Shipping Fulfillment: Processing Your Orders

Ease of fulfillment depends on many factors

The fulfillment of your online orders is typically as simple or complicated as the size and composition of your inventory and your fulfillment location/s. If your eCommerce business has limited inventory in a single location, you can employ a fairly straightforward process of selecting the item from where it is stored, placing it in a box and preparing it for shipping. If you ship from multiple locations and have thousands of items available online, order fulfillment is a core competency and merits reading on.

Fulfilling your orders

Fulfillment is usually not transparent to your customer or part of their buying experience. However, each environment should be considered in setting up the fulfillment process:

Selling Environment:

In some selling environments, the customer has the option to select the fulfillment location–and thus fastest delivery–based on the shipping destination. However, for most sellers, this is done via rules set up in the shipping platform.

Shipping Environment:

Determine the optimal fulfillment location based on one or more of the following factors:
- Inventory carried (or remaining) at location
- Proximity to destination address
- Service level
- Order processing capacity/current workload
Route pick lists, packing slips, and shipping labels to designated printers appropriately

Physical Environment: