7 Order Fulfilment Tips for Shopify Vendors

In the ever-evolving world of ecommerce, numerous factors can influence the success of your growing business. If you want to thrive in today’s world, you can’t just sell the best products, you need to deliver amazing customer experiences too. 

A big part of that is optimizing your order fulfillment strategy. Offering free shipping can be a great way to increase your conversion rates, but it’s not enough on its own. Around 68% of consumers say their decisions on whether to purchase products are influenced by shipping speed. 

A poor order fulfillment strategy increases the chances of delays in your supply chain, damaged shipments, and other issues that can lead to dissatisfied customers. 

The good news? There are plenty of ways you can optimize your fulfillment strategy on Shopify. Here are our top order fulfillment tips for modern ecommerce vendors.

1. Choose the Right Fulfillment Strategy

The first step in optimizing your order fulfillment strategy as a Shopify vendor, is deciding how you’re going to manage your orders. The most common option for smaller businesses is “merchant fulfillment”. This basically means you complete the order fulfillment process yourself, collecting goods from a warehouse, packaging them, and shipping them to buyers. 

While this is a low-cost and convenient way to ship products, it’s also a time-intensive task. As your business scales, you might consider working with third-party fulfillment companies, to make your life, and running your business easier. 

You could also consider exploring the “dropshipping model”, where you never handle inventory at all, and instead pass the process of order development and fulfillment over to a third party. 

2. Organize your Orders List

One of the most important order fulfillment tips you can follow on this list is to get your business organized. Shopify comes with order and inventory management tools built-in to the backend dashboard, so you should be able to get everything in order quite easily. 

A good way to get started is to organize your orders into groups based on similar attributes. You can use the orders list page in Shopify to group your orders using tags, filters, and search. Organizing and grouping your items can help you keep track of which orders need special attention, which are in progress, and which are still waiting to be fulfilled. 

You can even organize your Shopify orders based on their destination. This can make it easier to determine how many products you’ll need to send through specific shipping carriers. Plus, it’s a great way to get an insight into where your customers are. 

3. Create, Purchase and Print Labels in Bulk

Once you have your orders organized and ready for fulfillment, create your labels as quickly as possible with Shopify’s simple “create shipping labels” tool. You can bulk select all of the orders ready to be shipped on your orders list, and click a single button to generate labels instantly.

This means you can spend a lot less time manually creating labels for every product. We recommend using the Shopify shipping labels index to ensure all the information is correct. However, you should be able to save some extra time by using Shopify’s automated suggestions to find the right packaging and options for each order, based on historical data. 

Once you’ve prepared your shipping labels, you can buy them through Shopify’s back-end, and print them all at once. One extra tip – if you’re using USPS for shipping, you can also create a manifest for all of your orders in Shopify’s backend. This gives you a single barcode that houses all the shipping details for a specific group of orders, ideal for when you’re delivering details to USPS. 

4. Build Strong Relationships with Shippers

The shipping carriers you work with play a huge role in how effective your order fulfillment process is. With that in mind, it’s worth making sure you have a strong relationship with your partners. The better your relationship with your shipping carriers, the more likely you are to access a range of benefits, such as preferential pricing, or priority support. 

The best way to improve your relationship with carriers is to transparently communicate with them as often as possible. Remember, most carriers price their services based on shipping volumes, so if you’re expecting a surge in volume, make sure you pre-warn your carrier. 

It’s also worth holding regular meetings with your suppliers, so you can ask them whether there’s anything you can do to make their lives easier. Some companies might request you drop orders off at a specific time in the day, or ask you to arrange pickups at a certain time. 

Plus, remember to thank your supplier for their support when things are going well. A little recognition can go a long way towards building better relationships. 

5. Automate Whenever You Can

This is one of the order fulfillment tips you can’t afford to ignore if you want to save time and money in your business. Ultimately, the right fulfillment strategy is crucial to your company’s success, but it’s also a time consuming and labor-intensive process. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways you can streamline tasks and processes with automation. Shopify Flow, the built-in automation tool for Shopify comes with a selection of pre-built templates for order automation and fulfillment. Plus, you can build your own workflows from scratch.

With Shopify Flow you can put orders on hold when they fall into a specific “high risk” category, and send instant fulfillment request for paid orders to third-party logistics providers. You can also automatically tag orders with specific details, such as fulfillment location. 

If you’re using a dropshipping strategy in your store, you can use dropshipping apps on Shopify to automate a lot of the fulfillment process too. These apps allow you to automatically send orders to your suppliers, and request tracking details for your customers.

6. Use Smart Order Routing

https://youtu.be/JqRPjqyshO0 

If, like many growing ecommerce merchants, you have multiple fulfillment locations (or customers all over the world), then you’re going to need a little help routing your shipments. Smart order routing is a solution Shopify provides to help with this process. 

It allows retailers to automatically prioritize and assign the best route to fulfill an order based on various rules. You can choose to automatically ship products from the closest location, or ensure orders stay within a specific country to avoid customs tariffs and duties. 

There’s also the option to set up a list of “ranked locations” for your preferred routing options, and minimize split fulfillments, to ensure that you’re sending larger volumes of products out at the same time, reducing packaging and carbon emissions. 

Once you’ve chosen your rules, you can rank them in order of priority. Once an order comes through, Shopify will check which fulfillment locations have inventory, and applies the routing logic to your strategy for you. 

7. Always Be Transparent with Customers

Finally, it’s worth remembering that no matter how careful you are with your routing strategy, there’s always a chance that something will go wrong with your fulfillment process. Delays and problems can happen for a range of reasons that are outside of your control. 

However, while you can’t necessarily prevent these problems from happening, you can preserve your relationships with your customers by being more transparent with them. Around 45% of customers say they’re actively looking to buy from brands that show them anticipated delivery times, which shows that transparency is key. 

If you know something has gone wrong with your fulfillment process, make sure your customers are aware. You can use automated SMS and email campaigns to send bulk alerts out to all of your customers that have placed an order within a specific time period. 

Alternatively, you can place notifications on your website homepage or product pages in the form of banners and pop-ups. 

Ready to Master Order Fulfillment?

With a little luck, the order fulfillment tips above will help you to develop a fantastic fulfillment strategy, that delights and retains your customers. Remember, it’s worth paying attention to your fulfillment metrics, and feedback from your customers over time, to help you define whether you should change your strategy at any point. 

In the meantime, if you want to boost your chances of getting more orders to fulfill, work on making your website as compelling as possible. You can reach out to Storetasker today to find an expert capable of helping you transform your ecommerce store, enhance your brand image, and even boost the impact of your marketing campaigns. 

Find your Storetasker expert today.