Take Your Order Fulfillment From Eh to Excellent Before It’s Too Late

by Chelsea Camper | Last Updated February 26, 2020

If you haven’t already started preparing for 2012’s Q4, now’s your chance. These order fulfillment issues can arise at any time, but they can hit your business hardest around the busiest time of the year. Waiting too long to try to fix your order fulfillment system can result in a loss of customers!

There are several areas your fulfillment system might need a boost.

Providing Customers With Up-to-Date Information

Is your website linked to your order fulfillment system? Do you have to manually transfer order information from your website into QuickBooks?

Manually entering order information creates an opportunity for transposition errors. It could be as easy as misinterpreting a capital “I” as a lowercase “L” or mixing up addresses of two different customers. Using a program to automate the transfer of order information from your website to QuickBooks and connect to your shipping carriers can not only help reduce errors, but also help you get information to customers about their order.

Not Having Enough Stock

If your business has been around for a few years you have the great fortune of historical data. Look back and analyze your data to find where your business swells and hollows. Use this data to determine how much of each stock item you’ll need for your next swell in business.

During the fourth quarter customers are hurrying to get that one last present. If they come to your site with one particular item in mind, go to order it, and find that it’s out of stock, they’re probably not going to hang around your website much longer. That customer will be off to your competitors looking for that one product that they need to have.

Those who don’t have the benefit of years of historical data will need to try to estimate to the best of their ability based on what data they do have.

Accuracy & Speed of Your Pickers & Packers

Customers want their correct order quickly, especially right around the holidays. Incorrect orders and delayed orders aren’t going to sit very well with your customers. Assuming you already have a program that connects your website, QuickBooks (or similar), and shipping carriers, what else could be causing your orders to be shipped to the incorrect customers?

The shipping label and packing list getting mixed up is one place to start looking. If you’re printing out your packing list and shipping label on separate sheets you’re doing a couple of things to your pickers and packers:

Making it harder for them to keep the packing list and shipping label together
Wasting their time by having them match the packing list and shipping label

By simply combining the packing list and shipping label onto a single sheet you can not only reduce shipping errors, but also speed up the order fulfillment process.

Unorganized Warehouse

Do you keep your most ordered items in separate corners of the warehouse? Are your similar products spread out between several different rows? These little placement details could be costing your fulfillment process valuable time.

If your pickers are rushing from one side of the warehouse to the other to fill each order, their picking rate is going to be lower than if they had all of the popular products in one area. Keeping items that are typically ordered together near each other in the warehouse is another way to reduce fulfillment time.

Just fixing one of these issues can help your fulfillment process tremendously.

Want to learn how to Simplify your Order Fulfillment? Get the recipe!