The world of e-commerce and retail is incredibly fast-paced, which makes managing customer expectations for speedy and accurate deliveries more important than ever. This is where our order fulfilment services can help you.
Our advanced team can handle everything from inventory management and picking, all the way through to shipping and our contract packing services, ensuring a seamless experience for both retail businesses and their customers.
In this guide, we’ll explore exactly what order fulfilment services are, why they’re so important, and how they contribute to efficient and reliable deliveries, showing you exactly why you should integrate these systems into your business.
Want to get started? Make an enquiry today and we’ll see what we can do!
Why Are Order Fulfilment Services So Important to Modern Businesses?
Many businesses still conduct their own delivery and shipping operations, enabling them to have greater control over their e-commerce logistics system. However, outsourcing your order fulfilment services to a dedicated business like Tactical Solutions can offer several major benefits that you can take advantage of:
- Scalability: If you’re a small business planning to grow further in the near future, scalability may be a key priority for you. What’s even better is that modern fulfilment centres can also handle high order volumes during peak seasons without straining their in-house resources.
- A flexible pricing model:Â Most B2C order fulfilment services will offer a flexible pricing model for their users, with pay-as-you-go pricing or pay-per-order pricing being rather popular. Finding a transparent pricing model for your picking and packing services can make outsourcing your orders more cost-effective in the long run, so it’s important to do your research first.
- Cost-effectiveness: The cost benefits don’t stop there though – by using a dedicated order fulfilment service, you can reduce your operational costs, eliminating the need for you to source warehouse space and logistics staff.
- An enhanced customer experience: You’ll usually get faster delivery times and accurate order processing when using an ecommerce order fulfilment company, helping your business boost both customer satisfaction and loyalty.
By entrusting their order fulfilment services to a professional logistics company like Tactical Solutions, modern brands and retailers can focus on their core activities, such as new product development and field marketing.
The Different Types of Order Fulfilment Models
There are several different types of order fulfilment models that retail businesses can choose from when implementing them into their retail operations, depending on things like their size, industry, and needs:
- In-house order fulfilment solutions: With this form of order fulfilment, companies manage their logistics internally, instead of outsourcing to another organisation. These services are more suitable for small-scale operations.
- Third-party fulfilment services (3PL): Third-party fulfilment services are popular for larger companies, moving order fulfilment to specialised providers who handle the entire process for you.
- Dropshipping: With dropshipping, products are shipped directly from your suppliers to your customers, eliminating the need for inventory storage. The seller usually acts as a middleman between the customer and the manufacturer, often selling the products for a higher price than if the customer went to the manufacturer directly.
- A hybrid fulfilment model: Some businesses prefer to combine several different order fulfilment models (such as in-house and outsourced strategies) for greater flexibility.
Understanding these models should hopefully help you to find the best fit for your retail operations.
The Order Fulfilment Process: A Step-by-Step Breakdown
Successfully fulfilling orders requires a multi-stage process that can streamline the journey, all the way from the point of purchase through to the final delivery.
The order fulfilment process you follow may differ slightly from the stages laid out below (depending on the type of products you manufacture), but it usually follows these steps:
- Inventory housing: First off, you need to know exactly what you’re selling and how many units are available at any one time. Your items will be sent to a fulfilment centre or warehouse to be catalogued, ensuring accurate tracking of your products when required.
- Product storage and organisation: Once catalogued correctly, your products will be stored systematically in fulfilment centres, allowing for easy access and efficient retrieval when a purchase is made.
- Item Purchase:Â Next, your customers need to purchase items from you, before the rest of the process can continue.
- Order picking: Once an item has been ordered, the item will be selected by the order picking team, based on the customer’s purchase.
- Order packing: Once picked, your products will be securely packed to ensure safe delivery.
- Shipping: Your orders will then be dispatched using courier services, based on the tracking options and shipping rates chosen by your customers.
