Your customer happiness totally depends on how fast you get your order to your customers. It is the only measurement that allows customers to come back or go to the next store door.
According to the survey, only 34% of consumers are willing to wait more than two days for an order to be shipped and delivered. This shows that the consumers are impatient about their order delivery. They want quick assistance with their product availability to know the items’ price, billing, and final delivery.
This way, you have to look into your order fulfillment process. Optimizing your order fulfillment process can speed up your deliveries and order accuracy.
It ensures less waiting time, leading to happy customers, more orders, and revenue for your business.
This blog guides you through the basics of order fulfillment with software use. This way, you will know how to speed up and optimize your order fulfillment services.
Key Takeaways
- Order fulfillment is a crucial business responsibility for enterprises.
- To fulfil orders effectively, it is necessary to coordinate with various departments and outside partners.
- In the order fulfillment process, an ERP system plays a crucial role.
Article Content-
- What Is Order Fulfillment?
- Why is order fulfillment important?
- Benefits of Order Fulfillment
- Order Fulfillment Process: Know How It Work For On-Time Delivery
- Order Fulfillment Challenges
- How Do You Choose an Order Fulfillment Strategy?
- How SWIL’s Order Management Software improves Order Fulfillment?
What Is Order Fulfillment?
Order fulfillment is the order receiving, processing, packaging, and shipping of an order to customers. It starts with order taking and ends with delivering the right products.
It is a way to explain how people get the product they paid for. It’s one of the sales process’s final yet most essential stages. If it is poorly planned, it could be the reason for lower customer retention.
It involves steps which we can discuss later in this blog.
Why is order fulfillment important?
Today, many ordering and delivering facilities and platforms are available in the market and smartly handle order delivery. But it creates competition for brick-and-mortar businesses. Customers have high demands, and if businesses do not have the order fulfillment strategy, they definitely struggle.
Some stats say…
- After a disappointing delivery experience, 43% of customers say they won’t shop with a retailer for at least a month.
- Another 38% of consumers said they won’t shop with retailers anymore.
This way, we conclude that order fulfillment directly impacts customer shopping habits. To gain a competitive advantage, it’s crucial to meet customer expectations for quick delivery and return services.
Thus, you need a system for optimizing your order fulfillment processes.
Benefits of Order Fulfillment
- Reduce your shipping costs
- Reduce operating expenses
- Ensure higher customer retention
- Boost your customer service
- Create customer loyalty
- Increase quality control
- Prioritize selling
Order Fulfillment Process: Know How It Work For On-Time Delivery
The order fulfillment process involves inventory management, supply chain management, order processing system, staff management, return management, reorder management, stock control and support for customers.
Typically the order processing process involves 8 steps, which are as follows.
Inventory Receiving
In stores, items/ stocks are coming from vendors or suppliers. Thus, it is necessary that incoming stocks are well-counted and inspected to ensure the proper amount was received and the quality is acceptable.
Inventory Storage and Management
Once the stocks are received, it is required to organize them accurately according to consumer demand or any other criteria a shopkeeper chooses.
Order Processing
Once the store has enough inventory to receive orders, the order processing strategy must follow. Order processing becomes easier if your business is integrated with the right retail management software. You can easily check your order item via software, know about the items availability and initiate the order.
Picking
It is a system where the store staff pick/selects items from the warehouse according to a packing slip’s instructions.
Packing
Once all the items required to complete the orders have been picked, the process of selecting packing materials begins. This is the final step, where quality assurance checks are performed.
Shipping
Shipping is a significant step in the order fulfillment process. Once the shipping labels and documentation have been received, the packed orders are loaded onto the counters for billing. It ensures the best delivery experience from order handling to its final delivery.
Delivery
This option includes the billing process (multiple payment modes) and ensures the on-time delivery of goods with quality checked.
Return Processing
The order fulfillment process ends when the customer receives their order. But what if the customer is not satisfied with the received order???
The returns process includes returning the product, putting it back into storage or disposing of it. It can also have either an exchange or a refund.
Order Fulfillment Challenges
- Handling inventory issues like out-of-stock scenarios and return management
- Accurate analysis of demand and planning to achieve it
- Quick order receiving system and supply chain execution
How Do You Choose an Order Fulfillment Strategy?
Depending on the skills and resources available in your business, you can decide on an order fulfillment strategy.
But what is most important to deal with the market competition is integrating business with business management software. The software integration offers-
- End-to-end tracking for orders
- Monitor inventory levels
- Keep a record of orders
- Boost your customer service
- Helps in demand forecasting
- Proffers multiple billing options
- Establish a smooth system from order to delivery
How SWIL’s Order Management Software improves Order Fulfillment?
SWIL has an effective order fulfillment solution. It has a complete business management system which tracks every order and its fulfillment process. It facilitates the following features that make software users able to-
- Generate Order from Purchase Order
- Generate Order from Purchase Order Book
- View Party Product Wise Order List Report
- Re-order Management
- Convert Order to Invoice
With the above features, SWIL also offers other features that help in quick order fulfillment. If you are looking for an order fulfillment management system, kindly contact the SWIL team. The team will assist you most appropriately.
