In any business, the process of accurately shipping customers’ orders is tedious and challenging. With the several steps to consider, there’s a high probability that your ecommerce store commits errors and delays, and even waste time and other valuable resources. Thus, as a business that is looking to boost its customer relations, understanding the process of order fulfillment and its importance can make a lot of sense.
What is Order Fulfillment?
Order fulfillment is the process of receiving, packing, shipping, and delivering an order to a customer. There is no sweeping system that works for each business because of the numerous interesting subtleties of every association. Some companies have an in-house team to fulfill order delivery, while other larger enterprises fulfill order delivery on their own or hire a third-party logistic services.
Whether you do it yourself or hire someone else, the process remains the same. Here is a brief step-by-step description of the process involved to fulfill order delivery.
1. Receiving
The first step to fulfill order delivery is receiving the order. In-house operations receive and store products directly while bigger associations can outsource this undertaking to third party logistic services.
2. Storage
Maintaining coordinated and easy-to-access storage is essential to a well-functioning order fulfilment system. An unorganized warehouse is bound to cause delays and inconvenience.
3. Processing
This is the part where the store receives the order and processes it to understand the requirement from the client. This is where the product to be shipped is identified.
4. Picking
This is the step where the desired item/s are picked. This can be completed manually or automated. Either way, the item should be procured from the warehouse and prepared for delivery.
5. Packing
As the name suggests, the required products are assembled according to their delivery status and prepared to be shipped.
6. Delivery
The package leaves the storage space and is dispatched to the client through one of numerous transportation techniques.
7. Returns
To fulfill order delivery doesn’t just mean that you deliver the order and you’re done. There are chances that clients may send packages back as returns. To successfully complete the order fulfillment process, the package must be collected from the customer and returned to the warehouse with the same care as it was delivered.
As long as your order fulfillment strategy is hitting these high notes, you are destined for success. Nonetheless, finding a procedure that enhances your company’s ability to fulfill order delivery can have a significant effect on customer satisfaction and, in the long run, on company revenues.
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Why is it Important to Fulfill Order Delivery?
• Encourages Customers to Buy Your Products
In an ecommerce business, order fulfillment delivery can build a positive image on your client. This implies that you need to guarantee a smooth order fulfillment cycle to draw in more clients and satisfy them with your product fulfillment efficiency. The more you live up to their expectations, the more you urge them to pick you over your competitors.
• Improves Company Reputation
Normally, consumers judge your business by the manner in which you deal with and satisfy their orders. Clients will abandon the shopping cart and your brand on the off chance that you can't fulfill the orders according to their requirements. If this occurs, your business' reputation will essentially be tarnished, prompting a domino effect of client disappointment, costs, and a wrong impression of the company. Either you do it yourself or get someone else to do it for you, streamlining the process and addressing customer grievances in an efficient manner can go a long way in building a good reputation for your brand.
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• Helps Generate More Sales
Having a simple process to fulfill order delivery can have many positive effects on your business, the main among which is generating more sales. The logic is simple; the faster you are able to satisfy customer requests, the more requests you are bound to receive, in turn raising your profit margins. In addition, clients are bound to tap the "place request" button when they can comprehend the fulfillment process behind the packing and delivery of their orders. It can also build trust among customers that their orders are handled with the utmost care, and they’ve got value for the money spent.
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Strategies to Boost Your Order Fulfillment Practices
Like we said before, there is no marvelous order fulfillment process that works with every business. You must try out a couple of gloves before you can find the perfect fit. If you’re looking to change how you fulfill order delivery, then you need to follow these 5 industry best practices and upgrade your order fulfillment process.
- Keep up Inventory Accuracy
- Execute Slotting Optimization
- Coordinate With Your Suppliers
- Add a Smart Warehouse System
- Improve Supply Chain Visibility
1. Keep up Inventory Accuracy
Have you ever ordered an item online just to discover that it's unavailable, and that you will not get it for a few days or even months? It's disappointing, right? On the off chance that this happens to your clients, you must ensure a system that can fulfill order delivery with minimal obstacles. The best way to do this is to maintain your inventory.
Keeping track of stock is essential for well-functioning warehousing activity. Continuous cycle checks help guarantee that clients can't order products that are unavailable or inaccessible for procurement. Setting up warnings that shield clients from these sorts of buys can boost customer satisfaction and trust and set you up as a customer-central business.
