Your ability to meet customer demands through accurate and timely order fulfillment is perhaps the most essential competitive differentiator your business can leverage. There are a lot of moving parts for an order to end up at the customer’s doorstep—and plenty of room for things to go wrong. From receiving orders to picking, packaging, documenting, and shipping goods through third-party logistics, if you are not at the top of your game, customers will look for someone who is.
Don’t let eCommerce order fulfillment become a frustration for your best clients. Continue reading to learn more about the top order fulfillment challenges and how you can solve them.
Problem 1: Lacking Inventory Management
Without organized inventory support, business profits can go south quickly. If you can’t locate inventory due to poor organization and technology support, you will experience shipping delays and angry customers. When operating a warehouse, fulfillment center, or DC, it’s vital to know where your inventory is located, how much is available, and whether or not it is damaged. All of these factors must go into your strategy for a successfully operating warehouse.
How to Solve It: Management Support
The best provider can offer several mobile solutions to support your eCommerce order fulfillment. From warehouse labels and signage to voice capabilities, you need support in all areas of your warehouse for increased productivity and order fulfillment accuracy. Voice-directed solutions can help automate a growing number of labor-intensive logistics functions, including: picking, receiving, loading, replenishment, and put away.
Mobile solutions can also provide your enterprise with real-time inventory visibility via RFID technology (radio frequency identification), while eliminating manual data entry and processing bottlenecks. Take time to research companies that offer software to improve automated scanning of assets and overall supply chain management.
Problem 2: Flawed Logistics
When it comes to scaling your business, your efforts can come to a halt if there are flawed logistics within your warehouse. Always remember that the shipping process is just as important as making the sale. Inventory should be in the right place at the right time, or else you risk late, broken, or missing packages, which can hurt your reputation and lower sales. As a business, you don’t want your eCommerce order fulfillment workflow to deteriorate with slow shipping times, poor product quality, and disorganized processes if you can help it.
How to Solve It: On Point Automation
With the proper technology, automation support is a priority when it comes to eCommerce order fulfillment. As your business grows, your orders will grow, meaning if you don’t have a handle on your shipping and warehouse productivity, you’re on a fast track to losing business. Streamline your warehouse with automation tools to quickly dispatch orders. Mobile computers, rugged tablets, and barcode scanners will all help your warehouse and employees in fulfilling orders quickly and with ease.
Problem 3: Poor Customer Service
Regardless of the industry you’re in, customer service is paramount for the success of your company. And with so many eCommerce companies vying for the attention of the same people, providing excellent customer service is essential for success. The problem is that most enterprises don’t consider their customer service support as part of their ecommerce order fulfillment process when in reality, customers want to hear from businesses directly. The more information you can provide to solve their issue, the better.
How to Solve It: Prioritize Customers
When it comes to customer service, most users expect a direct message anywhere from an hour to a day. Be sure to respond within a reasonable time to happy customers and to those who were less-than-satisfied with their experience. Installing an artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot on your website is the best way to answer customer queries, especially if you don’t have the budget to hire staff to wait by the phone. To limit the number of calls and emails, offer a FAQ section on your website regarding past challenges that may arise.
Organize eCommerce Order Fulfillment with Peak
Peak Technologies has over 30 years of experience streamlining warehouses and providing services and solutions for improving your eCommerce order fulfillment process. To overcome the top challenges your business faces, connect with one of our experts to learn how we can better organize your enterprise. What’s more, you can download our free eBook on the Definitive Guide to Warehouse Metrics to learn the performance indicators you need to know to overcome fulfillment challenges.