- Returns management: The returns management stage is an important part of the order fulfilment process, as handling returned items effectively will help you maintain customer satisfaction.
It should be noted that the product recall procedure is different from the standard returns legislation laid out in the Consumer Rights Acts 2015, but it’s still important to make yourself aware of both forms of regulation for future reference. You can find out more about product recalls here.
Each step in the process requires accurate precision and coordination to reduce the risk of delays and errors. When everything is working correctly, the order fulfilment procedure should be largely automated, allowing your employees to focus on more important tasks.
Common Challenges in Order Fulfillment
Whilst hiring an external order fulfilment company has many benefits, it also comes with several challenges. Some of these drawbacks can be prevented or diminished with the right planning, so it’s important to make yourself aware of them before committing to a new outsourcing company.
Technology is used vastly within modern fulfilment centres, but human error can still occur – especially when doing jobs that require manual processes. For example, simple mistakes such as typos can have a disproportionately negative effect, resulting in the wrong items being sent to the wrong customers.
Inventory mismanagement can also be an issue here, with stock shortages and overstocking disrupting your e-commerce operations greatly. However, warehouses and fulfilment centres can mitigate these issues somewhat by using innovative order fulfilment software, although this won’t be possible for every single task.
Another challenge faced by e-commerce fulfilment companies is high return rates – managing returned items can be extremely resource-intensive, so it’s important to have a specific returns policy in place. Legally, you have to offer a set returns period for your items (even if they’re not defective), so ensuring your products are well made and manufactured from quality materials may help to prevent your products from being returned en masse.
You might also encounter shipping delays due to external factors, such as the weather or external supply chain disruptions. Shipping delays are sometimes unavoidable, but keeping your customers informed throughout is essential to prevent them from wondering about the status of their orders.
These challenges can make the order fulfilment process harder, but they can be addressed with proactive planning and robust technological systems, so there’s no need to worry too much about them.
Integrating Modern Technology Into the Order Fulfilment Process
At Tactical Solutions, technology is at the very heart of everything we do, using our innovative technological capabilities and retail data analytics tools to ensure every client is happy with our broad range of services. There are several new forms of technology that can be integrated into your sales platforms and order management solutions, pushing your brand above the ranks of your rivals.
Modern order fulfilment processes heavily rely on top-notch retailing technology to improve speed and accuracy, with several key innovations including:
- Warehouse Management Systems (WMS): Warehouse management systems make the stages of inventory tracking, inventory management and order processing much easier, allowing you to focus on other, more pressing business matters.
- AI and machine learning:Â AI (Artificial intelligence)Â and machine learning are two interlinked forms of technology, which have recently risen to prominence due to the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. These tools enable brands to accurately predict and forecast demand trends to optimise their inventory levels.
- Robotics and automation: Robotics and automation have been a feature of e-commerce channels for several decades now, streamlining your picking and packing processes for much faster turnaround times.
- Real-time inventory tracking: The rise of advanced retail analytics tech has meant that customers and businesses now have greater visibility into the shipping process, using a range of informative metrics to provide tracking information on the fly.
As you can see, these cutting-edge tools enable fulfilment providers to deliver a much faster and more reliable service for their clients, which should also have a positive effect on brand loyalty and customer retention.
Choosing the Right Order Fulfilment Partner
If you’re searching for the perfect order fulfilment service partner, you can’t go wrong with Tactical Solutions. These solutions are the backbone of efficient and accurate deliveries – particularly in today’s competitive market. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a large conglomerate or a small business either, as we can grow as fast as you like, due to the flexibility offered.
We’re not just limited to order fulfilment either, with some of our other key solutions including:
At Tactical Solutions, we’re a specialist field marketing agency, offering cutting-edge UK fulfilment services for all our clients. As part of the Dee Set Group, it’s fair to say we know what we’re doing in the retail sphere, so you can really put your faith in our team of experts.
Want to see how we can help your brand grow? Just get in touch with our dedicated team and we’ll do the rest!
