Mobile App for Tracking Shipments and Managing Deliveries: Why We Were Perfecting It Instead of Launching New Features

All the main competitors had apps. Some with over a million downloads, others with tens of millions. It was obvious that such a service was attractive to users.

Most users visited the Boxberry website from smartphones. Mobile devices made up 70-75% of overall traffic.

Boxberry has its own powerful IT department, responsible for backend and frontend development. But they had no competencies in mobile development, so we decided to outsource it.

We picked the outsource team together with our IT department team leader. We both worked in agencies, so we knew what challenges to expect, and that helped us a lot.

We went on GoodFirms and looked at the first 15 companies. Almost half of them did not have complex projects in their portfolios, so we filtered them out.‍

Then, we scheduled calls with the remaining companies. Talked to one team, but then saw a 404 error on their case study page. Strange! A friend spoke extremely negatively about the other one.

Started presales with the teams who provided relevant portfolios and satisfactory first communication. At this stage, we looked at the specificity of their project proposals. Three teams did not have a deep understanding of the project: the managers could not even explain how this or that point appeared in the estimate. We got a feeling that our project was evaluated by managers, not art directors or team leaders.‍

As a result, we had to choose between only two teams. We collected feedback from their customers and rated each of the finalists by 20 criteria. And started working with the team that scored the most.

Boxberry values their brand reputation on the delivery market. Therefore, it was important to them that the mobile app was well-thought-out from the very beginning and did not raise negative feedback from customers. They asked their colleagues to test the app, collected all bugs and comments, and sent them back to us. It took us 3 months to make all the changes, and then the app was tested again. It took us another month to test the API.

The app was released in October, but we didn’t promote it until March. Firstly, we wanted to detect and eliminate even the rarest of bugs.

It’s easy to collect feedback through the app: customers readily report when something goes wrong.

After the launch of the Boxberry app, we learned that it was inconvenient for users to track orders. Almost half of the negative feedback was about unclear tracking. Customers did not have enough information about the exact location of their parcels along the way.

Tracking on the website and in the app are the same, but it was the app that showed us clearly that users were not satisfied. Currently, we are working on a new tracking system that would give more details on package location.

In app stores, users rate not only the app’s usability and performance, but also the delivery speed and service quality at the pick-up locations. Customers are always ready to share feedback if something is wrong with the package, but if everything is fine, they just quietly collect their parcels. This can result in lower App Store and Google Play ratings.

Users need more information at hand. The main reason why they installed the app was to track packages. We were also surprised to learn that the most popular app section was Frequently Asked Questions.

We continue to develop the app. Soon we are going to launch push notifications to help customers learn that the package has arrived. It’s also a good way to reduce the cost of notifications.

Boxberry uses SMS, Facebook and WhatsApp to notify users about package arrival. The company pays for these services. When we launch notifications, users will get updates first through the app, and only then through the other channels.

Boxberry International launched delivery to the USA on February 1, 2021. Now users can order package delivery in their personal website account. We are developing a similar function for our mobile app.

The company’s team is actively developing online products and is confident of providing customers with the best service in the market.

The Boxberry app took the second place in Best Consumer App (B2C) at the Golden App contest. For Boxberry, it is yet another proof that the work has been done with high quality.