Top 10 Ways to Fail at Order Fulfillment

by Chelsea Camper | Last Updated December 30, 2015

Order fulfillment is a critical part of your business. A fast and accurate fulfillment process will make your customer happy while a slow or inaccurate one will quickly anger and possibly lose your customers.

There are many ways your order fulfillment process can be compromised, let’s take a look at the top ten.

#10: Don’t Keep Track of Inventory

One of the easiest ways to fail at order fulfillment is to not keep track of inventory (or to incorrectly keep track of it). Using estimations and only counting up your physical inventory once or twice a year is a good way to let your fulfillment process start slipping. Eliminating the use of inventory barcodes is another way you can start losing track of your inventory.

#9: Give Customers Out of Date Order Information

You’ll start really making your customers angry when you start giving your customers out of date or incorrect order information. If a customer calls in asking when their order will be shipped, you can tell them that your system doesn’t have that information; that will get them hot under the collar real quick! Or if their order shipped on Tuesday, let your system wait until Friday to tell them that their order has shipped.

#8: Keep All Shipping Forms on Different Sheets

Let your pickers and packers scurry around trying to match each shipping label with the right packing list. Having each of your shipping forms on multiple sheets instead of collating them to a single sheet will surely slow your order fulfillment time down to a crawl.

#7: Manually Transcribing Order Information for Online Orders

Letting your shopping cart automatically place online orders directly into your fulfillment process is too easy. It’ll open the window for errors (plus take up valuable time) if you have someone manually transfer online order information into the fulfillment process. All it takes is a capital “i” mistaken as a lowercase “L” or a “1” to send the entire order crashing to the ground.

#6: Make it Almost Impossible to Input Offline Orders

Forcing customer service to follow massive workarounds in order to input offline orders into the fulfillment system. The harder your fulfillment system makes it to input offline orders the more frustration your customer service staff will experience. It might even get to the point where you can only accept online orders.

#5: Have Different Fulfillment Processes for Each Type of Product

If you have similar, but different products (for example, silverware and table cloths), make sure you have completely different fulfillment processes for each. The more complex and different they are the more confusion there will be in your warehouse.

#4: Keep an Unorganized Warehouse

Having similar products spread out in an un-orderly manner will keep confusion at an all time high. Allowing each employee to move products to different shelves whenever they feel the need to will also add some frustration. Not labeling the shelves or containers will also slow your fulfillment time.

#3: Don’t Use a Multi-Channel Order Manager

Not using a multi-channel order manager, like T-Hub, will isolate each part of your fulfillment system and make information transfers a laborious process. This will also introduce gaps in information such as no information as to whether to customer has paid in your shipping label program.

#2: Taping on Your Shipping Labels

Using tape to affix your shipping labels to packages instead of using shipping label sheets is definitely one of the top ways to fail at order fulfillment. Not only does taping on the shipping label make your company look unprofessional, but it also introduces a risk of the barcode not being read. If the barcode can’t be read by your shipping carrier, it’s not going to make it to your customer.

#1: Don’t Listen to Customer Complaints or Suggestions

Finally, the number one way to fail at order fulfillment is to completely ignore anything your customers say about their experience with you. If they’re complaining about the fact that your site claims it only takes 3 days to get to the customer after they order and it’s a week later, don’t worry about it. You didn’t need that customer anyway, did you?

What other ways can you fail at order fulfillment?

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