Typically, store owners rely on their shipping partners to provide tracking updates to their customers. However, carrier sites often lack the transparency and personalization that modern customers crave.
In many instances, customers are forced to go back and forth between the online store and the carrier’s website to find everything they’re looking for – which reflects poorly on the business. The good news? Robust shipment tracking solutions now exist to help you provide in-depth tracking details to your customers.
AfterShip and Navar Tracking are two shipment tracking platforms built to gather carrier data in one place. Their aim is to help merchants provide a better, more consistent tracking experience to their customers .
Both platforms have multiple strengths and allow you to add tracking capabilities to your website without coding. But which is the better option for your business?
In this post, we will show you a detailed comparison of AfterShip vs. Navar Tracking. The goal is to break down their unique features and differences to help you choose the best platform for your store.
AfterShip Vs. Navar Tracking: Platform Overview
Before we compare AfterShip and Navar Tracking head-to-head in various categories, it’s important that we briefly introduce the platforms.
What Is AfterShip?
AfterShip is a market leader in shipment tracking for ecommerce businesses.
With AfterShip, you can immerse customers in your brand from checkout to delivery by creating beautiful and responsive tracking pages that live directly on your website.
Plus, you can trace and track all your online orders from one interactive dashboard with tracking updates from over 800 carriers worldwide.
AfterShip also boasts many other capabilities to help you deliver the best tracking experience, including an order lookup widget, shipment notifications, and more.
Over 10,000 businesses worldwide use AfterShip to optimize their shipment tracking, including top-tier retailers like Harry’s, Wayfair, and Pandora
What Is Narvar Tracking?
Narvar Tracking is an ecommerce package tracking platform that allows you to keep customers up-to-date with timely order status notifications.
With Narvar, you can track shipments around the world and provide estimated delivery dates your customers can rely on.
Plus, you can set up responsive tracking pages and embed personalized recommendations to drive additional purchases.
Narvar customers include the likes of Neiman Marcus, Away, and The Home Depot.
AfterShip Vs. Narvar Tracking: How They Stack Up
Now that you have some idea of what each platform offers, let’s take a look at how they compare in terms of features, price, and customer service.
AfterShip Vs. Narvar Tracking: Features
There are certain features every shipment tracking solution should have to facilitate merchants and end consumers. These include:
Apps & Carrier Integrations
When choosing a shipment tracking platform, it’s crucial to check how easily it integrates with your existing systems.
With AfterShip, you can easily integrate shipment tracking into Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento, and more.
The platform also has apps for tracking eBay shipments, expanding courier range, and sending timely delivery emails to customers.
AfterShip integrates with over 800 carriers worldwide and counting. You can download and view AfterShip’s courier list to see if your preferred carrier is supported.
Narvar also integrates with ecommerce platforms, but most of its integrations are focused on enterprise ecommerce software. That’s a deal-breaker for small businesses.
Also, Narvar doesn’t support as many carriers as AfterShip. So, you might need to set up shipping accounts with certain carriers and relay tracking information through them.
The takeaway? AfterShip is the better option for merchants looking to integrate shipment tracking with other platforms.
Shipment Visibility
Customers are eager to know where their orders are at every stage of the shipment journey.
AfterShip gives you insightful tracking data in one place so that you can provide delivery updates faster.
Once you sign up, the platform asks you to enter your tracking number to receive tracking updates. It then automatically detects the carrier based on the tracking number format.
AfterShip delivers actionable insights to help you make insightful decisions. With 7 key statues and 33 sub-statues, you get to know the exact status of your shipments.
Moreover, the platform lets you find individual shipments easily by the carrier, delivery status, customer email, and other parameters.
AfterShip also offers other compelling benefits when you sign up for a plan, including,
- Automatic updates from over 800 carrier partners
- Unified order and tracking information
- Shipment status modification
- Bulk shipments import and export via CSV
Narvar shipping tracking is no slouch when it comes to visibility either — the platform lets you track shipments before they leave the warehouse. Let customers know when to expect their package, even before the first transit scan.
Narvar’s shipment tracking process works similar to AfterShip’s. You enter your tracking number in the Narvar tracking number field to receive tracking updates. The platform also reflects the latest carrier updates automatically instead of requiring manual checking.
