Order Fulfillment Software: Features, Benefits, and Examples
Warehouse shipping may seem simple to people from the outside of the industry. Yet, ensuring timely and correct delivery is often difficult for retailers, as the myriad of small and large problems hinder the efficiency of operations.
At the warehouse, you must be able to receive, pinpoint and quickly retrieve orders, track expiration dates, and ensure that delivery costs are not draining your funds. Effective inventory management, order management, and customer relationship management are prerequisites to successful warehouse operations.
Order fulfillment software is designed to remove bottlenecks in the shipment process, automate manual processes, and eliminate costly mistakes.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of order fulfillment software, its main features, and examples.
What is order fulfillment software?
Also known as Ecommerce fulfillment software, these solutions are helpful both for businesses that manage their own orders, and for those who work with third-party logistics providers.
Fulfillment software solutions integrate with existing tech platforms, such as merchants’ CRM systems, to automate and streamline order management and shipping.
In essence, order fulfillment software is a digital hub that allows you to oversee the entire order lifecycle. It eliminates manual tasks and errors and provides you with better control over your inventory. This allows you to make order processing faster and smoother.
Benefits of order fulfillment software
Faster delivery
As Maureen Walsch from DCL Delivery notes, the most common question customers ask from Ecommerce companies is “When will my package arrive”? The speed and quality of delivery has a considerable impact on customer satisfaction.
Order fulfillment software eliminates paperwork and enables you to maintain reports, pick tickets, and packing lists in an electronic form. This allows you to provide customers with fast shipping and accurate delivery times, which boosts customer satisfaction.
Improved order management
Order management is the capacity to manage every customer order from receiving to fulfillment. The goal of order management is to provide your customers with correct and undamaged products. Order management process includes receiving, confirmation, and checking of the details of the order. Then, a warehouse worker picks, packs, and ships the order to the customer.
Order fulfillment systems consolidate all orders in one place, enabling you to quickly confirm, edit, and fulfill each of them,. This removes challenges of fragmented data, ensures that items are available and not expired, and keeps all orders grouped into correct batches.
Improved inventory management
Well-organized inventory management is the basis of effective warehouse operations. Warehouse fulfillment software enables you to organize your business's inventory, even across multiple warehouses. You can monitor every aspect of your inventory, including quantity, cost, location, bin number, and manufacturer notes. Plus, you can set inventory minimums for each item and receive instant alerts when inventory levels run low.
With warehouse and inventory management software, you can avoid overstocking and understocking, optimize ordering of products, and make sure that all items are available for shipping.
Reduction of human errors
According to Conker, around 80% of process deviations result from human errors, and the typical expense of a picking mistake varies from $20 to $60. With Ecommerce order fulfillment software, you can drastically reduce the number of human mistakes.
For example, if your fulfillment warehouse software tracks inventory in real time, it can automatically generate the most efficient picking route, while visual cues can help operators pick the right items. Plus, fulfillment automation technology rules out mistakes with numbers and can even plan out the best placement for each item.
Features of fulfillment software
Here are the most common features you can find in the best order fulfillment software on the market.
Inventory accuracy and visibility
Depending on the concrete solution, ecommerce warehouse software can offer various features, such as:
- Monitoring of stock availability
- Tracking of stock movements
- Reorder points
- Inventory forecasting
- Optimization across fulfillment centers
- Within group and zone-based rules
- Fixed and dynamic picking locations
- Optimization of inventory placement based on criteria like velocity, volume, fragility, temperature requirements, etc.
Order management
Some of the notable features of order tracker software that allow you to optimize order management include:
- Support for cross-channel fulfillment technology: online, in-store, mobile, and social media
- Customer profiles with order history, contact information, etc
- Order modification, cancellation, returns, and exchanges
- Customer inquiries resolution
- Automated email notifications, order routing, and other routine tasks
Picking and packing process
Inventory and order fulfillment software can eliminate bottlenecks during the picking and packing process. Some features to look for include:
- Accurate barcode scanning, or scanning of text to record serial numbers
- Routing features
- Organization and recording of goods
- Generation of packing slips, bills of lading, and commercial invoices
Analytics and forecasting
Order fulfillment software for small business or large enterprise can include extensive analytics capacities, which will help you optimize operations and forecast demand. Some features to look for.
