As anyone who has owned or worked for an eCommerce site would attest, maintaining an online business that is so reliant on a lot of external factors can get extremely nerve wracking at times.
The recent boom of online shoppers has come with its own set of woes, the millennial shopper expects their online shopping experience to be entirely effortless and have their products delivered to their doorsteps in record time! This can prove to be quite a challenge for most eCommerce sites out there.
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This is why today we decided to concentrate on order management systems, often overlooked in the larger scheme of things when it comes to running an eCommerce business, but in the long run it is the single most important thing that would help you deliver your orders faster and keep more of your impatient customers happy!
1] Helping Expedite Your Shipping Process
If you are shipping your orders from a warehouse, then a big chunk of order delays can be caused due to the time taken by workers to figure where each exact item is stored and then pick them up, wrap them and bring them out to the delivery vehicle. All of this though can be solved by a proper order management system.
Even if you are a drop shipper who uses the Shopify platform, having a third party shopify order management can help you keep track of all your orders and provide accurate details to your customers about the whereabouts of their orders.
And if you are shipping from a physical location then order management systems can categorise and pull up storage data on any item in an instant and at the same time print out shipping labels and automate a lot of the other related menial tasks so that your shipping times get much more faster!
2] Have Your Inventory Managed Real Time
As an e-commerce business, storage space is expensive and ordering something twice can block valuable capital as well as storage space for indefinite amounts of time.
At the same time if due to some human error you fail to have enough stock of a popular item, then you might end up with a frustrated customer at best and at worst a cancelled order if the shipping time takes too long.
This is why having an inventory management system that can update you in real-time is vitally important for the smooth running of your e-commerce platform!
3] Using Historical Sales Data to Forecast Changes
Having a dedicated order management system lets you access and analyse all your previous order data in the matter of a few clicks. This is vitally important if you are looking to stay ahead of the trends and keep up with stocks of your most purchased items as their demand increases and decreases with seasonal fluctuations.
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The ability to have a birds eye view of your sales also helps in making other forecasts like your trajectory for the next year, where you should be investing more money and energy into and if you are sustainable enough on your current scale to go for another round of expansion!
At the end of the day a good order management system is almost like the perfect manager that keeps on top of your business and production all at once and helps you close out sales deals and evaluate all the financial decisions you have made and how they have impacted your e-commerce platform in general.
In fact it is exactly this ability of giving you a birds eye view of your entire business as a whole that makes order management systems invaluable as a software solution for any online business, especially if they are an e-commerce solution!
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