The need to improve your ECommerce order fulfilment is the entire process your company goes through when you receive an order from a customer until it’s delivered. On the other hand, you’ll also have to deal with returns when customers want to send something back because they changed their minds, had a problem, or it needs to be fixed.
Order fulfilment is vital in organizations. This activity includes collecting and storing inventory, fulfilling orders, and managing the post-sales process. A company with an efficient order fulfilment strategy can eliminate costly mistakes, reduce shipping expenses, and save resources.
Meanwhile, to ensure customer satisfaction and avoid receiving bad reviews, you must find ways to enhance this process. For example, when a customer orders an item through your online shop, you must ship it to the buyer within a specific time frame to avoid cancellation.
Here are six practical strategies to improve your eCommerce order fulfilment process.
1. Maximize Storage Capacity
In business, storage is a function that includes handling items within the period of production up to the last step of the sales cycle. When you maximize your warehouse space, you’re likely to increase the efficiency of your company’s operational processes and avoid missing sales opportunities.
Since warehouse storage is vital in eCommerce fulfilment, you should maximize the capacity of your facilities. This process includes adopting a vertical racking system, decreasing aisle width, changing the storage medium, and using underutilized areas.
If possible, you should also consider investing in warehouse management software to help you track inventory and boost the efficiency of your inventory management processes.
2. Enable End-To-End Order Visibility
Order visibility is tracking the number of items inside a warehouse. You can monitor each order through the fulfilment and transportation processes by looking at the inventory activity. Doing so can help you determine the next best step to improve the process.
For example, if your business is overwhelmed with orders, you can provide fast customer service to avoid receiving multiple complaint emails. With order visibility playing a significant role in eCommerce fulfilment, business owners must enable end-to-end order visibility.
This strategy delivers transparency so you can monitor each movement affecting your business’s logistics. After that, you can provide real-time updates to your consumers and offer them assurance or resolutions.
3. Select Credible Suppliers
Suppliers are other businesses that deliver the materials companies need to create their products. These business-to-business (B2B) transactions aim to ensure that clients receive high-quality products at reasonable costs. If your company promptly receives supplies from credible suppliers without defects, it can reduce complaints and item returns from the end users.
Since suppliers are essential in the efficiency of online order fulfilment, you have to find credible ones. Remember to check the eligibility and qualifications of your potential suppliers to ensure their reliability.
Also, you must check the shipping locations of your potential suppliers and ensure they’re aligned with your organizational needs. In addition, you must assess if a potential supplier can produce sufficient supplies of their items to receive enough stock.
After looking for reliable suppliers, you have to frequently communicate with them to avoid receiving incorrect or damaged items and prevent shortages in supplies. Plus, you need to set clear communications to ensure transparency in reports so you can make the right decisions.
Nevertheless, you must consider automating this strategy using an advanced communications platform. This could help you update delivery statuses where everyone can easily edit and monitor updates.
4. Streamline Order Processes
Order processing is when the consumer places an order and your company confirms if the items are available. Next, you’ll collect the goods from the warehouse, send them to the sorting area, pack the product, and ship it to the client. Accurate and timely order fulfilment is ensured when businesses can easily verify stock levels and track order delivery.
Companies must streamline their workflow using an automated order processing system. You can use this technology to merge your digital store with other sales platforms. This will automatically confirm orders after online buyers place theirs.
As a result, you can enhance accuracy and eliminate manual errors in your business. In addition, you can also collect customer information like frequent delivery locations and the number of orders to help you make data-driven decisions.
5. Provide Real-Time Updates To Consumers
Companies must constantly assure their consumers that they’re making the right decision. So, once a customer places an order for a product, they’ll need to receive frequent notifications about the progress of the fulfilment process. When your company provides updates, your clients will continue to trust your brand and have a satisfying experience.
Significantly, you must communicate more to deepen your connection with your consumers. For instance, you can send notifications to your customers about the exact parcel monitoring information after it’s shipped. You can also use this strategy to alert them about delays so you can apologize immediately and avoid dealing with the consumers’ frustration.
6. Implement A Return And Refund Policy
In eCommerce, receiving item returns is normal because most buyers are trying their products for the first time and might need a size replacement. Therefore, it’s essential for your business to have clear procedures for customer returns and refunds. This will be useful in establishing the parameters under which customers can return items for a refund.
You’ll improve your relationship with your customers when you allow product returns since this initiative helps develop trust. However, creating a return and refund policy requires you to implement specific rules. Hence, you must address points clearly, stating if your business will accept exchanges, returns, and refunds within a period.
After that, you must include a list of all the products exempted from these returns and pin them on the company’s digital platform.
Key Takeaway
Online businesses must consistently deliver to the demands of their consumers so they can encourage them further to choose their brands. Thus, you must consider following these six strategies to improve your eCommerce fulfilment so you can constantly exceed the expectations of your loyal clients.
Once you do so, your customers can generate positive reviews and may even motivate them to create user-generated content (UGC), helping you attract more qualified leads.
You did a great job of highlighting the key factors that businesses need to consider in order to create a successful order fulfillment process.