What is order fulfillment and how does this core function help eCommerce businesses?
Order Fulfillment in an eCommerce Business
Conduct a quick Google search of the definition of fulfillment, which is: “happiness or satisfaction after fully developing certain abilities or character”.
The definition doesn’t enlighten as to the purpose of fulfillment in a business sense yet there is another meaning that rings a little closer to home.
Fulfillment also means the achievement of something that is desired, predicted, or promised.
Fulfillment is all about fulfilling (or shipping) a customer’s order efficiently. Additionally, this process involves a sequence of steps that are involved in order processing to the satisfaction of customers.
How to Improve Your Fulfillment Process
You must do a lot of things right to become a successful ecommerce businesses. One of these steps is order fulfillment!
This is one part of the business that can actually drown operations if not done properly! Following are some important considerations you need to think about when working on order fulfillment for your business.
- Customers think free shipping is more important than fast shipping
- Shipping two units is much cheaper than shipping just one unit
- Offering multiple choices can become an issue
Use Auto-fills and Multiple Choices on Product Order Forms
You can be assured of one thing – no customer likes filling out long and detailed product order forms. In fact, this makes the entire process lengthy and difficult!
It is your job to make the order fulfillment process faster and easier for your customers. This can be done by utilizing multiple choices and pull-down menus on order forms. You can also implement the auto-fill feature for the same purpose.
Make Sure Your Inventory is Up-to-Date
How many times have customers expressed displeasure at finding an item that was out-of-stock? How many loyal customers have you lost to rival businesses because they offered the items your customers needed?
Keeping an updated inventory of available and non-available items will ensure you don’t offer out-of-stock items to customers.
Shipfusion sets your business on autopilot and combines flexible, reliable fulfillment with powerful, real-time technology. Shipfusion has multiple fulfillment centers across the US and Canada– making it easy to manage your eCommerce business. For more information on how to set your business on autopilot, contact one of our fulfillment specialists today.