5 Ways to Enhance Your E-Commerce Business’ Fulfillment

The world of e-commerce boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic. To survive and remain relevant, businesses shifted many operations online. This includes small business and retail operations of all kinds.

Vital to operating an online store is fulfilling an order. Once a customer places an order, they want their product to arrive quickly and without any hassle. But for that to happen, the online business must run a fulfillment center that can order supplies, store items, and dispatch them efficiently.

The Importance of E-Fulfillment

Fulfillment is how a company receives, stores, packs, and ships out its stock. It involves every process and action that occurs after a customer clicks the order button, right up to receiving their order. Many entrepreneurs believe that e-commerce is about branding and sales when it’s really about how well you can manage your fulfillment.

Customers demand that companies deliver their orders quickly and at a low cost. If your e-commerce business doesn’t have an efficient fulfillment strategy, it will either affect your customer satisfaction or run up your costs. It’s important to invest early on in your business’s life cycle.

Tips to Improve

You can be new to the e-commerce industry or a veteran—there are always ways to find an edge over your competition. Keep in mind the technology behind e-commerce is continually improving, which means there will always be new ways to improve your business.

1. Automate Fulfillment Process

Automation uses software to perform rule-based tasks. You set the rules and processes the software must carry out, and it will do it without a need for human intervention. Automation is essential to any fulfillment strategy because it is far much more accurate, efficient, and faster than what is possible with human staff.

Humans are very creative and resourceful, but they can come up short when it comes to repetitive, routine tasks. Automation can quickly eliminate human error from any process and run your operations with an accuracy that humans can’t match. By nature, human efficiency starts to wane after a lot of work, and they need to rest, while automated software and machines can run all day at maximum capacity without a break. Computing power advances every year, which increases the gap between what automation can complete compared to humans when it comes to task completion.

An automated fulfillment process can save your company time, money, and hours. For example:

• Your inventory management software can automate orders to your suppliers when stock levels reach a certain level. That way, your business will never run out of stock.
• Your storage needs to be well managed so the products are in the right place and can quickly move to dispatch while giving you real-time information. Automation can achieve this by linking RFID technology and warehouse management systems. You will know stock levels, location, and movement from your panel rather than having to go to the floor.
• Once a customer places an order, it must be packaged and shipped. Automated packaging machines can pack faster than humans at speeds of five times or more. They can also read packing slips to determine their destination in microseconds and have it at dispatch for carriage.
• In e-commerce, returns are widespread. A returned product must be re-entered into your system and appropriately stored. Automation ensures your inventory data is accurate in real-time and puts the product back in the appropriate location without errors.

2. Outsource Fulfillment

When you started your e-commerce business, you likely did your own fulfillment. It gave you control over the unboxing experience and enabled you to watch over every process. But after some time and growth, you may find it necessary to outsource your e-commerce fulfillment services.

Fulfillment is a necessary business process, but it isn’t the business. Outsourcing your fulfillment will allow you to focus on growing your business. You can now use your time, skills, and resources to enhance your business areas like sales, product sourcing, or online marketing.

Outsourcing can also reduce your costs, especially as your business grows. Employing staff and leasing warehouse space are long commitments that can affect your adaptability. If you outsource your fulfillment, you will only pay for the packages you manage and your space. Your business will also benefit from economies of scale as the outsourcing company can negotiate better deals with shipping companies.

If you handle your fulfillment, you will always be limited or hamstrung by the resources at your disposal. Outsourcing your fulfillment enables you to scale up or down at will. When business is low, you will not have the burden of high costs such as warehousing and staff. When business picks up, you will easily fulfill all orders without a significant increase in costs.

Traditionally, if you wanted to enter a new market, you had to research and sink money in the area until it became profitable. With outsourcing, you get to use the fulfillment center’s established network with no delays. That reduces your cost outlays and risk.

3. Embrace Technology on the Front End

To reduce sales friction, you need a system that makes ordering a product simple. For that, you need a flexible front-end infrastructure that can take an order in any form. That means your system should be able to take an order from your contact center, electronic data interchange, or file transfer protocol (flat file, text file, XML).

4. Communicate Effectively

In any relationship, communication is key. That includes the relationship you have with your customer. Communicate with them in real-time from order placement right up to delivery. It will help reduce the anxiety customers have about making an online order. You can provide order tracking to show the order’s location and how much time is remaining until they receive it. It would be best to let customers easily reach you about any worries concerning their order from multiple communication channels (email, chat, phone, and social media).

5. Prepare for Seasonal Demand

Each business has a period in which there is a peak, normal, and even a low demand period. It is not in your interest to overstock or understock your fulfillment center. You also don’t want to be under or overstaffed during these periods. Anticipating and preparing for these periods is partly experience, but nowadays, it involves data analysis.

The intelligent systems that run fulfillment centers can collect data from the past to extrapolate future demand. Powered by automation and AI, they can also analyze data in real-time to note any unplanned, extraordinary supply shocks.

Fulfillment Centers are the Core of E-commerce

Improving your fulfillment services is key to competing in the online space. Your customers expect a seamless process at little or no cost. The only way you can achieve this is if your fulfillment centers run at maximum efficiency.