All ecommerce startups start small by fulfilling orders with manual processes and addition of more staff, storage space and work schedules. This approach assumes new dimensions once the business starts to grow by leaps and bounds – with enhanced success comes increased order values, lines per order, fulfillment intricacy, and the inevitable requirement to upgrade to an effective software solution.
For your benefit, we bring five effective strategies that can boost the efficiency of your order fulfillment efforts and help you achieve more sales with clock-work precision and in tune with the customer demands.
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Software Integration: Most growing e-commerce companies in India are using some kind of software to handle their order fulfillment operations. Gathering and understanding the order data from the software is a crucial step in keeping abreast with changing demands. Order profiling and warehouse piling can also be accelerated with the use of order fulfillment software.
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Cross-Coaching Employees: Fast and slow movers change speed on a daily basis creating a direct impact on the efficiency of order fulfillment, order pickup density, walk times and restocking cycles. This can lead businesses to compromise on individual employee productivity and focus single-mindedly on capacity utilization. Cross-training employees to handle orders to meet demands can prove useful in reducing costs of hiring additional labour. Even though cross-trained labour may be less efficient in fulfilling order requirements than the experience staff, they can still help boost the overall throughput demand.
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Accommodating Last-Minute Orders: Doing this can really put your order fulfillment strategy on the front line. Last minute demand requests and fulfilling them can prove extremely advantageous for your ecommerce business and provide you with a competitive edge.
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Managing Accuracy: Ecommerce businesses that leverage order fulfillment software solutions, experience almost hundred percent order accuracy as opposed to those businesses that depend on manual fulfillment. A real-time software system can create transparency into order profiling, thereby increasing visibility and accountability of order accuracy. This also helps improve the labour competency and reduce order inaccuracy.
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Reducing Order Returns: Every ecommerce business witnesses product returns and this is often due to order inaccuracies. A good tactic followed by ecommerce companies is that they include the cost of product returns – shipping, reverse logistics, customer dissatisfaction, etc. – right into the product price to minimize the adverse impact on the bottom line.
Speedier growth in ecommerce business goes beyond just having a good marketing plan and a website. All of these above-mentioned strategies can prove highly fruitful for online retailers towards their order fulfillment efforts, especially if you are using an integrated software management solution.
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