Continuous stock administration keeps satisfaction distribution centers coordinated, which helps keep interior frameworks exact and smoothed out for use. Having the option to reliably check in with stock levels permits overseeing staff to settle on significant decisions. Continuous perceivability shows how likely the requirement for sloped up or diminished creation is for a specific item. Overabundance stock can be dangerous; nonetheless, a fruitful stock administration arrangement ought to consistently be attempting to eliminate pointless stock.
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Finally, if your online store doesn't permit your clients to buy unavailable items, it'll help maintain your customer satisfaction levels and avoid confusion. As such, you don't need to oversee future orders of items; you just need to stress over satisfying client orders where each item can be delivered immediately.
2. Execute Slotting Optimization
This might be quite challenging to carry out, but helpful at the same time. Slotting deals with the picking process in your distribution location. Slotting operations is the practice of proficiently organizing your products to speed up the picking process.
A mainstream and compelling approach to deal with this is by putting popular items close to delivery regions to accelerate the rate at which you can fulfill order delivery. Furthermore, storing these popular products in areas that ease the efforts to reach them can likewise speed things up.
Another aspect of slot optimization is the storing and picking process which need to correspond to measure, weight and delivery particulars. The most delicate items should be picked last so that they're stuffed last and will not get squashed by heavier things. In this way, more delicate things should be put away in a space where they'll be picked last.
3. Coordinate with Your Suppliers
Not many online retailers manufacture the items they sell. This implies there's one other organization (probably more) that you depend on order fulfillment delivery to your clients. But one of the fundamental issues with third-party logistics is the gap in understanding exactly how every product is shipped.
For instance, you may not generally know when your company that will fulfill order delivery encounters a delay or some technical issues. So how would you fix this issue? The most ideal approach to do this is to integrate with your service providers.
This requires software that can divide information among you and your providers, so you can monitor the everyday tasks related to product and order fulfillment. Moreover, it can reduce or even completely stop issues with miscommunications, like errors in the shipping address, cost, etc.
4. Add a Smart Warehouse System
Smart warehouse systems are getting progressively typical in the present warehousing market. These systems use several interconnected technologies to support the efficiency and effectiveness of automating the process that will fulfill order delivery, simultaneously eliminating manual work. It makes more sense to use human intelligence for more critical tasks than sending representatives out to locate an item in a warehouse and carry it to shipping.
These frameworks include several components that can automate the warehousing practices, thus making order fulfillment more efficient. A portion of these advances incorporates mechanical technology, radio-recurrence recognizable proof (RFID, a computerized barcode that utilizes radio waves), AI, the Internet of Things, and warehouse management systems.
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How do these advances cooperate to streamline the order fulfilment process? Let’s take a look at the slotting and picking process. At the point when you receive an order request for the shipment of products, RFID scanners scan the tags for every item, automatically refreshing the stock levels. Robots take over from that point, putting away those products so they can be picked. Other robots help pick those items and carry them to the packing region to be shipped.
Technology not just reduces human error but also the time it takes to store and pick those items. Besides, this also decreases the number of employees that you would normally require for carrying out the work, having a direct impact on your finances.
5. Improve Supply Chain Visibility
The last procedure that can help smooth out how you handle order requests is improving the visibility of your supply chain management. Supply chain visibility includes tracking production, orders and shipment activities to gain insights about the functioning of your business practices.
At the point when you improve supply chain visibility, you can discover amazing bits of knowledge into what might be harming your order fulfillment process. For instance, you may find that consistent delays from laborers can hinder production at a specific point. Or on the other hand you could find that your transportation merchant utilizes sub-optimal routes, affecting your customer satisfaction levels.
It's impossible to imagine some of the things that can come in the way while you fulfill order delivery until you improve your supply chain visibility. In any case, when you do discover something, you can find sufficient ways to fix it. Thus, your order fulfilment process will run as expected, saving you time, cash, and a bunch of issues related to the order.
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Strikingly is an intuitive platform that not only lets you create a free online store and kickstart your ecommerce business, but also streamline the process to fulfill order delivery. Strikingly’s Simple Store is a one of a kind ecommerce platform that gives you access to the latest product services among ecommerce website builders.
