Now that online shopping is boosting up consistently, it has taken increasing importance on how products/goods get to consumers and their delivery time. And due to several challenges, including supply chain and labor; logistics providers have suffered a lot from their own setbacks over the past few years. Which is one of the reasons why businesses prefer to use courier software for their logistics and fulfillment, nowadays.
However, today everything around us is quite competitive and the logistics industry is no exception to that. So online retailers should definitely address fulfillment issues to remain in the competition. Thankfully, there are various kinds of solutions available for you.
Strategies to Make Your eCommerce Fulfillment More Efficient
If we talk about the process of eCommerce order fulfillment– it starts way before a customer places an online order. Businesses should have the inventory and procedures in place to make sure that customers can get their orders as quickly and correctly as possible.
The following are the various elements of the procedure and how you can boost them:
Inventory Management
eCommerce businesses should always have enough amount of goods to be able to fulfill their orders. Which can be easily provided by manufacturers or suppliers. But the most important thing is to know the level of products to keep up with the consumer demand and deal with a seasonal sale. You have to face stock-outs and even lose customers if you have too little in your stocks. However, having too much inventory can also be pretty costly and inefficient.
How to Boost:
To enhance your procedure of eCommerce inventory management, you can take benefits from technology solutions. Particularly, a warehouse management system (WMS), that can help you in keeping track of what you have and provide you with the data you need to make more informed decisions about what you should keep on hand. This type of system also allows you to set automated re-order triggers so that you can avoid stock-out situations.
Order Management
The next feature in eCommerce order fulfillment is handling the orders placed by customers. When a customer places an order, what happens next? They assume that your warehouse must have started processing their order. And, if there is a delay, it can affect the customer experience.
How to Boost:
The best way through which you can make this process more efficient is to combine your whole eCommerce order fulfillment procedure via your warehouse management system. Also, customers get real-time visibility of inventory availability, and your warehouse will be notified of new orders so that they can begin with processing.
Picking and Packing
When your warehouse gets notified of a new order, those products should start moving in the right direction, that is, towards the customer. The first two steps in this procedure are picking- where a product is removed from inventory, and packing- where the item is packaged for shipping. If you’re not able to manage it properly, these processes can become pretty difficult.
How to Boost:
You can resolve such issues with the solutions like RFID codes and mobile warehouse technology, and easily improve the efficiency and accuracy of picking and packing activities. RFID gives your business easy access to inventory and order information.
Shipping
Once a customer’s ordered item has been pulled from the shelf and packed, it is required to be shipped. If your company doesn’t have good processes or shipping partners, then your orders will be bottlenecked in the procedure.
How to Boost:
It is crucial to keep your customers informed about all the available options and to have complete visibility of your supply chain when you provide them with so many choices. Additionally, you can partner with multiple shipping providers and consider using order fulfillment services to decrease the distance between the warehouse and the final destination.
Returns
Getting the items to the customers’ hands seems to be the end of the order fulfillment process, but it is not. Because some products take a reverse trip back to the warehouse in the form of returns. And, how you manage this procedure makes a huge difference in the customer experience and your results.
How to Boost:
Implement reverse logistics into your operation by creating processes to manage returns of items that come back through your doors. Also, your technology solutions will be quite helpful in keeping track of these products coming in the reverse direction.
Conclusion
This year alone, the global eCommerce industry is expected to hit a massive figure, that is, $5 trillion. This is a significant opportunity for those who have an online business or work in this industry. Try to apply some of the above-mentioned ideas to improve your eCommerce fulfillment strategy.
You can get help from our experts, who will tell you in detail how it could help your business grow by clicking here.
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