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Top 10 Tips for Successful Order Fulfillment

October 7, 2019 eCommerce Tips

In the e-commerce business, the supply chain plays a huge role in determining its success. A successful order fulfillment means having a delivery performance that meets up with the orders with no delivery damage. When order delivery is made at the right time and without any lapses, the customer is bound to be happy. What with the mounting orders, delivery can become more arduous and challenging to manage. This eventually leads to poor delivery performance and bad customer experience. In this post, we will share with you 10 ways to guarantee successful order fulfillment and ensure the flourishing of your e-commerce business.

Know What the Process Entails

Before you commence the order fulfillment process, it will do you a whole lot of good to understand what it is all about. The process involves more than just shipping ordered products to their destinations. It is also a complex e-commerce system that has more to do with offering an excellent order fulfillment process and satisfying your customers. Understanding what the process allows you to leave your customers happy and build your business.

Establish Communication

In the flourishing of any business, communication with the customers is essential. During the delivery of a product, the customer would want to be kept abreast of its progress. When there is no communication, they are likely to get worried. Make efforts to build a connection with your customers. Communication influences and enhances their confidence in your order fulfillment process. Communication assures them that your supply chain is topnotch and can be highly leaned on.

Create Customer Support System

In an e-commerce business, there may be cases where there are missing products during delivery or purchased products. When such a case arises, the typical response the customer makes is to lay a complaint to the brand. When there is a lack of customer service, there will not be any room to receive customers’ complaints and this can be very bad for business. Having customer service representatives on-hand to receive and address order fulfillment issues is pivotal to having a happy and satisfied customer base.

Delivery Costs

As an e-commerce retailer, you should make efforts to enlighten the customers on the delivery costs and criteria employed to determine them. Different e-commerce businesses take on different criteria, such as the weight of the product, to arrive at a delivery cost. When your customers know how the delivery price is determined, they will develop stronger confidence in your order fulfillment process. Also, ensure that you keep the shipping price at a decent rate as to avoid not ending up in driving your customers away.

Build an Order Management System

As time goes on in an e-commerce business, the influx of orders starts getting overwhelming and when managed inappropriately could initiate the downfall of the business. Establishing a distributed order management business is important to have an edge over your competitors. This management system allows you to monitor and manage orders in real-time. It makes the location of the product ordered is easy and organizes the order fulfillment process.

Products Return Policy

The loss or damage of a product in an inventory of an e-commerce business is bound to happen at some time. When such happens, replacement should commence regardless of the cost. In the delivery of a product to a customer, there should be a return policy as insurance to any good damage or loss. This should be done to ensure your customers of a quality order fulfillment process.

Collaborate With the Right Shipper

If your delivery time suffers some lapses because of poor supply from your supplier, your e-commerce business is likely to suffer certain drastic consequences. If your supplier frequently underperforms, your customers are going to hold you responsible, not your shipper.

To avoid such, you should partner up with an established and reputable shipper. Ensure that they have an impressive track of records to avoid any order fulfillment issues.

Enhance Inventory Transparency

Transparency of the product inventory is highly important to keep an e-commerce business in the growth trajectory. It keeps you in the know of the happenings in the sales channels, the shortfalls so that you can take proactive actions towards shoring them up.

When you are updated on the stock of products, you will gain an edge of replenishing them to meet the demand. In the long run, you will have an enviable order fulfillment process and keep your customers satisfied.

Integrate an Order Notification System

Having a real-time order notification will help you make early product delivery, and satisfy your customers. In an e-commerce business, getting notified about a customer’s order placement gives you a head start to spot bottlenecks, establish a smooth network delivery process. It ensures that no delays are encountered, which may leave you with irate and unsatisfied customers that cannot wait to leave you.

Be Genuine

Ensure that the product delivered has the features described in the product’s description on the listing page. No customer wants to know that the product’s features specified on your e-commerce site are only a smokescreen to get it out of your inventory. It leads to a decline in relationship and trust.

There you have it! These are the top tips to establish a successful order fulfillment process vital for the growth of your e-commerce business. Establishing communication with customers, using a distributed order management system, creating customer service and more will help you create an excellent and successful order fulfillment process.

Do you need a reputable order fulfillment services company for your ecommerce business? Contact us today at Fulfillman. We provide a wide range of services including Global Fulfillment, China Sourcing, Drop Shipping, Third Party Logistics, and lots more. Our trusted experts will be happy to speak with you and provide suitable answers to your questions and concerns. A fantastic experience awaits you.

