As you now know, online ecommerce retailers can grow exponentially if they can establish a strong and reliable product supply base, can brand themselves effectively, market themselves successfully, and deliver great customer service. But as an ecommerce business grows, issues related to scale emerge, and often they find that their efficiency decreases resulting in customer complaints centered around the right product being delivered on time. This highlights how important the ecommerce order management process flow is to an online business, it is like the cardiac system, if its not flowing properly then the business will falter and die. All it takes is a handful of negative reviews and suddenly your business goes from hero to zero.
How to Improve Your Ecommerce Order Management Process Flow
So if the order management process flow is so key to the operation of a successful business, what can you do to make it more efficient and fix all the inefficiencies revealed by scalability. The core solution to this is to automate the link between the ecommerce platform used and an ERP system which manages fulfillment of the order. The automation of this process cuts out time, human and error and cost from the order process and should exceed your customer’s expectations as well.
Whether you’re using Magento, Shopify, Amazon Marketplace or a WooCommerce solution, you can buy a software solution which will integrate it directly with your ERP solution and other systems such as SAP, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Quickbooks, Xero, or Acumatica.
What these software solutions do is integrate your online orders directly and rapidly into your ERP and accounting systems so that you eliminate the labor costs of accounting book keeping, and manual data entry which slows down order processing and often results in occasional errors. This can also reduce compliance-related penalties and allow for integration and validation of EDI data creating a unified system.
Fulfillment of orders can be delivered through your own warehouse or direct to your suppliers if you also integrate dropship software. Inventory updates are instant and can be queried at any point, with re-ordering automated based on thresholds and rules set by users. Inventory levels can also be integrated with your e-commerce platform and with your ecommerce partners such as Amazon and Buy.com, allowing your end customer to check if the product is in stock and have a realistic idea of delivery date, even setting their own delivery date.
Integration with transport suppliers and fulfillment services allows for quicker fulfilment and order tracking for you and for your end customer, enabling even real-time viewing of the order track and delivery time within an hour slot. This is particularly good when you are using a drop-ship vendor, because you will no longer need to contact the vendor for information on the order when a customer enquires about timeliness of delivery, the customer can see themselves the whole supply chain and be given a realistic delivery time.
So the time could be right now to improve your ecommerce order management process flow.
