It’s no secret that the ecommerce sector is experiencing consistent growth, with more and more shoppers choosing to purchase from the comfort of their homes (or beds, bathrooms, cars).
In fact, the online shopping market continues to grow at a rate of 15% year on year and generates around $4 trillion dollars a year worldwide.
This is good news for online retailers, but it comes with a few challenges.
Not least of which is the need to develop and maintain a robust order processing system that allows you to fulfill orders with ease, accuracy, and pace.
If you’re wondering just how to do that, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, you’ll learn all about order processing, the critical stages involved, and how to optimize your order processing system to enhance operations and improve your customer service.
What is order processing?
Let’s start nice and simple.
What do we mean when we talk about order processing?
Order processing is the business process or workflow that bridges the point where a customer places an order to when they physically receive your product.
The way a company approaches order management might range from simple manual processes such as logbooks to complex, automated, data-driven workflows involving internal or external fulfillment centers.
Pretty simple, right?
But what does order processing actually involve?
What are the 6 steps in the order fulfillment process?
1. Order placed: the customer decides to purchase your product. This has most likely taken place online.
2. Order received: your ecommerce platform sends you a notification, either via email or to your order management system. This lets you know that a customer has placed a new order. Ideally, this will also trigger a confirmation message to the customer.
3. Order picked: once the order has been received, it’s time for one of your warehouse staff to pick it. There are several different kinds of picking strategies that may be implemented here, including piece picking, zone picking, batch picking, and wave picking.
4. Order packed: now that the order is picked in its entirety, it is packaged and prepared for shipment.
5. Order shipped: your shipping supplier collects the order and takes over from there. Here’s another good opportunity for a confirmation email to be sent.
6. Order delivered: the customer’s order has successfully made it to their doorstep. Yay!
But wait, there’s more…
Though these 6 steps are the main stages in the basic order fulfillment process, to truly optimize your businesses process, and to continue improving operations, you should add 2 more phases:
7. Customer feedback: ask for it! How do you know what you’re doing well — or not so well — unless you’re collecting customer feedback? This is a great way to ensure positive future customer experiences.
8. Improvements: now, you need to act on that feedback. This doesn’t mean you need to implement every single suggestion, of course. Instead, you should be analyzing customer feedback for trends and common occurrences, which may signify a need for further fine-tuning of your workflows.
Doing all of this manually sounds like a lot of work, right?
This is especially true as sales start to ramp up.
Enter order processing software.
What is order processing software?
For enterprises fulfilling and shipping large volumes of orders on a daily basis, order processing software is a lifesaver.
Order management software helps you control and automate the 6 steps involved in the order fulfillment process.
In many cases, it also gives you the ability to communicate with the customer on order updates, such as automatically sending them an email once their order is out for delivery.
There are a few more benefits to your company setting up a highly effective order processing software system, though.
What are the benefits of effective order processing software?
Order processing software comes with 4 major benefits:
1. Manage stock efficiently
Stock management is crucial to successful sales order processing.
The last thing you want is to receive a customer order for an item you don’t have in stock.
Order processing software removes part of the human element involved in fulfillment, and allows you to keep track of your current inventory levels.
This also means you can analyze inventory trends and get ahead of fast-selling stock by bringing more in before stocks get too low.
2. Fewer fulfillment mistakes
The unavoidable truth is that wherever humans are involved, mistakes will be made to at least some extent. The best teams use the technology at hand to reduce the rate at which these mistakes happen.A solid order processing software platform should allow team members to fulfill a sales order with minimal mistakes.
This might involve confirming correctly picked orders by entering or scanning stock codes.
3. Save time
The faster you can pick orders, the more orders you can pick each day, and the less your fulfillment costs end up being.
So, it’s crucial that you choose an order processing software platform that allows you to automate as much as possible, which will save your team loads of time in the long run.
4. Use customer data to make informed decisions
It’s pretty hard to analyze thousands of customer data points using a manual system.
Order processing software allows you to monitor trends, determine peak selling times, and even go as far as recommending specific products to previous customers based on consistencies across other purchasers.
Optimize your order processing system with monday.com
Let’s take a look at an easy way to use monday.com to optimize your order processing system for better stock management and an improved customer experience.
With monday.com, you can use custom column types to design your own workflows. In the above example, we’ve used the following column types:
- Item Name Column: this records the name of your customer.
- Status Columns: the following 4 columns are Status Columns, which you can customize with order status options that fit your specific company and workflows. We’ve used them to display the type, style, and color of hat order, and the status of the order from Pending to Shipped.
- Person Column: this column can be used to assign an employee who is responsible for fulfilling the order.
- Date Columns: these 2 columns display the date when the order was received, and when it was shipped to the buyer.
- Formula Column: in our example, the formula column is used to calculate the number of days elapsed from the point an order is received to the moment it is shipped. This is helpful for reporting on and analyzing how long it takes to process an order.
- Email Column: storing customer email addresses facilitates better client communications.
Now, you might be thinking: that’s a lot of information to enter, especially if I’m receiving hundreds of orders each day.
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
How can you get customer data into monday.com?
A simple way to save yourself the time of entering all this customer data is to have your clients place orders and enter their data via a custom purchase order form, like this one:
Even better, use one of our countless integrations to capture this data directly from your ecommerce platform.
What improvements can you make right now?
Here are 3 major improvements you can — and should — start implementing right away:
Automate everything
Let’s be honest, manual grunt work sucks.
Plus, it’s a huge time sucker, which inevitably raises your costs of fulfillment.
With monday.com, it’s easy to set up your own custom order processing automation rules, which can be set up to make small changes within your workflow, notify employees and customers, or trigger stock alerts.
Be picky with your shipping supplier
It goes without saying that you’re going to need a shipping supplier who is reliable, punctual, and professional.
But there’s 1 piece of the puzzle you might be missing out on.
To truly optimize your order processing system, you should find a supplier who not only ticks those boxes but who has a robust internal system that can integrate with your own workflow, minimizing the amount of manual work required on both ends.
It shouldn’t be all that difficult to find either, using monday.com’s integration for Zapier.
Pretty much every platform out there integrates with Zapier, so you’ll be able to set up a custom integration in no time, no matter which software they use.
Level up your customer communications
One of the best ways to improve your sales order process and lift customer satisfaction is to work on your customer communications.
At a minimum, you should be sending email updates when:
- An order is received
- An order is shipped
- An order is delivered
Luckily, it’s simple to automate this process in monday.com.
Be effecient with monday.com
It should be clear now that efficient sales order processing isn’t just about picking, packing, and sending, but about having a robust system to help you get this work done at scale.
Are you ready to move your order processing systems into the modern world?
Why not start with one of our templates?
