When your company was small, your order processing was simple and it didn’t require a lot of fancy software or automation to keep things running smoothly.
As you’ve grown, though, you’ve probably noticed that the way you did things before isn’t working as well as it did and you’re needing to make adjustments periodically to get the most benefit for your company.
But is that order fulfillment really worth so much effort? As it turns out, how well you do your order fulfillment really does make a difference, at least in terms of dollars and cents.
The Many Ways Good Order Fulfillment Saves Money
When you use a more automated order fulfillment service, it saves you more than just time, it saves you money, too. If you think about how much time you spend manually entering orders alone, it’s not hard to see that you can more than make up for what you spend on shopping cart integration in productive time elsewhere. However, the hard cash savings are harder to pinpoint sometimes.
Here are a few of the places you’ll realize real cost savings that will add up quickly:
- Shipping. Believe it or not, being able to electronically convey your shipment manifest to a shipper like UPS or FedEx can save you real cash, especially if the packages are similarly sized and many are going to nearby locations. It saves the shipper effort, saves you time and everybody’s happier with the reduction in real paperwork.
- Inventory storage. Storing inventory requires physical space, which costs money. Having an automated order system also means having a really good way to gauge how well products are selling and accompanying software that can produce data analysis on what products should be eliminated. You can more easily predict when you’ll need to restock, how much you’ll need to restock and will be able to reduce your paid warehousing space accordingly.
- Inventory loss. Over-ordering also means that sometimes products are expired or out of fashion before they can be sold. Better software tools that count and analyze the data on every aspect of your shorter-lived products can help you predict how many to keep on hand so you don’t lose so much inventory to age.
- Fulfillment errors. Every time an order is messed up because you transposed a set of numbers or simply entered it wrong manually, it costs you in postage, time, effort, shipping and packaging. Automated orders mean that accuracy at the order entry point is always spot on and if there’s an error, it’s on the pick, pack and ship With the right precautions in place, even these mistakes can be minimized so that your costs for fulfillment errors are approaching zero.
Good fulfillment saves you money, each and every time. That’s why it’s more than worth it to pay for quality fulfillment software or partner with a 3rd party logistics (3PL) company that has this kind of technology already in place.