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How Can Fulfillment Centers Help Increase Sales

July 4, 2019 eCommerce Tips

For every business, whether established or a start-up, the building of its customer base is paramount for its growth. One way to build up a base of loyal customers and increase sales is to improve the experience of your customers. This is one thing that fulfillment centers will help you achieve. Utilizing the assistance of fulfillment centers is an efficient business strategy that a business can employ to form a wonderful relationship with its customers and stoke its growth.

There are varieties of ways that fulfillment centers can help you enhance customer experience, build a loyal customer base, boost sales and grow your brand. They include:

Deal with Market Fluctuations

The market is volatile and no business is invulnerable from experiencing its fluctuations. It can happen as time goes on at any particular time of the year. Fulfillment centers are well equipped to assist businesses, especially startups, in dealing with the drastic changes in the market. Most business organizations are not informed on how to handle the unexpected changes in the market leading them to run on fumes. This affects their capacity to meet up with demand and supply.

Fulfillment centers help businesses to take precautionary measures for any eventuality in the market. They ensure the sales is increased or maintained or that the customer experience of your customers is not disturbed during the market fluctuations.

Improve Customer Satisfaction

Shipping wrong packages to a customer and making late deliveries are all part of the issues that deteriorate customer experience. These problems could arise from the inability of a company to handle the influx of orders. Giving access to a third-party expert to deliver packages to your customers aids you to avoid any hiccup in the process. Fulfillment centers do take a great time and care to ensure that nothing goes wrong in your supply chain. This, in turn, helps you build a satisfied and loyal customer base.

Allocates More Time to Your Business

Businesses need time to carry out their marketing campaign, engage with the customers, and ensuring that orders are fulfilled. Especially when it is a small or Startup Company, handling all these can prove too difficult most times without the efficiency and effectiveness of one of them becoming affected.

Outsourcing the order delivery aspect to a fulfillment center ensures that enough time is freed up for you to attend to other areas of your business. You will be guaranteed that your customers’ needs are met while you are not at it.

Take Care of Inventory

There is a lot of work in creating an inventory for a business. So much time and resources go into equipping the inventory with the right items, shipping out the right item and replacing an item returned by a customer. Setting up and managing an inventory by a small business may be a burden.

Fulfillment centers are known to have an inventory containing all the items you are offering and ensure that the items are up-to-date. They manage your inventory take care of the packaging and shipping, getting the load off your back, while you operate other areas of your business.

Saves Operating Costs

Fulfillment centers help you to decrease your company’s expenditure, saving up capital that you can be channeled into other areas of the business to encourage its growth. The capital freed up could be used to add more items to your inventory, run advertisement campaigns that ensure your customer base is built and the business is developed.

Saves Time

The supply chain could be suffering when you have do not have enough time devoted to it. This does not help in improving the customer experience, as their need will be poorly catered for. You can outsource the distribution to a third-party entity while you focus on running other logistics of your business. This way, you are ensuring that an efficient supply chain is maintained.

Reach Bigger Audience

A fulfillment center serves as a bridge between a business and its customers. Your customers can be at any part of the world. When you receive an order from them, a fulfillment center has the appropriate machinery in place to ensure that you reach out to them. You can go into new markets, reach out to a broader audience, grow your customer base and improve your business through a fulfillment center.

Enhance Customer Relationship

A better customer relationship is pivotal for any business that wants to boost sales and grow. When customers are satisfied with your service, they are likely to stick with you. This loyal customer will continuously purchase from you. They also will help in broadcasting your brand to new customers. A fulfillment center ensures that you form a great customer relationship with your customers to take your business to greater heights.

Impressive Turnarounds

Fulfillment centers ensure that there is a fast turnaround between when a customer orders for a product and when it is delivered. Having less time between when the product is ordered and when the customer gets them at their doorstep is one way to make them become satisfied with your services. In the long run, it makes you have a spike in sales and see your company reach great heights.

There you have it! Fulfillment centers enable you to run your business efficiently while you reach the height that you are aiming for.  Use the services of a fulfillment center today that suits the needs of your company.

Contact us today at Fulfillman if you need a reputable fulfillment services company for your ecommerce business. We are a leading provider of various services including Warehouse fulfillment, Drop Shipping, Third Party Logistics, Crowdfunding Fulfillment, China sourcing, and so forth. Our trusted experts will be available to speak with you and discuss your needs. We will provide suitable answers to your questions and concerns. With us, you are guaranteed to get quality and excellent services that give complete client satisfactoin.

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Top 8 Secrets to Successful Order Fulfillment

June 11, 2019 eCommerce Tips

The supply chain of e-commerce businesses is a significant factor in determining their  success. According to the Supply Chain Council, successful order fulfillment can be described as “the percentage of orders meeting delivery performance with complete and accurate documentation and no delivery damage.” Orders are increasingly becoming more arduous and challenging to manage given the increasing growth of the business from multi-channels and market challenges.

