10 Fourth Quarter Order Fulfillment Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them

by Chelsea Camper | Last Updated July 19, 2019

While pitfalls can pop up at any time of the year, they are especially dangerous during the Fourth Quarter when many businesses are hitting their peak order numbers. During your busiest months you need your order fulfillment process to be seamless with all eyes ahead keeping an eye out for disastrous pitfalls.

Below we’ve brought up 10 common order fulfillment pitfalls and ways you can avoid them.

1. Not Enough Product

Not having enough product (or enough raw materials for your product) can be one of the worst things to happen in the later months of the Fourth Quarter when customers are hurried to get their items before the holidays. Try to look ahead and order enough product or raw materials to cushion a heavy increase of sales. If possible, review stats from last few years to see which items were the most popular and which you ran out of; stock up on those that you sold the most of.

This is easier said then done, however, since you don’t want to overstock your warehouse and have excess inventory hanging around long after your peak months.

2. Not Being Able to Collate Your Shipping Forms

Shipping label collation can help you avoid several pitfalls that we’ll talk about a little further down. To “collate” your shipping forms means to combine (or merge) them onto one sheet. Why is this helpful? It keeps all (or at least most) of the order information on a single sheet so that your employees don’t waste precious order fulfillment time trying to match up packing lists and shipping labels.

If you don’t have an eCommerce platform to help you manipulate your shipping label template, you can use the PayPal API to change the way the the shipping forms print out.

3. Wrong Items to Customers

This is one of those times that collating your shipping forms can help! By having the packing list and shipping label on the same shipping label sheet you can reduce the number of incorrect orders. The shipping label can stay with the packing list and package all the way up until the package is prepped for shipping where the label is easily peeled out and placed onto the package.

You can include the packing list in the package just before it’s sealed up by detaching it from the shipping label via perforation.

4. Workforce Too Small

Make sure you have enough hands on deck for your peak months. If you have 5 people trying to do the work of 12, your employees will begin to tire and be more likely to make a shipping or packing error. Even if you just bring on a few temporary part time workers, your employees will be able to be more accurate with the orders they’re working on.

Even if you have a perfect order fulfillment process, having over worked pickers and packers can lead to order errors.

5. Unorganized Warehouse

Have you recently checked on the organization of your warehouse? Having an organized warehouse can help streamline your order fulfillment process. By having your most popular items in an area that is easy to access, your pickers and packers can quickly grab the most ordered items.

You can also organize your warehouse so that products that are typically ordered together are near each other.

6. Incorrect Items Being Pulled

There are a couple of reasons for incorrect items being pulled: 1. Packing lists and shipping labels getting mixed up because they’re not on the same sheet and/or 2. Incorrectly or poorly labeled bins. Bins that are poorly labeled can cause a lot of picking confusion. Some confusion can be cleared up by using different colored postcards to label different types of inventory.

For example, you can use green postcards to label bins with items related to lawn care and use blue postcards to label bins with items related to pool care.

7. Having a Poor Return Policy

Sometimes customers order the wrong size or color item, especially when they’re in a hurry around the holidays. They may also order something the gift recipient doesn’t like and need to return the item. If you have no or a poor return policy you can create some anger among customers who made a mistake and would like to correct it.

Remember how we were talking about collating your shipping forms? Well, you can also include information so that they have instructions on how to return the items with the first package they receive. This will help keep your phone lines open for orders instead of fielding the same return questions over and over.

8. Slow Website

Around the holidays there will be lots of people accessing your website. Now you may be wondering how a slow website effects your order fulfillment process. If customers can’t access your website to order, get your email, or find your phone number then there won’t be any orders for your warehouse to fill. You’ll also need access to your website to get the order information to send the ordered items to your customers.

Make sure your server is up for the challenge of a large influx of visitors. If you’re close to hitting your max bandwidth on a regular basis, it might be time to upgrade to a larger hosting plan!

9. Keep All Employees in the Loop About Promotions

If you’re running special promotions during the Fourth Quarter, make sure all your staff knows about them. Otherwise you could have the same customer getting two or three different answers from the staff they talk to.

Send out a quick email to everyone or post the promotions up on a billboard for everyone to take note of them.

10. Not Enough Packing Material, Boxes, or Shipping Labels

Check that you have enough shipping supplies to get all of your orders out on time. When you run out of shipping supplies, it brings your whole fulfillment process to a halt. This is one area you should definitely buy in bulk since your business is always going to need shipping supplies.

Keep tabs on how many boxes you send out per month as this will show you not only how many boxes you’ll need but how many shipping label sheets you’ll need as well. Watch how quickly you use packing material as well to figure out if you’ll need to buy extra before the holiday season starts up.

What else should you be on the look out for this Fourth Quarter?

Find out how you can Streamline Your Order Fulfillment Process.