With such a high demand for fast and efficient shipping, streamlining your eCommerce fulfillment process is more critical than ever.
Today’s customers are more demanding than ever when it comes to online order fulfillment. It’s likely that you’ve dealt with a few impatient customers who kept phoning and emailing regarding their orders. Answering these inquiries could eat up time for you and your staff, especially if an issue arises after the product has been shipped.
If handling order fulfillment is taking up too much of your time, headspace, and money, it’s time for a change. Whether you use a fulfillment center or keep duties in-house, here’s how you can restructure your order fulfillment process to best fit the needs of your growing eCommerce business.
1. Offer Package Tracking
Customers love having the power to track their orders. Implementing a package-tracking system is one way to improve your fulfillment process. Simply include a tracking number and an expected delivery date in your receipt confirmation email. If you’re not particularly tech-savvy, you can hire a developer to include this functionality into your website instead. In either case, you’ll spend less time answering calls and more time processing orders.
2. Think Through Your Promises
Fulfillment can become a burden when you’re constantly trying to fulfill promises you made to your customers. For example, don’t offer free delivery on all orders if your product is too heavy or bulky to support those claims.
You can streamline your fulfillment service by ensuring your offers make sense for each product. Share specific directions to avoid customer confusion and annoyance. For instance, if a product isn’t eligible for expedited shipping, disclose that in the product description prior to the cart.
Standardizing regulations on your website also leads to consistent practices in your warehouse. This will simplify the job of pickers and packers and help your staff identify concerns.
3. Set Achievable Expectations for Employees
Setting achievable expectations for your employees is another way to step up your eCommerce fulfillment strategy. Working on the floor in order fulfillment is a physically demanding profession. If you look closely, you will find exposé after exposé on illegal labor practices by some of the world’s greatest eCommerce corporations– don’t become one of these businesses.
Instead, set realistic rules and expectations that will keep employees happy and your business growing. At the end of the day, these are the people who view your product for the final time before your consumers receive it, so you should have confidence in their abilities. Their obligations must be attainable, their pay must be competitive, and their work environment must be fair for you to retain the quality your customers expect.
4. Separate Similar Products Well
Accurate picking can be difficult when you sell plenty of similar products. Selling different sizes of the same shirt, two types of red sweaters, a dozen jean varieties, or goods in bundles of certain-sized bottles could be examples of this. When filling an order, a picker in a rush or one new to your firm can easily confuse one for the other. To combat this, ensure similar items are located away from each other.
5. Organize Your Warehouse
If your warehouse is starting to look like a life-size maze, it’s time for a refresh. Organizing your warehouse can be a game-changer for your fulfillment strategy, so here are a few ways to do so:
- Always prioritize safety first
- Create or update your floor plans
- Group items thoughtfully
- Build or purchase more shelving or storage systems
- Establish a good sense of flow throughout the room
- Regularly schedule time for maintenance and inspections
- Use inventory management software
6. Match Customer and Warehouse Locations
By sending products from the warehouse nearest to the client, you can speed up and streamline the eCommerce fulfillment process while also making it more economical. Use location data to decide which of your or your fulfillment partner’s facilities fulfills a particular order if you manage several locations. Not only may you save money by shipping through fewer zones, but you can also save by skipping expedited options while still making your delivery deadline.
7. Offer an Easier Payment System
For all online sellers, the roughly 75% cart abandonment rate continues to be a concern. Although the cause of cart abandonment varies, the ease of payment is certainly up there.
For some people, security is their top priority. People worry about their financial information as data breaches are becoming more frequent. Others leave because their preferred payment option is not accepted. Some people only make one type of online payment, and they simply won’t buy if they can’t use it.
Make sure your customers can immediately understand the price as they view a product. Customers hesitate when only foreign money is used for the purchase information. Your fulfillment services should convert shipping costs and pricing into the local currency for international customers. Choose a reputable payment processor that accepts local currency payments.
8. Outsource Help
You can avoid most of the problems above by outsourcing all or some of your fulfillment duties to an order fulfillment center. These companies handle a large portion of the data gathering. Specifically, they monitor significant performance measures like order volume, pick accuracy, and overall throughput.
Fulfillment centers are also responsible for handling refunds, logging tracking numbers, and reporting order shipping. They track their own inventories, so you don’t have to.
Outsourcing your fulfillment services offers other supplemental, yet significant, advantages, including:
- You are no longer responsible for hiring or training personnel
- Cheaper and faster shipping
- Accessible warehousing
- Scalability
- Optimal order fulfillment software
Streamline Your Order Processing Method with MintFulfill
If you’re ready to simplify your eCommerce fulfillment process, it’s time to work with Mintfulfill! We are a fulfillment firm that focuses on exceptional customer service and cutting-edge order fulfillment techniques. We handle the costly difficulties of shipping and fulfillment for our clients, allowing them to boost revenues and improve customer happiness.
Please don’t hesitate and reach out today!