A Statista report says that the global eCommerce industry is expected to reach $5 trillion in 2022. So, if you run an eCommerce business, you will have to gear up to fulfil customer demand efficiently. A solid eCommerce fulfilment strategy will let you offer maximum customer satisfaction while improving your brand value. Now, let’s understand the strategies you can use to get started with optimising the order fulfilling process.
Strategies To Improve Order Fulfilment Process
1. Examine Fulfillment Center Location
The location of your warehouse or fulfilment centre can affect your services and order fulfilling expenses. You need to have a fulfilment centre that allows you to reach a larger customer base within 1-2 days. For example, if you have a warehouse somewhere in Delhi and most of your customers are located in the southern part of India, you will have to spend high to ship your products. Plus, your orders will take longer to get delivered due to the distance between the two locations.
As your order cycle time largely depends on your fulfilment centre’s location, you need to store inventory near your customers. In today’s fast-paced world, customers don’t wish to keep waiting for their online orders. If they don’t receive products within their expected timeline, they would simply move to your competitor. So, to stay competitive and customer-friendly, you must pay attention to the delivery timelines.
2. Consider Your Freight Expenses
The location of your eCommerce fulfilment centre can greatly impact your overall logistics expenses. Analyzing your customers’ order patterns and your freight forwarding costs by location is imperative. Since you can’t have warehouses in all the locations around the country, storing products in third-party fulfilment centres would be quite beneficial. You can hire NimbusPost’s worldwide fulfilment centres to store your goods near your customers and reduce the overall shipping costs. Along with free storage for 15 days, you will get benefits like same-day/next-day delivery, reduced delivery time by up to 30-50%, reduced returns by nearly 20%, and more.
3. Analyze Your SKU Count By Location
Matching all the SKUs across all fulfilment centres isn’t always cost-effective. Sometimes, it only introduces needless expense. However, you can carefully analyze the right technology and order management process that help you determine the inventory levels to carry at each storage centre.
4. Organise Your Order Management Processes
Freight costs, service level, and inventory levels all influence efficiency and order fulfilment expenses. All these factors need to be well-synced to balance customer loyalty along with operational expense management. You have endless possibilities if you use the right technology to ensure specific operational expenses.
5. Evaluate Your Sales And Growth Projections
You must know how much you need to invest in building a fulfilment centre network. If you’re setting up a personal warehouse, it is likely to be an expensive affair. To eradicate such expenses, you should hire a third-party fulfilment centre to store your inventory. All you need to ensure is that the storage services come with insurance and are the right size and type to accommodate your products. As you may need more space during a particular time of the year, your fulfilment centre should be able to provide you with storage space for more products in need.
6. Evaluate Your Current Fulfillment Strategy
It’s important to evaluate your current fulfilment strategy to analyze if you have any efficiency problems with current logistics or storage. Know, if you are struggling to keep your order fulfilment process in line with the customers’ requirements. Find out if you need to spend more time on improving your company’s core operations. If you do, then you need to hire a logistics partner that offers comprehensive benefits along with good order fulfilment advantages.
Above all, your fulfilment partner should also have proven experience in successful deliveries. Avoid partnering with a fulfilment centre that is infamous for high RTO, damaged shipments, etc. As you take note of the above points, you will be able to offer faster shipping and higher satisfaction to your customers. As timely order fulfilling methods can help you improve your brand value among your valuable clients, keep improving your fulfilment process to make it more customer-oriented which will eventually reflect in your business growth.
