Order Fulfillment Vs Order Management

Lost in transit. Packages are occasionally lost in warehouses or during transit. Often, this is due to a failure to properly track a package throughout the supply chain. If a package is unable to be located in a reasonable amount of time, the retailer must inform the customer. They may choose to refund the customer or else ship out a replacement product.

Total order transparency can reduce WISMO calls by more than 25%. Even better? Optimal supply chains have 15% lower costs than those that don’t optimize. Consider, for example, our case study on Bodybuilding.com, an online retailer that was struggling with WISMO calls and late and damaged orders. To get on top of these issues, it deployed Convey Engage to improve customer experience at a scalable cost. This tool helped the retailer to:

Shipping costs can be a concern for ecommerce businesses, and they can also affect your conversion rates. Third-party fulfillment companies often charge by the weight, volume, or dimensions of your product. Some services also offer prepaid return labels.

For instance, Amazon.com, Inc. uses robots in its fulfillment centers to assist associates in performing operations and drive faster shipping times. With the majority of online purchasing sales coming from the urban area, and consumers increasingly demanding product delivery in the shortest possible turnaround time, the location of a fulfillment center is of strategic importance to e-commerce companies. Having centers near major cities that not only house products, but also perform other fulfillment services like sorting, bundling, labeling, and shipping helps players deliver products in a shorter turnaround time and win customers’ confidence.

Seamless fulfillment involves not only choosing the right providers for the job but also keeping customers in the loop about their order’s real-time status or any hiccups. Because, let’s face it, hiccups are unavoidable: 11% of deliveries face delays or other issues. But that’s where your stellar customer service will come into play. A little transparency, effort, and understanding will go a long way to improving the post-purchase experience and ensuring brand loyalty.

In the third quarter, Best Buy’s online sales expanded 21.6 percent, with about half of the gain attributed to the chain-wide rollout of ship-from-store capabilities in January 2014. Others are using a hub store model in each region. For instance, Walmart is using 83 Supercenters for ship-from-store and Target, 136.

There are a lot of third-party providers that businesses can choose from to handle inventory management, distribution, warehousing, or fulfillment. Some major fulfillment providers include:

The global e-commerce fulfillment services market size was valued at USD 86,449.97 million in 2021 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.5% from 2022 to 2030. The proliferation of electronic commerce and the resulting rise in the number of online buyers, especially in emerging economies is anticipated to fuel market growth. Fulfillment service centers enable online merchants to outsource services including bundling, warehousing, shipping, and other value-added services, such as return management and urgent parcel service. A fulfillment center is ideal for merchants that do not have robust warehousing capabilities to manage inventory directly and do not want to invest additional efforts in shipping.