As soon as a customer adds one of your product offerings into their virtual basket and presses the purchase button on your eCommerce platform, the ‘order’ sets off on its journey from the warehouse storage to the customer’s doorstep. The product is retrieved from the inventory, packaged, and shipped to the customer and all of this requires vigilance at each step to delivery accuracy.
While the order’s journey is simple and much cheaper for a small business, as a business grows, its processes expand just as its customer base does. Proper processing and management of orders are essential to keep your order fulfillment business operating seamlessly. In this blog post, we will discuss the basics and benefits of order management and order processing and how a 3PL can handle it for you.
What is Order Management?
Order management is the systematic conductance of all the stages that lie between the placement of an order at the eCommerce store and its received at the customer’s address i.e., order received, tracking, and order fulfillment. Medium to large-scale businesses requires automation of order management for easier and greater order accuracy.
Order Management System
An order management system provides a detailed and integrated view of all customer orders, enabling you to manage them with ease and greater visibility. Some order management systems provide complete visibility of the entire order journey via a two-way sync. This way, the entire order journey is organized such that customer satisfaction is ensured.
What is Order Processing?
The workflow between order placement and order delivery is called order processing. It includes order picking, packing, skipping, and tracking. Accurate order processing is key to ensuring customer satisfaction. The nature and complexity of order processing can greatly vary between businesses from some having analog and manual processes to others having automated and faster workflows.
How is Order Management beneficial for your Business?
While you plan to scale your business, the enormity of tasks might divert your attention from the necessity of order management, but for the lasting integrity of your business in delivering precision and satisfaction, it is essential. Here are a few benefits of an order management system:
Data-driven Decisions
Using an order management system, you can view all relevant information in an integrated manner, enabling better and data-driven decisions and maximizing dock to stock efficiency. A good order management system will enable you to view the geographical distribution of your customer’s orders so that you can leverage that information for the strategic location of your warehouses. This aids your shipping strategy and allows you to save on shipping costs. Data-driven decisions have a lasting positive, financial impact in saving your business from unnecessary costs and supply chain inefficiencies.
Improved Inventory Management
Accurate order management enables improved inventory management with informed decisions derived through data insights. Businesses are often at risk of suffering from being understocked or hoarding excess amounts of inventory that later ends up as dead stock. Both scenarios are detrimental to a business’s financial health. Properly conducted order management paves the way to managing inventory with an increasingly streamlined and informed approach.
Enhanced Order Fulfillment
Managing the order fulfillment of a medium to large business with orders pouring in from around the globe and around the clock is not easy, especially with the impatience of the modern customer who seeks to always get order tracking updates. Catering to such needs without a proper order management system can result in absolute chaos. With automation and a synchronized system, streamlined order management can provide more accurate inventory records and even save on shipping costs.
What is the Order Management Cycle?
The order management cycle is the end-to-end process starting from a customer clicking the purchase button on your e-store, to the successful delivery and feedback of that customer. Here is the generalized, sequential order management cycle:
- Order placement
- Order received
- Pick-up from inventory
- Order packaging
- Order shipment
- Order delivery
- Customer feedback
- Tracking KPIs for improvement
How can you Optimize your Order Management with ShipBots?
If your newly scaled business has made managing orders and other eCommerce fulfillment tasks overwhelming for you, consider outsourcing fulfillment to a 3PL expert such as ShipBots. ShipBots offers the necessary e-commerce fulfillment infrastructure, intuitive software, team support, and eCommerce expertise required to achieve customer satisfaction and enable a business to grow. Here is how you can get started with ShipBots:
Import your Store Inventory Information to ShipBots’ Analytical Dashboard
The first step is to import all your store information with details of product offerings to ShipBots’s dashboard. As ShipBots software is integrated with all the major eCommerce solutions, it takes a little time to product import. Soon, your store will sync with ShipBots solution and your products and SKUs will appear on the dashboard.
Send Inventory for Storage
Once your eCommerce store has been connected to the ShipBots dashboard, next you will need to send inventory to the chosen fulfillment centers where it will be processed and stored in designated locations.
Receive Forwarded eCommerce Orders
Orders placed at your store will automatically start getting forwarded to ShipBots’s order management system, once it is set up. The order management system will then allocate a fulfillment center for order completion according to the customer’s location.
To learn more about ShipBots’s order management and fulfillment services, you can reach out to our team of experts.
