An important part of e-commerce success is fulfilment. No amount of technology — world-class website, user-friendly ordering app, savvy email marketing or even a large catalogue — can get customer delight if you can’t deliver the product on time in full.
Inefficiency in E-Commerce Fulfilment often leads to:
- Inability to manage scale: Delivering 10 orders might be easy but delivering 10,000 needs a robust system.
- Loss of sales: Customers are likely to choose a competitor if the delivery date is too far away.
- High returns: Wrong products or incomplete shipments will result in returns.
- Business failure: These end up costing you more money while also making the customer dissatisfied.
All of the above problems can be overcome with a single solution: A robust 4-pronged approach to order fulfilment.
#1 Multi-functional warehouse management
The first step towards operational efficiency is inventory management. You need a warehouse management system that enables you to manage your stock and process shipping efficiently. Make sure it enables a robust strategy for location management, picking and putaway, inventory and batch management. This will help store your inventory in an easily accessible and reachable manner.
Also, look for a WMS with a multi-product shipment function, with the ability to ship multiple child SKUs as one shipment. This will prevent incomplete shipments from going out.
#2 Storage optimisation
Not all fulfilment centres are the same. Depending on the product you’re selling, you need a fulfilment centre that’s designed for you. For instance, a client of ours in the business of selling furniture needed a fulfilment centre with pallet racking, load unit/best-fit evaluation and finalisation. Given the size of their products, they also needed a furniture warehouse with a customised layout to make the maximum use of storage space. We enabled this for them.
Moreover, while choosing a fulfilment centre, remember to ensure that it can be managed through your chosen WMS.
#3 Returns management
Returns are inevitable. You can minimise them but never eliminate them completely. The best you can do is process returns efficiently and address complaints on time. A good fulfilment process should enable this for you.
#4 Real-time tracking
Customers today are used to real-time tracking of their delivery — be it their food or their new sofa set. Real-time tracking gives customers the information they seek on-demand, significantly reducing customer service enquiries.
On the other hand, it also gives you clearly and timely visibility into your orders’ status, even when handled by a logistics partners. It allows you to control the customer experience, taking proactive steps in case of delays.
Shipacko Fulfilment designed to power e-commerce success
It is these four pillars that Shipacko’s Fulfilment offerings rest on. We operate over 67 fulfilment centres across India, with over 5 million sq. feet of storage and processing space.
- Our proprietary warehouse management system is integrated with all major courier partners to give clients multi-tenant, multi-location warehousing.
- We work closely with clients to optimise storage management to save space and costs.
- Our WMS enables seamless processing of returns.
- All your packages sent through Shipacko can be tracked in real-time from a single dashboard.
