Faster delivery and transparent estimates help NXTRND increase shopper conversion and sales nearly 9%

As more and more consumers shop online—and across more channels—their expectations continue to evolve. Today’s consumers expect more convenient shopping experiences and increasingly faster order fulfillment. They don’t hesitate to abandon their cart if the checkout process is cumbersome or order delivery isn’t fast enough. In fact, the average amount of time consumers expect to wait for their online orders is only 2.15 days, according to Wonderman Thompson’s 2023 “The Future Shopper Report.” And despite the drop from 2.36 days in 2022, the No. 1 thing global consumers would change about online shopping is even “faster delivery.”

For sports apparel and accessories brand, NXTRND, fast order fulfillment is important to its customer base, made up primarily of young athletes who have grown up in the era of instant gratification and who often “wait until the last minute to buy gear for the football season,” says Co-Founder and CEO Liam Burger. By selling on Amazon.com, NXTRND can offer fast, reliable fulfillment through Amazon and, at times, same-day delivery for Prime members.

Launched by Liam and his brother Dylan in 2018, NXTRND started on Amazon.com with its flagship product, a mouthguard initially intended for snow sport athletes that quickly became beloved by football players. Seeing this trend, the team quickly pivoted to cater specifically to the football space and started building out a complete NXTRND Store on Amazon.com “so that the athlete could come to one place and get dressed head to toe in our football gear,” Liam says.

NXTRND had a brand site from the beginning, but the team didn’t sell its mouthguard there until they spent a few years growing on Amazon.com, improving their products based on customer reviews, and solidifying a strong product portfolio.

Then, in 2021, the brothers believed in their brand and collection of products enough to reinvest in NXTRNDUSA.com. But this now meant that they were responsible for the end-to-end shopping experience, including order fulfillment. Up until that point, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) was handling the storage, picking, packing, and shipping for orders on Amazon.com. “We’ve been really happy with our experience with FBA and we noticed how shipping speeds really affect customer satisfaction and conversion,” Liam says. “So when creating our website, we wanted to offer the same kind of experience, or at least an experience as close to that as possible.”

The team was also conscious of their core customer base’s shopping behavior and the seasonality of the industry. Customers historically purchased the most in the months leading up to and in the start of the football season and needed their gear delivered fast. For NXTRND, this meant providing fast, reliable order fulfillment and keeping customers abreast of delivery dates. In fact, in the early days of selling on its ecommerce site, the customer service team would often receive emails, from both shoppers browsing the site and customers who had placed orders, asking when they would receive the gear.

Ultimately, NXTRND needed a third-party logistics provider (3PL) that could:

• Deliver a fulfillment experience like Amazon. Both the NXTRND team and its customers had gotten accustomed to the fast, frictionless click-to-delivery experience on Amazon.com.
• Provide fast, reliable fulfillment during the busy football season—and throughout the rest of the year. The 3PL needed to be able to handle the surge in orders in late summer, picking, packing, and shipping orders efficiently and delivering them to customers’ doorsteps on time.
• Give shoppers visibility into delivery dates. Knowing that they’ll get their gear in time for the first day of the football season is critical for NXTRND’s customers.

Because of NXTRND’s positive experience with FBA, the team explored 3PL services offered by Amazon. They were in luck: Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) provides fast, reliable fulfillment for orders placed through ecommerce channels beyond Amazon.com, including brand websites, social media stores, and other ecommerce marketplaces.

“Because our product collection was already in Amazon fulfillment centers, it made the most sense to use MCF to fulfill orders from our ecommerce site. And we could do that by simply connecting our website to our Amazon account through an app,” Liam explains. “There were just too many benefits with MCF to not use it as our 3PL.”

Using MCF as its 3PL for NXTRNDUSA.com, the team had the fulfillment capabilities it needed to drive growth on the brand’s ecommerce site. In addition to providing a fulfillment experience similar to what NXTRND customers got on Amazon.com, MCF:

• Ensures fast, reliable delivery: Using MCF, NXTRND could tap into the world’s largest fulfillment network. With the brand’s inventory strategically distributed across Amazon fulfillment centers around the world, the team felt confident that orders would be fulfilled rapidly and reliably. Amazon’s fulfillment network has an average click-to-door speed of 1.9 days (Nielsen IQ), and MCF has a greater than 97% on-time delivery rate (based on all MCF orders placed and delivered in 2023 in the contiguous United States).
• Leverages a single pool of inventory: MCF fulfills orders using the inventory that NXTRND already has stored at Amazon fulfillment centers for its FBA orders, which helps simplify inventory management. “Having one pool of stock across our two channels also makes it a lot easier to track and forecast inventory so we can reorder and send in more inventory to stay on top of demand,” Liam says. This is particularly important during NXTRND’s busy season from July to September.
• Provides transparent delivery estimates: Using the MCF fast badge, NXTRND can display real-time delivery estimates based on each shopper’s zip code directly on its product pages at the critical point in the journey when shoppers need it. For football players who need their gear before next week’s practice, for example, this information could be the difference between a completed purchase or a lost sale. It could also mean less strain on the customer service team, Liam adds. “If we’re able to answer shoppers’ questions about delivery dates right on the product page, then they won’t have to email us.”

Using MCF as its 3PL has helped NXTRND provide a world-class experience to shoppers on the brand’s website, similar to what they would get on Amazon.com. Athletes can shop NXTRNDUSA.com and see real-time delivery estimates across the brand’s product pages, and then check out with their preferred shipping speed. Either way, the customer knows when they’ll receive their order and can feel confident that their order will arrive on their doorstep on time.

“Having those really fast shipping speeds visible, there’s no hesitation to buy when the shopper can see that they’ll get the order as fast as tomorrow, especially when the shopper might have waited until the last moment to place their order,” Liam says. “It totally reduces the friction around buying and delivers a better customer experience.”

What’s more, MCF has shortened its five-day standard shipping speed down to three days and three-day priority shipping down to two days, at no extra cost to merchants or shoppers. “We’re always trying to find ways to make our customers happier, and faster shipping speeds at a less expensive price is a major benefit on our website,” Liam says. “With the updated rates for standard shipping, shoppers are basically paying for five-day shipping, but getting three-day—or faster.”

With the faster delivery speeds from MCF, NXTRND has been able to improve the average click-to-delivery speed of orders on its website to 1-2 days, compared to 3-5 days previously.

Liam emphasizes how important this is as the football season approaches: “The important part for us is being able to deliver on those speeds. It really allows us to perform where others probably couldn’t.” In the third quarter of an average year, NXTRND ships out more than 50% of total units for the year from site orders alone.

Since adding MCF fast badges to its product pages in November 2023, NXTRND has also seen an increase in shopper conversion and sales. In an A/B test conducted in May 2024, results showed an 8.3% uplift in conversions and an 8.9% uplift in total sales.

“Having the delivery estimate visible right under the ‘Add to cart’ button provides more transparency in the shopping experience,” Liam says, “so shoppers have an easier time trusting the brand.” Not only does the increased confidence boost conversions and sales, but it also means fewer customer service inquiries, which positively impacts NXTRND’s bottom line and frees up resources to focus on other aspects of the business.

And with the 8.9% sales uplift, “our top line increases, so we can spend more on marketing and developing products,” the co-founder explains. “The more that customers are able to experience our products and see the quality, the more easily we can expand our product line.”

He adds, “We’re always trying to find ways to make our customers happy, and this all contributes to a better customer experience. Retention is based on the experience that our customers have, and in the game of ecommerce, retention is everything.”