Order Management to Streamline Your Shipping

Written by Brian Roizen, the co-founder and chief architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Streamline Your Shipping with Order Management and Product Optimization

When it comes to online shopping, shoppers have grown accustomed to shorter delivery times with low cost or free shipping. As a business owner, you want to provide your customers with a good user-experience.

Order management and shipping go hand in hand. As soon as an order is placed, you’ll need to decrease the inventory of the sold product and prepare it for shipment. There is risk involved if you are manually doing both of these, especially if you’re selling across multiple sales channels, because you might run into oversold issues, and potentially get suspended.

Order Management and Product Listing

Faster order management and fulfillment can help avoid oversold situations. Product prices are updated constantly, new products will be added, and seasonal or old products are discontinued. If you don’t constantly update your product feed, then you are at risk of receiving feed errors or disapprovals. With a feed management platform, you can set this up so that it automatically pulls data and updates your feed as often as you like – weekly, daily, or even every 15 minutes.

Best Practices

Check Your Inventory

As a retailer, it’s critical that you ensure your product never runs out of stock. That may sound easy enough, but when you sell on multiple channels, it’s easy to over-sell. Let’s say that you have 20 Canon PowerShots left in stock. You sell 11 cameras on your website and another 10 on Amazon. One of those customers is going to be unhappy, and your performance scorecard will take a hit. Worst case, you may even get suspended from Amazon. 

There are 2 potential solutions to this problem:

• Implement shorter time-lags between polling marketplaces for orders and submitting tracking numbers.
• Distribute product inventory across multiple channels with rules.
  

An intelligent feed management platform like Feedonomics can eliminate these headaches and minimize mistakes that can cause a loss in revenue or affect your chances of winning the buy box. Having a fully optimized product feed allows you to have a dynamic file that automatically updates every 15 minutes and pushes out to your marketplace platform. You are in control and can choose the frequency to update your product feeds – once a day, every hour, or whatever user-defined schedule you’d prefer.

Optimize Your Product Feed for Better Relevancy

If you truly want to compete on channels like Google Shopping or Amazon, you’ll need to optimize your feed and structure your product attributes so it’s similar to the phrases that people are using in Google searches. Why? Google crawls your product description for relevant keywords. When you have attributes like brand, name, size, and color in your product title, then your relevancy increases and your impressions will increase. Furthermore, when shoppers include the attributes of “color” and “size” in their product search, it’s a very strong indicator of intent to purchase, leading to a greater chance of increasing sales. 

Automate Your Processes

What if you could have a platform that could ship from all of your channels using a user-friendly platform that makes shipping faster, efficient, and affordable? ShipStation is a shipping solution, designed to process, fulfill, and ship orders from all the most popular marketplaces and shopping carts, while using all the top carriers.

Feed optimization platforms like Feedonomics add efficiency and speed to your business operations by using automation and powerful rules to easily optimize product data to hundreds of different advertising channels and marketplaces. Together, automate the entire product listing and order management process. Your business will be equipped to make efficient deliveries on every order, thereby streamlining the shipping process of the fulfillment cycle.