A disorganized order fulfillment system can lead to delay in order delivery to the customer. This eventually leads to poor customer experience. E-Commerce that has such delivery system leaves its customers in frustration and the business suffers in return. This indicate how important it is for order fulfillment to be successful.

To have a flourishing e-commerce business means to have a successful order fulfillment towards your customers. Here are tips on how you can manage your supply chain effectively and make your order fulfillment more successful.

Establish a Working Demand Management System

Creating a good demand management system is vital to accomplish a successful order. The purpose of a demand management system is to equip the business with the ability to handle unprecedented demand rise and gives a forecast of demand from customers. Multi-channels through which customers make purchases are monitored. Data are captured and analyzed to equip the business of real-time information regarding the flow of demand in the supply chain. Data captured using this system is accurate and helps forestall any challenge in the future. This also gives room to maximize profit and growth of the business.

Do Not Back Out On Promises to Customers

Not being able to live up to expectations can have a devastating effect on your business. Customers typically want to earn every value of their money. You can ensure that you have your customers’ trust and loyalty by ensuring that the stocks in your inventory levels match the specifications. Also, ensure that there are stocks that match the customers’ needs available at all time in the inventory. To effectively, ensure that your customers are satisfied, use Available to Promise (ATP) inventory. This method guarantees that a particular stock is always available.

During delivery, ensure that the shipping notification is working effectively. Regardless of the specified time for the arrival of the product customers naturally want to keep tabs on its movement. When customers are not notified they are likely to fidget, make incessant calls to the customer care and this amount to a loss of money and time. What with such experience they are likely not deal with such e-commerce platform again.

Understand the Challenges

Customers have an ever-changing taste and options to select regarding how they shop and receive orders. Retailers that have a complex e-commerce system are likely to offer their customers unsatisfied user experience. The whole e-commerce fulfillment should take minimal time and swift as possible to accomplish. Retailers should design their e-commerce system to enhance user experience and making shopping and order receiving hugely convenient.

Build Communication

Communication with customers is essential for the flourishing of an e-commerce business. During the delivery of an order to a customer, it is important to keep them abreast with its progress. When there is no communication customers are likely to get worried, which affects their confidence in the e-commerce service. Communication reassures them of a good supply chain and boosts their confidence.

Use A Working Distributed Order Management System

A distributed order management system gives an e-commerce business a competitive edge over its competitors. This management system utilizes a central approach to managing the real-time inventory of retailers. After a customer orders a product, the retailer should be able to locate the product. The inventory becomes organized to ensure that there are delivery or shipping delays.

Flexibility is introduced as customers can buy products and return them when and however means. E-commerce businesses that have the DOM are not going to leave their customers with a poor customer’s experience.

Make Customer Service Available

There will cases of late delivery of purchased products, missing products during delivery or damaged goods. The only recourse customers normally take when they experience any of these is the call the customer service. E-Commerce, where there is no customer service to respond swiftly to customers’ inquiries, may not last long. Having customer service representatives on ground addresses order fulfillment issues and enhances the relationship with customers.

Lost or Damaged Goods Replacement

At some point in an e-commerce business, goods in the inventory are bound to be lost or damaged. Replacing the damaged or lost products should be done regardless of its cost. Better still; each item in the inventory should have a purchase shipping insurance to cushion any loss. Damaged products returned by customers should be replaced without any charge. This should be done to avoid having a horde of irate and unsatisfied customers at hand.

Delivery Costs

Shipping costs by retailers are usually determined to utilize two criteria; by price and weight of the product. E-commerce retailers should ensure that customers are enlightened on how the shipping price is determined. In addition, e-commerce businesses should make an effort to keep shipping costs as reasonable as possible.

There you have it! Above are some top secretes to successful order fulfillment. A successful order fulfillment system is key to retaining customers and boosting e-commerce growth. Given the increase of channels through which customers make orders, it has posed challenges to e-commerce businesses. Building communication with customers, keeping your promise, creating an order management system all ensure that at the end of the day, e-commerce business has a successful order fulfillment system.

Do you need a reputable order fulfillment services company for your ecommerce business? Contact us today at Fulfillman. We provide a wide range of services including Global Fulfillment, China Sourcing, Drop Shipping, Third Party Logistics, and lots more. Our trusted experts will be happy to speak with you and provide suitable answers to your questions and concerns. A fantastic experience awaits you.

