How do you improve your order fulfillment process with an ecommerce order management system?

What is ecommerce order management?

eCommerce order management system is the back-end procedure for managing and fulfilling online orders. Everything is handled, from order routeing to shipping label printing to refunds.

Order management has always depended on cumbersome ERPs and manually updated spreadsheets. Today’s brands and marketplace sellers cannot be supported by these old systems and outmoded procedures. Brands need flexible, scalable, and adaptive solutions to be competitive. They require operational technology that can scale in response to changes in demand and the industry. An order management system can help with this.

Order Management System for Ecommerce

Order management systems (OMS) enable automation and integration at every stage of the order journey. As a result, businesses can deliver consistent consumer experiences across all channels at scale. Operators can use eCommerce order management systems to manage orders that come in from a variety of sales channels and leave from a variety of fulfilment locations. It unifies service provider automation and data into a single user interface.

A successful order management strategy relies on real-time data. Data is being passed via many levels of sales channels, technological platforms such as BigCommerce, and operational infrastructure in the retail industry. It’s hard to rely on static spreadsheets with that much data.

Order management solutions have become increasingly important as firms adopt multichannel shopping.

What does eCommerce order management entail?

An order management system’s objective is to get a product into the hands of a client as quickly as possible. It tracks each item in a customer’s order from the time it is added to their basket to the time it arrives at their home – as well as any returns that may occur.

What strategies can you implement to improve your eCommerce fulfilment process?

1. Know your inventory and know it well

When it comes to optimising your order fulfilment process, the best place to start is at the beginning. Make sure you are fully prepared for monitoring and maintaining your stock inventory before you ever get an order. If you don’t, you’ll be exposed to a variety of problems.

To do so, you’ll need to know how many items are presently in your supply chain, including those that are on order from your supplier and waiting in your warehouse, as well as any that are being returned as returns by consumers.

If you don’t know how many products you have on hand, you risk taking orders for items you don’t have, causing a supply chain bottleneck and unfulfilled orders on your hands.

2. Automation of fulfilment procedures

Automation is the apex of an efficient and dependable order fulfilment process. The majority of e-commerce businesses manually enter data into each system. As a result, businesses waste a lot of time on repeating processes while fulfilling orders. As a result, an entity and its workers’ efficiency are reduced, which may have an influence on job performance.

Because of the integration and automation of your order management procedures, you will be able to submit data just once, implying that the automated creation of orders will be feasible. You may also reduce the risk of human mistakes, save operational costs, and increase sales opportunities all at the same time using automation.

An order management system will improve the speed and visibility of your company processes. Barcode scanners may also be purchased to reduce the time it takes to enter inventory into your systems as fresh product batches arrive in your warehouse.

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3. Invest in Technology

Spreadsheets will only get you so far. Order management software that easily interacts with eCommerce platforms and online marketplaces may assist with the management of orders across sales channels without needing manual uploads or duplicate data entry.

As soon as a consumer places an order online, fulfilment employees will be notified to pick, pack, and send the products in a timely and efficient manner with the platform or marketplace then able to provide the tracking information back to the consumer.

To make more accurate purchasing and production decisions, eCommerce firms should use their integrations to connect the upstream operations of purchasing and manufacturing to the downstream activities of sales and product demand.

4. Invest in training for your staff

Depending on the sort of picking procedures and methods you use, order fulfilment might be extremely labour demanding.

Therefore, it’s critical that employees be well-trained, understand where to obtain the goods they need to complete a given order and are provided with reasonable incentives to keep them motivated and pleased.

In fact, like with the previous two ideas, a motivated and efficient team will help you lower average order fulfilment times while also increasing overall productivity.

It’s also worth remembering that, while it’s critical that workers know their jobs inside and out if key team members are absent due to vacations, sickness, or other reasons, you should have additional employees who can fill in for them with minimal interruption.

This cross-training guarantees that you have a multi-skilled staff that can do several tasks in your warehouse and can assist you when certain sections get very busy.

53% of shoppers say that speed of delivery is one of the most important factors when it comes to fulfilment of orders

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