Also, Narvar order tracking lets you combine order information with the company’s vast network of carriers to accurately track shipments worldwide.
However, Narvar does not list search and filter shipments as one of Narvar package tracking features. Unlike with AfterShip, you may have to specify shipments manually when using Narvar.
Branded Tracking
What’s one of the best ways to deliver a consistent shipment tracking experience? Sending customers to a branded tracking page.
A branded tracking page presents your brand and shipment details to your customers, keeping them well-informed and closely engaged with your business.
Both AfterShip and Narvar Tracking allow merchants to create branded tracking pages and drive additional revenue with personalized recommendations and upsells.
The AfterShip tracking page offers the following:
- One-click tracking enables customers to track orders at every step of the way in just one click.
- Multilingual tracking provides a consistent experience that adapts to customers’ language.
- Google Analytics integration offers powerful insights into post-purchase engagement of your tracking page.
- Redirect delivery option gives customers flexibility to send packages to another address.
- Instagram feed allows you to get creative and drive brand engagement with personalized product recommendations.
The Narvar tracking page also offers one-click tracking and personalized recommendations.
However, it lacks a few important things that are necessary to provide a consistent, on-brand tracking experience.
For example, you can’t create multilingual tracking pages in Narvar, nor can you integrate the platform with Google Analytics to gain insights into post-purchase engagement.
So, if you want to give an immersive experience to your tracking page visitors, AfterShip is arguably the better choice.
Pro tip:Make sure to put the tracking page link somewhere customers can easily find it. AfterShip allows you to add your tracking link to either your footer or header, or both.
Shipment Notifications
Customer expectations don’t end with a tracking link. 83% of customers expect regular communication about their packages. This makes shipment notifications a must-have for an engaging post-purchase experience.
And guess what — both AfterShip and Narvar offer excellent shipment notifications.
AfterShip allows you to send engaging SMS, email, and Facebook updates from the time an order is shipped to the moment it is delivered. It also lets you embed relevant product recommendations and engaging sales deals to drive additional purchases.
You can choose to send notifications to customers, email subscribers or yourself to stay on top of delivery incidents. Plus, you can personalize your email notifications with a super-flexible email editor to achieve high email engagement rates.
Narvar, on the other hand, lets you send shipment updates via Facebook Messenger and SMS — but not email.
You can manage communication preferences upfront, so your customers can stay informed through their favorite channels.
While both solutions are ideal for sending order updates, Narvar lacks email notifications that work better for delivering product recommendations and transactional updates.
Analytics
Monitoring your shipping performance can help you identify opportunities to improve. That’s why analytics are a core component of modern shipment tracking platforms.
With AfterShip, you get insights into shipping and post-purchase performance with an interactive dashboard.
You can evaluate your delivery rate, exception rate, and courier performance to optimize logistics.
Plus, AfterShip analytics lets you measure your CTR and customer engagement on your branded tracking page. You can use these insights to optimize a cohesive marketing campaign.
The platform also caters to merchants looking to prevent customer churn with customer review analytics. The feature offers a breakdown of start ratings, good and bad reviews, and customer feedback to give you a clear idea of where your brand is struggling or excelling.
You can then take steps to improve upon areas that lack proper expertise.
That’s not all – AfterShip also offers notification analytics that give you insights into SMS and email engagement. These metrics let you improve your notification content proactively if required.
On the other hand, Narvar users can leverage its self-service Hub to routinely measure performance, schedule marketing assets, and review feedback to optimize the customer experience.
Additionally, the platform lets you leverage data and configure rules to power smart deliver dates that impress and delight customers.
All in all, if you’re looking to get comprehensive insights into your shipping performance, both AfterShip and Narvar will have you covered.
AfterShip Vs. Narvar: Returns
AfterShip and Narvar also offer a self-service returns management portal that improves the returns experience for customers.
AfterShip’s returns portal allows you to gain visibility into all your returns to fasten your return process. It also gives you the ability to send proactive updates of return status to reduce inquiries and drive customer satisfaction.
What’s more, you can set up smart routing rules to ensure products are sent back to the right place at minimal cost.
AfterShip partners with 12 carriers for processing returns. You can apply the negotiated rates of your courier accounts to generate pre-printed labels. Alternatively, you can print discounted USPS return labels directly in the portal.
