As your e-commerce website starts getting the attention it deserves, your customer base and the number of orders start to grow. The situation presented to us by the pandemic has pushed people to make more online purchases than ever. Shopping online has never been more exclusive, and the competition has never been more intense. To tackle this, you can start by setting up multiple sales channels and a solid overall digital presence for your brand.
Check out our blog on “How to reach more customers via digital marketing efforts” to discover the best marketing tools for your e-commerce business.
The “too many orders” conundrum…
Too many orders, as hard as it is to believe, might not always be the best thing. More orders mean more staff, more shipments, more refunds, and more complexity overall. The cost of not having these variables taken care of is the immediate loss of repeat customers. Payment errors, incorrect deliveries, and misplaced orders are all factors which contribute towards leaving your customers with a sour taste they will not be looking forward to again. In fact, it’s reported that 65% of your customers never buy from a brand after a single bad experience.
Strong customer satisfaction is key to customer retention…
Sounds daunting? Not to worry. What you need is an effective e-commerce order management strategy which handles your orders from the moment your customer places an order to the time their order is delivered. Having these steps expertly planned out will ensure that you do not fall victim to losing precious customers.
Read through our blog and discover new avenues in your business that might need some work to make your order management more efficient and customer friendly.
1. Highlight Special Orders
Your customers enjoy online experiences which are more personalized and convenient. Whether it be in the form of express shipping, gift packaging or personalized notes, these are all perks which allow customers to have a memorable ordering journey. Let’s switch to behind the scenes. These customers usually end up paying extra money for their order to be handled with extra care or at a higher priority. However, it is surprising how many businesses choose to ignore this factor and process these orders as their regular counterparts. The result? A disappointed customer who pays a premium price for your extra services.
It is crucial that these orders are flagged for your processing team so that they are aware of how exactly the order is to be handled. Whether it’s done by specific barcodes, color-coded tapes or however you deem fit, the point is to ensure your customers get what they have paid for.
2. Train Your Staff
An increase in the number of your orders means evolving responsibilities, tools, and technologies. Just buying a barcode printer and scanner will not do the job. Your staff needs to understand how an order moves from one step to another and how that information is communicated among different members of your team. A single case of miscommunication can result in your entire process being severely affected in terms of halts and mix-ups before the fault is discovered and things can resume.
The fix? Go the extra mile and organize some much-needed training sessions for your staff on a regular basis. The purpose of these trainings is to ensure that your team knows exactly what is expected of them in terms of contributing and collaborating towards the entire fulfillment process. The trainings can be as trivial as using barcode scanners correctly and as major as crisis management techniques to deal with unhappy customers.
3. Set up effective order tracking
People who order online regularly really look forward to receiving their deliveries and want to be aware of how their order travels before reaching them. To add to the patience of such customers, an accurate and detailed order tracking system is the way to go.
Whether you do this via app notifications, SMS, or email reminders, keeping your customer in the loop of how the order is being processed and moved around before finally being delivered adds to their excitement and associates the transparency with increased trust in your brand’s customer service.
4. Automation is your friend
Involving more staff in each of your processes increases the likelihood of human errors and even results in lesser productivity in the long run. Simple steps like integrating your website with your order management system can go a long way in terms of ensuring accurate order processing by eliminating tedious tasks such as data entry and manual scanning.
Of course, not every system is 100% reliable. Hence, it is ideal to have a combination of automated systems set up and manual verification which would ultimately prove to be a robust technique to ensure accuracy throughout all steps of your order fulfillment.
5. Outsource your fulfillment to an expert
Imagine a world where your e-commerce orders are processed with a guarantee of accuracy. A world where every single one of your customers receives their orders exactly how they asked for it in a timely manner. You can have a team of industry experts and cutting-edge technology at your disposal, all working together to help you process your orders efficiently regardless of scale. And as a bonus, you can even have some amazing product photography done from the same place as well.
With RoboStores, you can have exactly that. With a customized e-commerce solution for you ranging from warehousing, picking and packing, fulfillment and an in-house studio, RoboStores is your perfect e-commerce partner no matter what your requirements are. Whether you are a drop-shipping business, e-commerce start-up or a multi-vendor store with a lot of inventory, our team is all hands-on deck with your business and would love to explore how we can help your scale your e-commerce business to the next level.