How to Optimize your eCommerce Order Fulfillment Process to Boost Sales

The eCommerce order fulfillment is a complex process with a direct impact on customer experience and profitability. Right from the point when an order is placed till the point of delivery, there are lots of key factors involved that may change your business’s growth curve.

 

Taking up the right initiative for optimizing your order fulfillment process can help you fulfill increasing customer expectations concerning product quality, on-time delivery, and product returns.

 

In this guide, let’s have a look at the different steps you can take to make your order fulfillment process better and improve your ROI.

How Improving the Order Fulfillment Process can Boost your Sales?

Here are some ways in which optimizing your eCommerce fulfillment process can help you boost your sales and revenue:

 

  • Improve customer experience by offering quick deliveries and ensuring the quality of products, resulting in increased customer loyalty and customer lifetime value.
  • Identifying any bottlenecks in the process can help you save operational costs and improve ROI.
  • Switching to an automated system will help you reduce the occurrence of manual errors while lowering costs.
  • Optimizing inventory management and picking processes can also help to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.

 

All these factors will ultimately lead to more sales, increased order values, and increased revenue for your eCommerce business.

Strategies to Optimize your eCommerce Order Fulfillment Process

Now that you know the advantages of optimizing your order fulfillment process let’s look at some steps you can take to do so.

1. Automate your Order Fulfillment Processes

If you’re relying on a manual order fulfillment process, this might be the time for you to move on to an automated system. The fulfillment process involves lots of data entry work, which may lead to redundant, unnecessary work for your employees.

 

Moving to an automated order fulfillment process will help you minimize rework, and thus your employees can use that time to work on more meaningful tasks. Automation will also help you reduce the occurrence of manual errors related to order acceptance, shipment, picking, delivery, and invoice generation.

 

Start by investing in the right tools that will help you avoid most manual, repetitive tasks from the order fulfillment process.

2. Optimize your Picking System

Lack of an optimized picking system leads to workforce waste and reduced productivity. You can eliminate these problems by adopting tools that can help you with the proper tagging of your warehouse items.

 

Such a system will point to your inventory’s right locations and provide the shortest route for your picking staff. It will also help you combine orders that can be picked together, thus improving your entire picking process’s efficiency.

3. Minimize the Decisions to be Made by your Warehouse Staff 

When you rely on your warehouse staff to make important decisions, you are not just making the process less efficient, but you are also making way for errors in your order fulfillment process.

 

If you take the necessary measures to ensure that you don't leave any decisions at the mercy of your warehouse staff, you can make the process much more accurate and faster. 

 

For example, prioritizing orders, inventory storage, quality checks, packaging, return management, etc. - all these processes should be exactly how you want them to be. 

 

You can have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for your order fulfillment process to ensure that the decisions that need to be taken by your warehouse is minimized and everything goes on as expected.

4. Choose a Reliable Shipping Partner

If you see an increased number of product cancellations and negative customer reviews due to shipping problems, this might be the time to reassess your current shipping provider. Make sure that the shipping provider you pick is reliable and up to the mark.

 

You can make promises of quick deliveries to your customers. But you should also make sure that the shipping partner is capable of keeping up these promises.

5. Ensure that your Inventory is up-to-date

Having your inventory up-to-date is key to avoiding unnecessary out-of-stock situations where the customers are informed that the product is out of stock after making the purchase. This led to a bad customer experience and increased customer churn.

 

To avoid this, you must ensure that your inventory is up-to-date and there is no mismatch between your website and the actual products present in the inventory. Having an inventory management system can help you do this with great accuracy.

6. Track and Improve your Metrics

Finally, analytics and data may be of great help in optimizing the order fulfillment process. Tracking the right metrics will help you find bottlenecks in the process and improve upon them over time.

 

Analytics will also help you foresee any probable problems and find the root cause for any issues that you might be currently experiencing.

Final Thoughts

The eCommerce order fulfillment process is at the heart of any eCommerce business’s operations, and thus optimizing the process can bring about positive changes in many aspects of your business.

 

So, start implementing the strategies mentioned above right away to boost your sales and bring about a positive change in most of your business’s key metrics.