Need all your delivery and returns data in one place? AfterShip allows you to integrate the returns portal with its shipment tracking solution to easily monitor the delivery statuses of all your shipments.
What about Narvar? With Narvar returns, you get all the features you need to streamline the return experience.
For instance, you can easily configure return policies inside Narvar to eliminate confusion about which items in an order are eligible for return or exchange.
And with return item tracking and notifications, you can answer customers’ questions before they need to call.
Narvar also offers smart return routing like AfterShip — you can set it up to ensure items are sent back to the correct location at minimal cost. This way, you can get more intelligent about inventory planning.
In summary, both platforms do a great job in helping merchants deliver a fantastic returns experience.
AfterShip Vs. Narvar Tracking: Pricing
AfterShip has transparent and straightforward pricing, whereas Narvar Tracking requires you to contact the company to obtain current pricing.
AfterShip provides 4 pricing plans — and you can downgrade or upgrade an existing plan as your business requirements change.
- Free: $0/month, 50 shipments per month
- Standard: $9/month, 100 shipments per month
- Pro: $199/month, 500 shipments per month
- Enterprise: custom pricing, 25,000 shipments per month
All AfterShip plans also include 30+ apps & integrations, developer support, multi-user access ($5/user/month), ISO 27001 certification, GDPR compliance, and 99.99% monthly uptime guarantee.
Narvar pricing, on the other hand, is a mystery for most merchants. The company does not list pricing information for any of its products — and Narvar tracking reviews don’t reveal the cost either.
The only way to get an idea of Narvar’s pricing is to get in touch with the company, which is a practice generally followed by enterprise software companies.
So if you’re looking for a flexible shipment tracking solution that grows with you, AfterShip is the perfect choice.
AfterShip Vs. Narvar Tracking: Customer Support
Even the savviest merchants can require help while they’re navigating a technology platform. If your shipment tracking provider does not have a good support team that’s ready to help at any time, your investment could be jeopardized.
Thankfully, AfterShip and Narvar Tracking both offer a range of support options to help you along the way.
AfterShip offers 24/7 live chat and email support on its higher plans. Free plan users can submit ticket requests and get a reply within one business day.
For those who want to fix things on their own, AfterShip offers access to a Help Center featuring common user questions and their answers.
Narvar, on the other hand, provides users with access to a resource library with handy webinars, reports, and ebooks that inspire you to deliver a better post-purchase experience. However, 24/7 support is missing from Narvar’s range of customer support offerings.
In the end, AfterShip has the more superior customer support of the two platforms. Nothing beats 24/7 access to a support agent.
Conclusion: Which is Better for Your Business — AfterShip or Narvar Tracking?
AfterShip vs Narvar Tracking: we’ve looked at their features, returns portal, pricing, and customer support. Let’s recap on how they did in each area before sharing final verdict on both platforms:
Key Features | Narvar Tracking | AfterShip |
---|---|---|
Signle source of truth | Yes | Yes |
Search and filter shipments | No | Yes |
Tracking number detection | Yes | Yes |
Carriers support | 600+ | 800+ |
Branded tracking | Yes | Yes |
Personalized recommendations | Yes | Yes |
Instagram feed support | No | Yes |
GDPR compliance | Yes | Yes |
Shipment notifications | Y (SMS, Facebook Messenger) | Y (SMS, email, Facebook Messenger) |
Analytics | Yes | Yes |
Ecommerce integrations | Yes | Yes |
Unlimited products | Yes | Yes |
Return items tracking | Yes | Yes |
Smart return routing | Yes | Yes |
SMB-friendly plan | No | Yes |
24/7 customer support | No | Yes |
AfterShip is a great fit for businesses of all sizes, especially those who are looking to grow. AfterShip offers robust shipment tracking features, great returns management, transparent pricing, and 24/7 customer support.
Narvar Tracking can be the right option for larger businesses, but whoever considers it will need to spend time to learn about its salient features and pricing.
We definitely recommend using AfterShip if you want to get up and running quickly. Both are excellent platforms, but we believe AfterShip has an edge over Narvar thanks to its vast carrier network and clear pricing.
To get started, sign up for a 7-day free trial of AfterShip now.