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How to Choose the Best Fulfillment Services Company for Your Ecommerce Business

May 17, 2019 eCommerce Tips

To run a successful ecommerce business, you have to get things right on the front-end as well as the back-end of your business operation. Many new retailers on the ecommerce space focus their attentions on giving the customers great shopping experience. They ensure that their sites look great and easy to navigate. They also take extra steps to ensure that customers find what they want quickly, pay for them as quickly as possible and get all the help they need. While this is very important, it is only one aspect of what makes buyers happy. The joy of any buyer will only be complete when the product is delivered how and where they want it. That is where fulfillment services companies come in.

Unless you are a supply chain and logistic expert like Amazon (unlikely), you may need the services of a fulfillment company to handle the delivery aspect of your business. Micromanaging may be viable at the early stage of your business but once you start getting more orders, it will be necessary to engage a fulfillment provider. Finding the best company to handle this aspect of your business can be hard. To help you achieve that, we will briefly discuss some helpful tips:

Look For Certified Companies

It is always better to work with companies that are certified by some relevant bodies for the services they provide. In the case of fulfillment services companies, the bodies that may certify a company include American Purchasing Society, the International Warehouse Logistics Association (IWLA), and the Warehousing Education and Research Council (WERC). A company that is certified by any of these organizations can be trusted to perform well.

Consider Experienced Companies

Choosing an experienced company is also very important. Companies that have been operating in the sector for a while will most likely have the necessary software and hardware to handle the delivery aspect of your business in the best possible manner. An experienced fulfillment provider is also less prone to mistakes which will be a good thing for your business.

Consider the Distribution Network of the Company

This is one of the reasons you need to understand your customer base. It will be helpful to choose a fulfillment provider that has the right distribution network to handle your orders. If you sell to people within a particular state, you can choose a company that is very strong in that particular state or region. If most of your customers are overseas, you should consider only companies with global reach.

Choose Companies with Clear Terms and Conditions

It is important that you clearly understand the terms and conditions of any company you are dealing with. The agreement you will enter needs to clearly state what you will get and what you will pay. Read the fine prints carefully and clarify such points as minimum and maximum volume the company will handle at a time. You also need to know the service guarantee you get as their customer.

Avoid Companies That Will Try to Lock You In

You need to be careful to avoid being locked into an unfavorable contract. In fact, it is important that you avoid being locked into any kind of contract at all. There are great fulfillment services companies that allow you to cancel at any time and those are the companies you should work with.

Consider the Pricing Structure

Pricing is one important aspect you shouldn’t joke with since it will significantly influence your profitability. It is important that you understand the pricing structure proposed by a fulfillment services company before entering into agreement. Understand exactly how they will bill you. It is also important that you avoid large monthly and annual retainers. A low flat-rate pricing structure is always better.

Consider All Applicable Fees and Rules

Asides your regularly service cost, there are some extra fees that may apply to the services you will enjoy from your fulfillment services company. It is critical that you consider such fees and rules that apply. Some may charge for storage: choose companies that charge low rate for storage capacity and offer flexibility in terms of how long your goods can stay in their warehouse.

Consider the Possibility for Scaling

As a business owner, you should always plan for growth. You also have to consider this while choosing a fulfillment services company. You need a company that will accommodate your growth. This means that the company must have a warehouse with the capacity to accommodate increased volume from you. It is possible that your products may go viral and you don’t want to start looking for a bigger company when this happens. If you plan adding new lines of products, you also have to consider a company that can handle the new products perfectly.

Software and Automation

The whole point of ecommerce is to make buying and selling easier through technology. As you make things easier for your customers, your fulfillment provider should also make things easy for you. This will basically depend on their software. It is important that you work with a company that lets you send product orders automatically from your ecommerce platform. The software should also be able to automatically update inventory and statuses. You should be able to see what is happening with your orders. If you can test a demo account to see how things work, that will be great.

Consider Reviews from Their Past and Present Clients

It is also important that you consider the reputation of the company you are going to work with. One simple way to do this is to check the reviews from their past and present clients. It should not be hard to find helpful reviews on Google and Yelp.

Using the services of a product fulfillment company will definitely attract extra cost for your ecommerce business but the benefits it offers is often massive. It will make your business more efficient in terms of order delivery. The satisfaction of your customers should be your priority and that is what a fulfillment services company can help you achieve.

Do you need a reputable fulfillment services company for your ecommerce business? Contact us today at Fulfillman. We provide a wide range of services including Warehouse fulfillment, Drop Shipping, China sourcing, Third Party Logistics, and many more. Our dedicated team will be available to discuss with you and provide suitable answers to your questions and concerns. We guarantee you excellent services.

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