If you own an online store, your priority is always to have the highest possible website traffic coming to your platform to boost your online sales. However, every business these days seems to have problems regarding customer orders. According to 65% of retailers worldwide, the inability to fulfill orders significantly impacts their business revenue. Many people in business have expressed that shipping customer orders can be tedious and challenging.
With so many factors involved in the eCommerce world, your online store will likely have problems conducting the order fulfillment process. If you are new to business management, it is likely that your eCommerce store is committing errors and delays, and even wasting some of the valuable resources at your disposal. As a business owner who wants to improve customer relations, checking out your order efficiency is a good approach. The completion of orders can significantly impact the gaining trust of your respective customers.
What is Order Fulfillment?
Order fulfillment is when an online business receives, packages, and delivers a particular order to its customers. There is not one specific comprehensive system inclined with a company because too many delicacies are involved. Some companies have an in-house team told to fulfill orders, whereas the more prominent organiz ations are fulfilling orders independently. They turn to a third-party logistic service and try to complete the orders.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Regardless of whether you conduct this process on your own or hire somebody for this matter, the process remains the same. The steps involved in the order fulfillment delivery process includes:
- Receiving
- Storage
- Processing
- Packing
- Pick up
- Delivery
- Returns
Before you deliver the order, you must receive and store it via your in-house operations. Your fulfillment system must have the capacity to store the ordered product. If your warehouse is disorganized, it may cause delays. Most importantly, the fulfillment of orders doesn’t mean that you just deliver the product, and you’re done.
Importance of Fulfilling Orders
1) Company Reputation
Usually, your business's credibility is judged by how you satisfy your customers. As a business owner, you must fulfill your orders and ensure that your customers don’t have any questions before they leave your online store. If you cannot fulfill orders on your eCommerce site, your customers won’t waste a second abandoning your shopping cart. The lack of product fulfillment efficiency will result in your brand becoming off-color and your site having a low conversion rate.
If you continue to neglect the issues within your eCommerce order, your business will get tarnished and send a wrong message. It can hurt your brand. You can either do it yourself or give someone else the authority to do this. You can streamline your fulfillment process and highlight all incoming customer queries. Monitoring their questions can go a long way in building a good reputation for your company.
You can also speak about the achievements of your company in the introductory paragraph of your Strikingly website. There is no point in writing long storylines about your business background because it will just make your introduction boring. You must keep your introductory paragraph brief and to the point. Strikingly also provides its users with different font styles and a color palette, which makes their website content readable for the audiences.
2) Generate More Sales
If you have a simple sequential plan to fulfill order delivery, it can positively impact your business plans and generate more online sales. The concept, in this case, is very straightforward, i.e., the quicker you can satisfy your customers, the higher your request you will receive. Moreover, you will see a surge in your profit margins.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Before you think about your revenue objectives, it is important to look at the sequence in which the order fulfillment process goes. The clients are requested to click on the “place order” or “place request” button that they find on the website landing page. By clicking on this button, they can submit their order. Once the order is received by them, the fulfillment process begins. It also builds trust within the customers as they are guaranteed that their ordered products are looked after properly.
Tips to Boost Fulfillment Practices
1) Inventory Accuracy
If you have ordered a product and then find out that it is out of stock, there is no doubt you would be pulling your hair out. There is an occasion when the order fulfillment process may take weeks or even months to complete. When a business owner doesn’t fulfill orders properly, it is disappointing. If you have experienced this feeling, you must ensure that your customers don’t go through this feeling at all costs. If you have an appropriate order fulfillment system at your disposal, your customers will complete their orders without facing any problems.
The best way to do that is by creating a business website on Strikingly and being updated about your product stock. After establishing a quality eCommerce website on our platform, you can add all your relevant products at an appropriate price. You can bring customers to your platform and try to engage with them in the best possible way. You can create product categories in your product section, allowing your customers to get to their desired products easily.
2) Slotting Optimization
Even though this process is quite challenging, it can also benefit your business plan. You must be able to slot your deals with the picking process to fulfill orders comprehensively. Slotting optimization is helpful in product fulfillment as it ensures product organization and completes the picking process quickly.
The best approach for a business owner is to allocate your popular products closer to your delivery locations. It will accelerate the rate you want to complete your respective orders. Most importantly, putting these items close to the pickup locations can speed up your order management process. Another factor you need to consider is the storing and picking process, which must coincide with the measure, weight, and delivery particulars.
3) Suppliers
You won’t find many retailers in the current market that manufacture the products on their own. There is one external company (can be more) that helps you to fulfill order deliveries. However, the problem that arises with third-party logistics is that there is an understanding gap in how the products will get delivered.
For example, you may not know when your company responsible for completing orders undergoes any technical fault. There could also be a situation where your customers get broken products when they receive their orders. So what are how these eCommerce issues can get rectified? The best solution to that is to communicate with your service providers. You must have software that divides responsibilities between yourself and the service providers. This reduces any errors regarding miscommunications, such as errors in shipping costs, addresses, etc.
4) Smart Warehouse System
These systems have built-in technological features that will fulfill order delivery processes effectively. It removes the manual work simultaneously and increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the order process. It makes more sense to rely on human intelligence for more critical tasks rather than turning towards certain representatives to carry out the shipping of products.
Image taken from Strikingly
The warehouse systems contain essential components that help automate warehouse procedures. Another way to keep a check-and-balance regarding your delivered products is to build a business website on Strikingly and manually track orders via the order management system feature. Through the order management system, you will not only get the status of the products that are leaving the warehouse, but you will also have the recipients' details. You will get to know about the revenue you are going to attain from special product delivery.
5) Coordination with Supply Chain
The last part of the fulfill order delivery process is to improve the visibility of your supply chain management. When we talk about supply chain visibility, we talk about tracking, orders, and shipment activities to understand your business practices.
When you improve your supply chain visibility, you will identify the aspects that could be causing interference within your order fulfillment process. For example, you can find out that your laborers are the most significant cause of order delay. Apart from that, you can also find that the transportation facility is not up to the mark. You must have a proactive approach regarding all of these drawbacks, or you will see a decline in the customer satisfaction scores.
Conclusion
When you think about an online business, the first thing that springs to mind is the checkout process. How the fulfill order delivery takes place has a massive influence on your online sales and your brand reputation. There is no point in presenting your products with the best graphics when you don’t have an appropriate order management system to match those products’ quality.
You can carry out your business's orders by creating an exquisite business website on Strikingly. You can chat with our Happiness Officers if you struggle to accommodate any of the store features, such as a shopping cart, to your business website. A healthy order fulfillment plan can save your customers from multiple issues, as you see with orders in physical stores.
