It doesn’t matter what situation it is, the COVID-19 pandemic has given retail and eCommerce businesses new types of challenges, such as it pertains to order fulfillment. Nowadays, despite going shopping malls and buying products in brick-and-mortar stores, consumers are doing online shopping for every product.
Because of that, eCommerce will have to maintain its fulfillment processes to control the surge in online orders in 2021. Here are 5 order fulfillment strategies that can help to navigate the ups and downs of outsource retail fulfillment in the current market situation.
Adopt Alternative Shipping Methods
Online orders are increasing day by day and you should not keep your order short otherwise it may be difficult for you to fulfill the orders of your customers. When Shipping carriers become overwhelmed, that time backlog of orders can develop and turn what might’ve been a few days in a week or more of waiting for consumers.
But, you can use other methods that can help to make the shipping faster and easier during the season. You may rely on your supplier’s shipping network by dropshipping products. When you feel the bottleneck to be the last leg of the shipping route from the carrier facility to your customers’ doors, then you should decide to involve a 3rd party order management provider to share the load.
- Embrace Last Mile Tracking
Last-mile tracking is getting in popularity nowadays. Customers prefer it because last-mile tracking gives facility customers to know exactly where their package is and they get an idea of reasonable money for certainty when it will deliver. Incorporating last-mile tracking or upgrading your latest version to be more user-friendly and detailed can make a big difference to your consumer’s perception of your eCommerce business and increase the likelihood that they will continue to buy from you in the future.
- Spread Inventory Strategically Across Your Organization
When you ship all of your inventory from a particular location, it can take a long time for many of your consumers to deliver their orders. If you receive a massive surge in orders at the end of the year, this increased waiting period may quickly become unacceptable to your consumers. Hence, by analyzing your consumer purchasing behavior, you can make effective future sales funnels for your organization and correctly choose the best places to store your inventory. Because of that, you can ship inventory faster, cost-effectively, where a consumer wants his products shipped.
- Simplify Reverse Fulfillment Logistics
Sometimes you analyze an uptick in your online orders, you’ll see an increase in product returns. This indicates to you about reverse fulfillment, logistics that you need to simplify to run like a well-oiled machine. Preferably, it may bog down your internal processes and make inventory management a nightmare. There is one way to make reverse fulfillment easy for your teammates is by having an order management system that can log items back into your general inventory easily. At the time, an omnichannel also provided free shipping and best ecom shipping solutions labels to consumers to make returns easier and comfortable.
- Improve Supply Chain Visibility
Last but not least is supply chain management. It may help streamline the order process to improve supply chain visibility. It involves tracking production, product orders, and shipments in order to get insights throughout all of the supply chain process. In a simplified manner, it’s the ability to gather data throughout supply chain operations. If you want to find important insights into what may be hurting your order fulfillment operations, then you can improve your supply chain visibility. When you find the actual error, you are able to take enough action to fix the error. From this way, the order fulfillment process will run smoothly, and also saving your time & money. You will get rid of headaches of customer headaches.