How to Speed Up Your Order Fulfillment Process: Tips & Tricks
In an era where swift and efficient delivery is essential, it is crucial for online businesses to optimize their order fulfillment process. This comprehensive article derived from Shopify offers practical steps on how to achieve fast order fulfillment and how to do it in a more organized way, especially for growing businesses.
The Bottom Line: This is an invaluable read for any ecommerce business owner who wishes to streamline the order fulfillment process, satisfying customers with quicker delivery times while intelligently scaling their operations.
Considering the pace at which ecommerce is developing and with the ongoing advancements in technology, we anticipate that businesses will be able to integrate more sophisticated automation and AI tools into their processes, further improving fulfillment speed and efficiency.
1. Customizing and Organizing Your Order List
Grouping multiple orders with similar attributes saves precious time during the fulfillment process. Shopify’s order list page allows you to utilize its search, filters, and tag features to efficiently organize your orders. Consider grouping orders by items, as these are likely to be stored together in your warehouse, or based on the destination market to optimize carrier pickups for different regions.
2. Bulk Creation, Purchase, and Printing of Shipping Labels
Once your orders are well-organized, you can bulk select them and proceed with creating shipping labels. Double-check all the shipping information in the central view before purchasing the labels and printing them with the packing slips in one go. Note: the process will soon be enhanced by Shopify with automatic packaging recommendations based on the order items.
💡Pro Tip: Use the printed packing slip as a picklist to expedite finding the needed inventory items in the warehouse.
3. USPS Manifests: A Time-saver For Pickups
If USPS is your chosen shipping carrier, make use of the option to create a manifest for all USPS orders. This feature generates a single barcode incorporating all shipping details for a group of orders, saving delivery time by allowing USPS to scan a single barcode instead of individually scanning labels.
4. Keep Track of Statuses with Shipping Label Index
Address printer dilemmas promptly by using the shipping label index to check which labels have been printed and which haven’t. Furthermore, avoid delay issues by keeping track of each order’s delivery status, allowing you to tackle any delivery problems with the carrier swiftly.
5. Streamline Fulfillment with Shopify Flow Automation
A smart way to boost fulfillment speed is by automating routine tasks with Shopify Flow. This first-party app is available for free to Shopify members. It provides a host of pre-existing order and fulfillment automation templates to choose from or even create your own.
Some common automation flows used by merchants include:
- Automatically halting high risk orders
- Placing orders to the same address on hold to package and ship together
- Auto-assigning fulfillment to a third-party logistic provider
- Order tagging with assigned fulfillment location for easy identification
Streamlined order fulfillment is crucial for growing ecommerce businesses. By organizing orders, fulfilling in bulk, making use of manifests, handling printer and delivery errors swiftly, and by automating parts of the fulfillment process, businesses can deliver products faster and improve the overall customer experience.
