How To Improve Order Fulfillment During Holiday Sales
The holiday season is a critically important time for online sales. Many eCommerce businesses attain almost one-third of their annual sales during the holiday season. This means your online store needs to work twice as hard to ensure order fulfillment is done right.
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching, there is an increased level of demand for delivering holiday orders in timely and cost-effective manners.
You’ve analyzed demand, determined inventory, optimized your product listing and even planned promotions. However, order fulfillment is a critical factor, which could make or break a successful season of your holiday sales.
Why Does Holiday Order Fulfillment Matter?
When it comes to holiday sales, every online merchant faces a lot of challenges in terms of order fulfillment.
They need to figure out how to manage increased inventory, labor costs, freight, payment processing, logistics, and most importantly, the increased pressures of delivering as per customer expectations for low cost/free shipping.
There needs to be an effective fulfillment strategy in place beforehand to streamline holiday operations and simplify the workload to boost holiday sales without compromising on customer satisfaction.
An amazing website, a strong social media presence, smart email marketing and other creative means to reach out to your customers are all well and good but not enough.
You also need efficient back-end logistics to leave a long-lasting impression on your customers’ minds and make the holiday season super successful.
You need to align every area of your business, especially between supply chain leaders and the marketing team in order to better handle your delivery management process.
Receiving a lot of orders is a great thing, but if you run out of stock, are unable to ship packages out in time, or even fail to deliver gifts to recipients in time, there’s a huge risk of losing your customers and damaging your reputation.
Order fulfillment in such cases could be challenging. Below are a few ways to help you prepare a successful holiday order fulfillment strategy.
Inventory Management
#1 Stocking Up
Maintaining the perfect stock is a tricky thing to do. Too much inventory brings high warehousing fees and stockouts lead to dissatisfied customers and lower revenue.
The tips below will help to manage your inventory:
- Analyze previous holidays sales data to predict sales this year
- Determine the number of days of inventory until you expect to run out of it
- Identify common shipping destinations according to the majority of customers’ residences to minimize inventory costs
- Use inventory management software or inventory forecasting tools to analyze historical inventory and sales data
- Diminish excess stock with the help of stock clearance sales
- Communicate about spikes in demand to your third party logistics provider for them to efficiently plan the delivery and support your business
#2 Track Inventory Levels Accurately
Even with the best inventory planning tools, forecasts can go wrong and the unexpected can occur.
For instance, your product could receive an organic celebrity endorsement, get featured in a few major gift guides, or become the must-have gift for a particular age group.
You need to continuously review inventory turnover, daily order performance, stock counts with timely data.
- Examine the root cause for inaccurate estimates and readjust forecasts for the future
- Reorder inventory if sales exceed projections
- Increase promotions if sales are behind projections
- Keep a track of stock on all your stores and fulfillment centers, and transfer inventory from your backup warehouse if required
- If any orders are getting help up, prioritize the replenishment of such products
Fast Order Fulfillment
Read more here.
Originally published at https://get.store on October 25, 2019.
