No matter how much time, effort, and money you put into promoting your business and converting visitors into buyers, you’ll never create repeat customers if you screw up fulfillment.
As your business grows, the warehouse can be an increasingly complicated place. Where once you had time to individually wrap items with tissue paper and ribbon, you’re now hoping and praying everything made it into the box before being shipped out.
With increased orders and inventory complexity, retailers come up with a number of solutions. To conserve cash and decrease the overhead cost of stocking products, some retailers choose to drop ship. Others, who don’t want to invest the resources in warehouse space or manpower, will employ ecommerce fulfillment providers (EFPs), such as Webgistix, or Fillship to handle all of their order fulfillment for them. While these models can work for some retailers, no business should be pushed towards either model simply because they don’t think they can manage their own orders.
Perhaps what you really need is a better system–enter Upshot Commerce’s Batch Order Processing.
As someone who was once on the retail/shipping side of a business, I remember life before batch order processing. It involved a lot of warehouse staff needlessly running back and forth across the warehouse to fulfill a single order. Everything seemed to take longer than it should, there were errors constantly, and everyone left tired and annoyed by the end of the day. Ah, memories.
Batch order processing organizes your orders into more manageable groups, which allows for pulling orders more efficiently, with more more built-in checks and balances to account for errors. Upshot Commerce sorts ordered items into pick lists, which are created based on their physical location in your warehouse. To read a great explanation of how the whole process essentially works, check out Jamie Salvatori’s article How We Achieved 99% Accuracy in Order Fulfillment .
Does the system require a little more set up than simply printing an order and picking it off a shelf? Yes. Is it worth it for the growing ecommerce retailer? You bet. Here’s just a few of the advantages of using Upshot Commerce’s Batch Order System:
- Batch download all order forms, including cover pages, invoices, packing slips, pick lists and shipping labels
- Export orders to Endicia’s Dazzle and Quickbooks
- Greater efficiency through printing in groups
- More built in checks and balances in process means less order errors
- More effective and efficient use of staff
- Better inventory tracking and order status updating
With a small one-time investment in time and resources (mostly related to getting your warehouse organized in a more efficient manner), you can remove a vast amount of worry, chaos and even expense from your life, allowing you to fulfill orders with confidence.