Discovering Fulfillment: Achieving Shipping Nirvana
Fulfilling ecommerce orders involves many moving pieces. From producing inventory and talking with manufacturers, to packing orders, to pushing shipments out the door, large-scale businesses have to worry about many platforms, applications, integrations, workers, pickers, customer communications, and anything in between. This is why ShipStation and BigCommerce created a guide to help you manage your warehouse and shipping efficiency. If you need to overhaul your fulfillment workflow, or just tweak it, we’ve crafted a guide that will help you get on the path to fulfillment.
What’s In The Guide?
Shipping Nirvana takes you through the warehouse operations that every high-volume business has to perfect. From optimizing warehouse processes to parcel shipping discounts, we have you covered.
Optimizing Warehouse Operations for Enterprise Retailers
When a customer places an order on an ecommerce website, the timer starts counting down in their head: “When am I getting the order confirmation email? When am I getting the shipping confirmation email? When is my order arriving?” The customer may envision a conveyor belt with packages being boxed up and sent out. But any business that’s dealt with an order spike or stockout knows, it can become hectic. In our first section, we discuss ways for enterprise retailers to optimize their warehouse operations to enhance their ecommerce website and shipping processes.
Tools and Software to Streamline Operations
If you’re managing a high sales volume, it’s imperative to streamline back-end operations to improve customer experiences, decrease wasted time, and increase efficiency. As an enterprise business, you likely already have a number of tools and technologies to help manage your ecommerce operations, such as:
- Order management systems (OMS)
- Inventory management systems (IMS)
- Warehouse management systems (WMS)
- Enterprise resource planning software (ERP)
Choosing the Right Ecommerce Platform for Enterprise Retailers
While modern commerce requires the ability to quickly adapt to ever-changing shopper behaviors, agility, however, can be difficult for many enterprises to achieve with their current tech stack — which is why choosing the right tech stack can have a significant impact on the success of an enterprise-level ecommerce business.
In this section, we will discuss ways for enterprise retailers to optimize their ecommerce tech stack and, specifically, why BigCommerce is an ideal ecommerce platform for enterprise retailers.
This section dives into solutions for the checklist below:
- Does tedious manual work on maintenance, updates and security drive up costs?
- Are you unable to get to market quickly with new promotions or make simple website updates because you’re overly reliant on developers?
- Do you often scramble to keep up when the business wants to implement a new growth strategy (such as adding a channel) that the platform doesn’t support out-of-the-box?
- Is your platform unable to handle complex catalogs or high transaction volumes?
- Are you forced to use your platform’s preferred or proprietary solutions instead of the tools you want?
- Do you often run into functionality limitations or technical issues that prevent innovation?
- Does your website suffer from slow site speed and responsiveness?
- Are you frustrated with a lack of timely guidance, support and expertise when you need it?
- Does your current ecommerce platform lack essential omnichannel capabilities or integrations?
- Do you often feel that you’re unable to deliver the customer experience you want?
Choosing Carriers and Shipping Services
Finding the best carrier rates is an important part of running a business. Parcel delivery is ever changing and part of running a successful business. Whether you are a direct-to-consumer brand or you just need to ship a portion of retail orders, there is a lot more to know about shipping than you might expect. ShipStation prides itself on being able to provide businesses with some of the best rates available. Businesses of all sizes rely on ShipStation and take advantage of discounted out-of-the-box rates and carrier integrations. Mix and match carrier accounts, utilize any of your own
“We reduced shipping costs 36.78% by being able to add UPS this year.”
-Allen Bark, Founder of Inker Supply
Get your own copy of Shipping Nirvana below
Shipping Workflows and Strategies
Knowing which services to use and how to fulfill your orders is crucial for your warehouse to save time and cut costs. From choosing the best service for your parcels, to reducing clicks, to updating the customer and selling channel that an order has shipped, you can handle a steady shipping volume or order spikes with ease.
Affordable Shipping Options
Finding the cheapest way to ship a package doesn’t mean sacrificing quality. Affordable shipping rates are available to anyone that knows where to look. And since you’re reading this, you’re already on the path to making shipping more affordable. ShipStation is all about saving you time and money on your shipping and fulfillment. And here, we’ll go over all the different ways you can find more affordable shipping options. You’ll discover new ways to use the services you use every day, new options you may have never heard of, and ways to create a better shipping workflow.
How Automated Shipping Workflows Scale Fulfillment
Shipping and fulfillment involve much more than putting a label onto a box. You want to make shipping smarter, not harder. Almost all tasks in ShipStation can be automated. A lot of ShipStation users have everything automated to the point that all they have to do is highlight the orders they want to ship and click “Create Label.” Let’s go over some of these key features.
ShipStation Carriers
ShipStation Carriers provide you with discounted shipping options as soon as you sign up. All you have to do is log into your account and start shipping. With discounts of up to 89% on top carriers like USPS, UPS, GlobalPost, DHL Express, and many more, you can find the right service for all your packages. If you need to use your existing carrier accounts, you can connect accounts from dozens of carriers, logistics providers, and fulfillment services.
