6 Ecommerce Order Fulfilment Best Practices

Whether you’re targeting customers in the B2B, B2C or B2B2C space, you online business needs to ensure that your ecommerce order fulfilment is an asset rather than a liability. Indeed, customer expectations have never been higher, and delayed shipments, incorrect orders, or any other fulfilment-related problem can do more than just lead to a cancelled sale: it can terminate a valuable customer relationship, and be a win for the competition.

To ensure that your online business meets customer expectations – or better yet, exceeds them – here are six ecommerce fulfilment best practices that drive success stories, and prevent cautionary tales:

1.  Optimize Inventory Management

Having the right inventory, in the right place, and at the right time takes highly controlled inventory management. Focus on areas such as stock level accuracy, future demand forecasting, and space allocation to ensure that you never have to guess or hope that you’ll get an order out on time, but instead you’ll confidently know that it’s a done deal.

2.  Improve Overall Warehouse Management

Whether your warehouse is several thousand square feet – or perhaps a few hundred – the fact remains that an inefficient or poorly designed warehouse management workflow will invariably cause ecommerce fulfilment problems. Key improvement areas to focus on include stock transfers and monitoring multiple stock access points.

3.  Enhance Inventory Transparency

You may have sufficient transparency when it comes to their main warehouse, but what about your channels, such as affiliates, resellers, channel partners, and so on? Real-time inventory insight across all sales channels is vital to delivering exceptional customer satisfaction, while keeping an eye on efficiency and costs.

4.  Augment Order Management

It’s critical to keep a close eye on both order status, and order notification. Auditing these areas often reveal gaps that, once closed or fixed, significantly improve overall fulfilment effectiveness and efficiency.

5.  Improve Shipping Flexibility

Shipping is now an integrated part of the overall customer experience, which means that you have the opportunity to strengthen valuable relationships, and establish competitive advantage, by making fulfilment memorable for all for all of the right reasons. Improving shipping flexibility and giving customers more choice are key ways to make this happen. For example, customers can choose to have multiple items shipped at different times (and choose the order they receive them), or they can have the same item shipped to multiple locations, and so on.

6.  Use a proven ecommerce order fulfillment solution.

Last but certainly not least, a proven ecommerce order fulfilment solution is vital for establishing the backbone and tools to drive all of the above best practices. Ensure that you choose a solution that: is cloud-based and secure, frees up your resources, gives you control and visibility over your fulfilment activities, and liberates your team from the stress of having to get every order out accurately and on time.