- Analysis of stock levels and forecasting of demand
- Estimation of lead times
- Generation of separate receipts of physical goods from cost reconciliation – shipping, taxes, etc
- Calculation of true costs of received goods by including additional fees
- Automatically visible cost reconciliation
Integration capabilities
Ecommerce WMS software should seamlessly integrate with the existing systems you use.
ERP integration
An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is the central hub for managing information flow across different departments within an organization. It coordinates information from finance, human resources, sales, and procurement processes. Integration with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems allows you to effortlessly exchange the necessary information and make quick adjustments.
Accounting Integration
Accounting integration allows invoices generated by the WMS to be instantly transferred to the accounting system. From there, they can be organized, consolidated into a single monthly statement, and sent to customers for payment. Accounting integrations transform manual accounting processes that would typically take days to accomplish into automatic tasks.
Marketplace integration
Integrations with shopping carts and marketplaces simplify order processing. Through REST API, your order fulfillment software can exchange information about orders and inventory levels. For instance, platforms like Shopify can connect to the WMS via API, and automatically transmit info with order details whenever you receive one. At Apiko, we also offer expert marketplace development services to our clients.
Order fulfillment software: implementation tips
Here are some tips on how to effectively implement order fulfillment software for Ecommerce.
Collect information and define your goals
First, assess your current operations. Analyze how orders are picked and packed, define what information needs to be accessed and when, and identify key bottlenecks. This will help you figure out which features of automated shipping and delivery software are most important for your business. A good idea is to conduct a gap analysis to address challenges in current performance and your future goals. This proactive approach prevents you from wasting time and money on unnecessary features.
Contact a software development partner
There are several ready-made order fulfillment solutions on the market, such as Mintsoft and ShipBob. Look through their feature lists to determine if these solutions fit your needs. If you need some unique features or long-term cooperation with the vendor, consider custom logistics software.
A reliable custom software development partner will create tailor-made software for your business and swiftly react to your changing needs. At Apiko, for instance, we have extensive experience in transportation and logistics software development.
Implement your WMS Ecommerce solution
In the first phase, you need to rigorously test your system to evaluate performance, identify flaws, and fix bugs. It’s important to validate system parameters and interfaces, and ensure that virtual simulations match actual operations. Then, your vendor will provide staff training, which is crucial for successful adoption. One good idea is to document standard operating procedures (SOPs) to facilitate knowledge sharing and reduce errors.
Order fulfillment software example: JetPack Shipping
Jetpack Shipping is a long-standing company that offers on-demand private label products and fulfillment services without any startup costs, inventory fees, or hidden charges. They are a strategic partner to ecommerce businesses, allowing them to focus on marketing, acquisition costs, and business strategies while Jetpack Shipping takes responsibility for order fulfillment. Jetpack also assists clients with processing, marketing, and customer service to help businesses succeed and reach their goals efficiently.
Jetpack Shipping reached out to our team to optimize their warehouse operations and digital facility management. As a result, we developed a host of solutions that allowed Jetpack to automate manual processes, eliminate mistakes, and speed up delivery.
JetStream
JetStream is a vital link connecting CRM and ERP, which ensures seamless order management. It simplifies processes through:
- Order transfer from CRM to ERP.
- Intelligent merging of orders based on specific criteria.
- Order status synchronization (canceled, refunded, hold, un-hold) between CRM and ERP.
- Tracking number synchronization with CRM.
- Order issue management, handling scenarios like customer attempts to cancel post-shipment.
- Custom rules for order transfer (such as blacklisting and detection of test orders)
FulFill Manager
FulFill Manager serves as a bridge between merchant users and ERP, offering:
- Management of merchant users and their access.
- Order management, allowing tracking of order status, creation, cancellation, and holding of orders or line items.
- Management of shipments.
- Product management, including the ability to request new products.
- Cost reports.
Overall, our solutions enabled Jetpack to streamline order management and fulfillment processes, and improve operational efficiency.
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Conclusion
Order fulfillment software is an effective solution for the optimization of inventory management and order management. It automates manual processes, eliminates costly human mistakes, and boosts the quality of shipping services.
At Apiko, we have extensive experience in warehouse management system development. If you’d like to start or deepen your enterprise digital transformation, we’re ready to lend you a hand.