Ecommerce has skyrocketed in the past decade, riding the digital wave to simplify shopping like never before. Industries higher shape up or ship out to sustain with this online shopping spree!
Efficient order processing in ecommerce is the key to maintaining with those high customer expectations. To go above and beyond, businesses must dance through a slick
Here’s every thing it’s essential to learn about order processing and find out how to improve it.
What Does Order Processing Mean?
Some may wonder: what does order processing mean? Simply, order processing means accepting, managing, and fulfilling customer orders. It is the series of steps that be certain that an order successfully reaches the customer who made the purchase.
Steps of the Purchase Order Process
Order processing methods vary depending on a business’s type and scale. Nevertheless, the fundamental steps for order processing remain consistent across online and success firms. Here is a broad overview of the steps in the purchase order process.
Customer Places an Order
The shopper will order a product through an online store, email, or with a company sales representative.
Company Receives the Order
The corporate will receive the order from the customer, including details just like the ordered product, amount, shipping details, payment processing data, and delivery information.
Depending on the company’s size, an individual may receive this order through a sales email, online store, or an order management system. This information should be manually or routinely verified to ensure a properly executed order.
In the case of firms with multiple locations or warehouses, the order management system will determine which location will handle the order.
Inventory Picking
Then comes the picking of the inventory. That is when the specified items and quantity will likely be collected from the current stock to satisfy the customer’s order.
The picking a part of the process must be optimized in every way possible for efficient order processing. The earlier the items are allocated and picked out, the faster they will be prepared and sent to the next a part of the process: packing.
Order Packing
That is where the items are packed into shipping boxes to prepare to send them off to the customer.
The packing procedure involves weighing the boxes and attaching required labels, address details, and delivery instructions.
Shipping
Following the packing process, the next step involves shipping the order to the customer.
Smaller firms normally send orders on to customers, while larger enterprises often consolidate and ship batches of orders to nearby locations concurrently. These orders are then distributed to specific locations as needed, which might help cut costs by reducing the variety of shipments sent out.
Customer Notification
After shipping the product, it’s crucial to inform the customer that their order is en route with tracking information. This proactive approach keeps them updated and significantly boosts customer satisfaction.
While these steps vary for different company types and sizes, every step is essential. No matter the company, each step ought to be followed to ensure a smooth order process.
Suggestions for Improved Order Processing
Now, let’s discuss some suggestions for improved order processing. These strategies help streamline the process and make it more efficient for each the company and the customer.
Implement a Clear and Organized System
Having a
Use Automation Tools
Automation is becoming increasingly popular in the business world, and for good reason. Corporations can save time and reduce errors by automating certain parts of the order process, reminiscent of sending out notifications or generating shipping labels.
Optimize Packaging
Optimizing packaging is considered one of the areas that’s essential to optimize. Whether a company uses premade boxes, templates, or custom packaging, it should have the best dimensions and be
Packaging ought to be the right size to fit and protect the products while being inexpensive enough to not cut into the product’s profit an excessive amount of.
Make Shipping Cost-Effective
Reasonably priced and efficient shipping is critical when handling orders. Shipping costs can really add up fast if not done well. Take a small ecommerce business, for example — they could start shipping products on their very own, but as orders grow, so do those costs.
It all adds up once you consider the time spent grabbing materials like tape and boxes and packing and then the time and fuel to haul shipments to the carrier.
As a business grows and orders pile up, it might make sense to start partnering with a distribution service to handle your shipping load.
To reduce shipping costs, consider purchasing discounted supplies, choosing
Use Order Management Software
Through the initial stages of a business, handling a few orders is no big deal. But as traffic picks up, things can get tricky, resulting in more errors. That’s when it is perhaps clever to consider getting some
Such software might help track incoming and outgoing orders, orders in processing, inventory levels, and way more. It offers more transparency over the order process, improves accuracy, and might help to increase efficiency significantly. It also frees up a considerable amount of staff to concentrate on other areas and growing the business.
Monitor Order Processing KPIs
Every ecommerce business should determine its key performance indicators (KPIs) throughout its shipping process. These metrics will be monitored to determine the efficacy and efficiency of the order success process.
Essentially the most critical metrics in this regard are the turnaround time for an order, customer satisfaction, success rate, and accuracy rate.
Let’s learn more about them:
- Order turnaround time: The time it takes between an order being placed and delivered to the customer. The lower this number, the more efficient the process is. To improve its turnaround rate, a business can track step times to pinpoint inefficiencies in specific process stages.
- Accuracy rate: The number or percentage of orders accomplished and fulfilled without errors. It helps pinpoint common mistakes and find ways to fix them, resulting in a significantly better rate of accurate orders.
- Customer satisfaction rate: It measures how customers perceive the business and their satisfaction with it. To gather data, ask customers for feedback through surveys or
follow-up emails. Customer feedback is vital in pinpointing any issues in the order processing chain, like long delivery times, damaged products, incorrect items, or other concerns. - Achievement rate: The success rate is the variety of orders which have been accomplished in comparison with the number which might be still in progress. It might help quickly discover problems or inefficiencies in the success process and discover areas of key demand for specific products. Every business should strive to keep a high success rate to ensure customers receive their products promptly.
Some businesses can also consider some extra or more detailed metrics. Still, these are the basic ones that ought to be monitored usually to ensure a smooth and efficient order success process.
Stay on Top of Inventory
One other critical aspect of order processing is inventory management. Keeping track of inventory levels is crucial in ensuring timely delivery of products. Businesses have to have enough stock on hand to fulfill orders, but not so much that it becomes a burden on space for storing and funds.
A good practice is conducting inventory audits to track stock levels usually. It may also help discover potential issues reminiscent of overstocking or
Enabling
By staying on top of inventory management, businesses can avoid stockouts and backorders, resulting in dissatisfied customers and lost sales.
Keep Customers Informed
Order transparency and status are among the many best ways for a company to improve customer satisfaction. Customers should either be usually informed of their order status or be capable of check the company website for information.
It won’t hurt to notify the customer in regards to the following steps:
- Order in process: The corporate has received the order and is currently going through the above steps, reminiscent of verification, picking, packing, and preparing to be shipped.
- Order processed: This implies the order is collected, packed, and able to be shipped.
- Order shipped: The order has been sent off to the customer. It also needs to include tracking information so the customer can monitor their order.
This information helps customers feel in control and stay involved with their purchases. It could make all of the difference in their satisfaction with the purchase process.
Not only does this contribute to them becoming returning customers, but they will even be more prone to recommend the company to others.
Order Management Made Easy with Ecwid
Running your personal ecommerce business will be an incredible journey, and Ecwid is here to provide help to achieve it. Our ecommerce platform is designed to make running an ecommerce store more effortless than ever.
Ecwid helps you improve your order processing and easily handle the entire order lifecycle, from placing an order to getting it delivered on time.
Listed below are just a few of the tools that make order processing a breeze with Ecwid:
- Keep track of orders from all sales channels in one dashboard, with handy filters for payment and success status, date, and more.
- Keep your customers informed about their orders by updating the statuses from waiting to processed, shipped, and delivered.
- Ensure your team stays updated on any status changes to speed up order processing.
- Stay on top of your inventory with
low-stock alerts to keep track of all of your products and make sure you never run out of stock. - Provide tracking information to your customers so that they know when to expect the order’s arrival.
- Use other tools for efficient order success, reminiscent of recent order alerts, staff notes, comments on orders, and order list export.
- Buy discounted shipping labels right from the Ecwid admin.
In today’s
