Ecommerce order fulfillment is vital to the success of your business. If you are not able to fulfill orders in a timely and efficient manner, you are going to lose customers and money. Fortunately, there are some strategies that you can look at which will help you fulfill all of your orders correctly.
Have The Ideal Location
A lot of people do not realize the importance of location when it comes to eCommerce order fulfillment. Location will impact the delivery costs and speed of your fulfillment which directly impacts the customer experience. Delivery costs need to be kept low while the speed of the delivery needs to be high.
To achieve these two objectives, you need to research your target customer. You need to know where the majority of your customers are going to be so you can have a fulfillment center close to them. Of course, this is not always possible, particularly if your eCommerce store supplies to customers across the country or the world.
To overcome the limitations you face, you should consider a third-party fulfillment center. If you know that you have customers on the other side of the country, you can send your products to a fulfillment center close to them. When you get an order, you will need to tell the fulfillment company and they will send your product. The same can be done with international customers, but you do need to consider the costs of this. Some fulfillment services will cost a lot more to use than others.
Integrate Technology
When many people start with eCommerce, they will manually complete a lot of steps. This could be the manual upload of data to management systems or inputting tracking information manually. All of this can be automated and you should do that to improve your fulfillment process.
Integrating the correct technology will also help you manage your stock levels. This is particularly important if you work with fulfillment centers. You need to be able to track what stock you have and where it is. This will ensure that you always have enough stock of an item to send to customers in the correct fulfillment center.
Consider Dropshipping
If you are new to eCommerce, you might not want to buy stock wholesale. This could be a cost that you are not able to carry or it not viable at the moment. If you want to introduce a new product that you are unsure about, you should consider dropshipping instead of in-house or third-party fulfillment.
With dropshipping, you will not own the product and will purchase it as and when you sell it from a wholesaler. The wholesaler will send the product directly to your customer with your brand information. Of course, to get the full benefits of dropshipping, you need to work with the right company. They should offer fast and efficient shipping to your customers.
Ecommerce order fulfillment can make or break a company. This is why you need to consider the different strategies you can use. Third-party fulfillment services can be helpful, but you can also use dropshipping from a reliable provider.