Efficient order fulfillment is one of the most crucial steps for an eCommerce brand to keep its customers delighted. While customer order processing is extremely time-consuming, you must streamline your processes to hasten delivery to thrive in the competition. It would be best if you improved your fulfillment efficiency by optimizing your workflow with the help of advanced inventory management solutions and business distribution software.
 
eCommerce brands always dread low customer satisfaction and high cart abandonment levels due to their lengthy fulfillment process. Fulfillment is a daunting challenge if you try to do it in-house. After all, it might work for a few orders in a day, but it doesn’t work well when your business grows, and you have more than hundreds of orders to process every day. It is always smart to get professional fulfillment services to help you with order delivery.
 
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However, whether you take the help of fulfillment companies or handle it on your own, efficient and accurate order fulfillment makes all the difference in the world for your customers. Let’s look at ten effective ways to speed up your order delivery:

• Efficient Inventory Management in Tandem With Promotions. As an eCommerce brand, you often launch seasonal campaigns or even run product-specific promotions. So, the best way to hasten your delivery process is to prepare and plan your inventory well for your promotional campaign before its launch.Also, segmenting your regular and promotional products is a good idea, making it easy for the logistics team.
• Manage Inventory Per Order Velocity. All your products can never have the same order frequency or even velocity. For efficient inventory management, you should always segment high-velocity products from others as those will have a faster cycle speed than the others.Such products should be at a place that is easy to reach for the fulfillment team. Always arrange high-velocity products on the front and lower shelves while keeping the lower velocity ones on top shelves.
• Product Bundling as Per Recurring Orders. One of the key trends in the eCommerce landscape is the tendency of consumers to purchase two or three products together, which usually complement each other. For instance, someone who orders a dog collar often clubs it with a matching leash. In such cases, if the products are bundled together, it can speed up the order fulfillment process. It saves picking time separately and thus saves cost for your brand.

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• Demand Trends. Make sure you research the current demand trends as well as the trends of the same products in the past years at the same time. This research of the market can help in speeding up fulfillment. For instance, if there is a rising demand for any particular product lately, or which products usually get purchased together at a specific time of the year could be stored together for easy packaging.
• Invest in Technology. eCommerce brands need to invest in sophisticated, advanced digital technology for real-time inventory data. Data helps them keep track of inventory—accurate inventory tracking help in streamlining and organizing the logistics process. Transparency and data analysis at every level of the fulfillment process helps you control your supply chain system to achieve faster delivery.
• Efficient Sorting Process. You must sort your orders efficiently for faster fulfillment. Sorting by product line is a popular strategy companies use for quicker order delivery. You can sort or segment your orders by zone, SKU, line items, or per product line. Typically, sorting is done as per SKU as it minimizes the frequency or effort to retrieve items.
• Effective Warehouse Layout. The layout of your warehouse has an impact on the efficiency of the order delivery process. An optimized workflow – from accepting the inbound goods to shipping – can prevent supply chain bottlenecks. If required, you should revamp your warehouse space to store products more proficiently without adding to the cost.
• Streamline Order Pickup. An optimized pickup operation impacts the order fulfillment process. Inefficiency in picking up orders can negatively affect the logistics operations and the complete supply chain process. There are various ways of efficient picking systems that you can leverage, such as wave picking, small batch picking, and zone picking. Alternatively, a professional 3PL provider has highly experienced pickers for expert delivery.

ALSO READ: How 3PLs can Help in Grocery Order Fulfillment in India?

• Smart Warehousing Strategy. Meeting rising customer expectations of two-day, next-day, or same-day shipping, you need to develop an effective and smart warehouse strategy. Your warehouses should be placed strategically near shoppers’ locations, saving costs in the long run. Though ground shipping from close warehouses might be the best and most cost-effective option yet, it might not be viable when your brand grows with a growing clientele across the nation. Hence, in that case, you would require to partner with a professional 3PL provider to make it more cost-effective.
• Plan Delivery Routes. For faster delivery, it is crucial that you optimize the ground shipping time by planning effective and fastest possible routes. Follow the traffic trend of different areas for efficient route planning so the delivery people can avoid traffic bottlenecks and other potential delays. Also, efficient trucking routes saves not only time but also fuel cost.
• Professional Help. After everything is said, the smartest way for faster order fulfillment is to hire a professional fulfillment center or a 3PL provider with the required industry experience to manage all the supply chain logistics operations cost-effectively. Research the market for proficient 3PL service providers, and develop a strategic partnership.

 
To conclude, speeding up your fulfillment process is crucial for your eCommerce brand thrice in the cut-throat competition. Nowadays, there is a major paradigm shift in consumer behavior and expectations. Consumers expect faster delivery and are ready to switch brands based on their fulfillment policies. So, in a consumer-centric world, you must take care of your customers to thrive and grow your brand.
 
Hence, select a strategic partner carefully to ensure world-class order fulfillment services.
 

 
Not just another 3PL provider, XPDEL is a growth enabler. We are a leading, hi-tech fulfillment and logistics company supporting Direct to Consumer (D2C) and Business to Business (B2B) supply chains.Data analytics is at the heart of our 3PL services, powered by advanced technology and led by industry experts.