrackMage — they also experienced massive benefits in customer support, in-store experience and sales.
Read the case study for
the full story
How TrackMage turned Metal Family’s shipping disaster into a powerful asset
Metal Family is a hugely popular animated web series. In early 2022, they launched a printed comic for the first time.
The team hoped to sell out within 2 months; they did it in 7 days. While fantastic news on paper, the release was a victim of its own success: their small team now faced the daunting task of processing 400+ orders per day.
Despite working flat out, it was an impossible workload. The team was processing every order manually (including attempted tracking updates) and the delays, mistakes and costs quickly piled up.
With over a thousand missing packages and enormous pressure from customers, Metal Family brought in TrackMage to quickly and permanently turn things around.
Metal Family themselves about the problem:
1
Tracking Updates Automation
The overwhelming number of orders meant it could take over a week between ordering the comic and it arriving at the post office for processing. The post office might take another 2-3 days to ship, before sharing a batch of 1,000+ tracking numbers with Metal Family.
To update customers, the team was using WooCommerce to manually change the order status of every individual package: navigate to sheet, find order, scroll to shipping info, input tracking number, find next customer...
Not only did this introduce significant risk of human error, it also meant tracking information took up to 2 weeks to reach customers. And during that period, Metal Family had absolutely no time to update their thousands of customers.
As soon as TrackMage was onboarded, our built-in Bulk Actions capability allowed Metal Family to identify all shipments containing their new comic book, match each one with a tracking number, and update their status in a single action.
What had taken dozens of hours (i.e. manually updating tracking information for every customer) now took seconds. As a small team, 100% of the time saved during order processing was invaluable.
DID YOU KNOW?
7% of Customers Upsold on Tracking Page With TrackMage, customers can check personalized tracking pages for updates. On average, Metal Family customers checked the page every single day.
Metal Family used the built-in features to passively upsell specific products from their store. Using these upsells, 7% of customers made new purchases before their comic had arrived.
Without any extra costs, TrackMage acts as a proven revenue generator for Metal Family
2
Delivery Optimization
While Metal Family could now perform actions on unlimited orders simultaneously, they had a bigger problem: more than 1,000 packages had already been shipped without any tracking updates.
By this point, customers were angry and confused. Many had ordered 2+ weeks ago and heard nothing about their order. The number of social media DMs, ranting posts and inquiring emails was through the roof—yet another burden on Metal Family's thin resources.
Customers reached out up to 5x per day asking where is my order?
So where were these parcels? Stuck in post offices across Europe while customers had no idea their order had even left the warehouse.
By the time TrackMage was brought in, many packages were being returned to Metal Family with fees attached. Worse, customers were demanding refunds and shipping the products a second time was just doubling their costs.
The financial and reputational impact was becoming drastic.
Metal Family needed two solutions:
1. To connect already shipped packages to their waiting customers
2. To create a system to avoid similar problems in future
We provided these solutions through automated email updates based on order status:
1. Order confirmation email — Immediately after ordering, customers received an email confirmation that the order is being processed and that tracking information would be provided as soon as possible. This small update gave customers confidence in the veracity of their order.
• Thanks to Metal Family's new bulk actions capability, tracking numbers on all subsequent orders have been supplied immediately after shipping, preventing further problems.
2. "Check your post office" email — This email was sent to the 1,000+ customers whose orders were silently awaiting pickup. It explained that since tracking information had not been shared, customers should contact their local post office and inquire after their parcel. In the majority of cases, customers easily found their comic book.
• This email also triggers for new customers if, for any reason, tracking information is not shared within 2 weeks of ordering.
During periods of high demand, these simple notifications are essential features that slash the number of WISMO requests and help put customers' minds at ease.
In the past 8 months, just 80 parcels have been returned to sender, compared with hundreds in the weeks before TrackMage was brought in. Even better, the number of parcels waiting at the post office has dropped from over a thousand to just 45, on average.
Since customers are better informed, parcels are being picked up much faster. Not only has this delighted customers, but easing the financial burden of missed deliveries has given Metal Family's cash flow and profit margins an enormous boost.
The stress on customer support staff has also been massively reduced, with the number of WISMO (Where Is My Order?) requests cut by around 70%.
DID YOU KNOW?
2,150+ Product Reviews—Collected on Autopilot
Product reviews are extremely powerful for increasing sales. But Metal Family had no system for collecting reviews for their online store.
Since TrackMage automatically requests reviews after a successful delivery, Metal Family now has 1,900+ product reviews without a second of effort.
3
Email & Shipping Validation
The majority of Metal Family customers could now receive full tracking information, regular updates and prompt deliveries—but many were still experiencing problems with email delivery and shipping problems.
The reason? Typos during online checkout.
Metal Family's improved system was sending out tracking information, but more than a third of orders had email addresses that bounced. Typos like "@gmaill.com" or "@gmaip.com" were extremely common, as were fake emails. Updates to these addresses always bounced and Metal Family had no other way to contact the customer.
At the same time, these enraged customers were bombarding customer support with angry messages with no idea that it was their mistake preventing their tracking updates.
There was a similar problem with shipping addresses: customers accidentally entered the wrong ZIP code or city, resulting in packages sent to the wrong addresses all over Europe. Many of these ended up in post offices, but others were rejected when the stated address didn't actually exist. This was an exhausting, frustrating and expensive problem for Metal Family.
Our developers built a custom script that automatically pinged every email address entered at checkout. This verified that the email address actually existed on the specified server. While tedious to perform manually, our script made this instant.
When a customer entered an invalid email, it was flagged as an error on the checkout page. Customers were encouraged to double-check their email before ordering. We implemented a similar check on invalid shipping addresses.
By verifying customer credentials in this way:
- Hard bounces on order status emails
dropped to zero.
- Misled packages due to wrong shipping addresses
dropped to zero.
TrackMage continues to improve the customer experience at Metal Family
Metal Family has been using TrackMage for nearly a year. In that time, their ability to fulfil online orders and delight customers has continually increased. They have also enjoyed:
