All That You Need to Know About eCommerce Order Fulfilment

For all those who do not understand what order fulfilment is—it is a sequential process of storage, pickup-up and packaging of products to ship them to the final customers. Of course, all this process needs to be initiated by the customer through online eCommerce platforms. An eCommerce company or a third-party logistics provider can handle this order fulfilment process.

eCommerce order fulfilment applies to both B2B and B2C orders. As soon as the customer initiates the purchase transaction on the portal, the fulfilment process commences. The status of order fulfilment needs to be informed to the customers on a timely basis so that they build trust in your services.

Would you like to know more about the order fulfilment process? Then, keep reading!

Determine your location wisely

Even if it is an online transaction, the physical storage of goods matters a lot in determining the shipping costs. You need to provide your customers with both the options, the regular service and the fast one, and levy charges accordingly. In the case of overseas orders, you need to be clear which countries you would be shipping.

Set a budget and determine your shipping zones accordingly. You can also adopt the optimization strategy by distributing inventory to multiple locations that are within reach of your prospective customers. In this way, you don’t have to incur repetitive distribution and shipping costs when the orders are placed.

Optimize and integrate technology for more convenience

Technology is the crucial factor that can amplify your orders and reduce costs. Making duplicate entries or entering information manually takes substantial time. Also, you need to incur costs on the staff to complete these monotonous tasks. Instead, you can consider technology as a blessing and blend convenient software into the eCommerce portals.

In this way, when an order is initiated by the customer, the software will intimate the fulfilment staff to initiate the process without waiting to make entries or seek confirmation. The system itself sends all the tracking details and feeds into the platform. These details are further shared with the final customers in the form of emails, SMS and push notifications.

Keep track of the inventory

The fulfilment process should be designed in such a way that you are not short of stock of products that are particularly in demand and during a specific season. You can be proactive while ordering more goods and prevent displaying the message, “Out of Stock” on the portal. If a particular product is out of stock, especially during the festive season, it can turn away the customer.

Choosing the perfect order fulfilment model

As a conscious eCommerce company, you need to choose an order fulfilment model wisely. You can evaluate several elements such as the nature of your products, the demand, demographics, managing orders, and free shipping services, and much more.

You can find three standard order fulfilment models—in-house, drop-shipping and third-party fulfilment. Each of this model has its pros and cons. It depends upon your business factors which model to pick up and implement.

Self-fulfilment model offers you complete control, but can be expensive. ECommerce order fulfilment services through a third-party provider is an affordable way to speed up delivery and save costs. An expert company will provide you with full customer satisfaction as well. Drop-ship model is a bit rigid but can be pretty affordable.

So, you can evaluate your business requirements, budget and do quick market research to choose a suitable order fulfilment model. It is not easy, and experimenting can be expensive, but you can adopt a strategic approach to it.