At this time of year, most online retailers are running a peak capacity but could you save time by streamlining your order processing? Whether you have a massive warehouse with multiple staff or are a one person business working from home, streamlining your business adds efficiencies and saves time every day of the year. Today, Jan Strassen from One Stop Order Processing shares how small changes to how her warehouse worked saved her hours each week by minimising how often stock was moved making staff more productive and the warehouse run more smoothly:
When people are setting up a new ecommerce business they are likely to focus on getting the front end just right, making sure that the bells and whistles are all correct so that they can attract customers and make sales. This is a great approach and essential for getting those all important sales but I think you can benefit from thinking about the back office right from the start as well. Plan for the time that you are getting 1000 orders a day and you will be ready for anything.
I’m a computer programmer and my approach to designing a new program is to sit down, set out the problem I want to solve, pick out my solution, design the interface and then I write my test plan, doing it this way means that I am not biased by having written the code before I write my test plan and allows me to catch those issues that I missed when coding. It is a bit of a backwards way of doing things but it works really well for me.
Analysing your order processing work flow
I didn’t do quite the same for my ecommerce shops, I sell my software but I also sell Integrated Label Paper. I let my processes grow organically. When I analysed my pick and pack I found that with everything included – unpacking deliveries and lining things up nicely on shelves, checking new order addresses were good, picking and packing orders, double checking everything about the deliveries manually and then making sure that everything had actually been delivered – my staff were spending around 15 minutes on each order.
I looked at the processes and saw many places were I could just stop doing tasks, automate processes and outsource without reducing quality or speed of my service. I stopped unpacking deliveries, my paper could happily stay on it’s pallets and be packed from there, I added automatic validation into my shop so that I only had to look at orders that needed attention, orders were automatically coloured so that you could see what the status was and I outsourced the shipping for 80% of my orders, I put a process in place to automatically send the deliveries to the new warehouse once they reached a green status, I even wrote a phone app so that I could manage order status when I was away from the office. This took the time spent on each order down to 15 seconds which is much better. Taking too long to pack orders limits your ability to sell, costs you extra money and wastes time that could be spend building up your shop, it is really important to get your order processing right and to be as efficient as possible.
One Stop Order Processing
Now I am a computer programmer and so I can do all of these things with relative ease but you might not be able to do that. So I packaged my software up and now sell it. It is called One Stop Order Processing and it allows you to process orders from all of your selling channels (Amazon, eBay, Shopify etc) in one place, using one method and one overall brand. It lets you keep control of your shop but simplifies order processing for you.
You can find more details and a free trial here.
Have a look at my video, it shows you how the software works :
You don’t have to spend any money to try the software, there is a free trial. We will help you to set up your trial and work through the features that you need.
One Stop Order Processing special offer
If you buy an annual license before January 31st then I will give you 10% discount and an extra month for free. Use the code TB2020 on checkout and you will receive the discount, we will then manually add the free month to your software when we process the order.
One Stop Order Processing is a UK software house based in Devon, we are a family business. Every member of our full time staff run their own online shop and so they really understand the issues that you have. Our software is fully configurable and so we will be able to help you with anything that you need to setup, most things are possible.
We really care about our customers and understand the issues that will effect you, we don’t sell you things that you don’t need and keep our prices as low as we can. The software has three subscription or purchase levels so you only have to pay for the features you need, prices start at £9.95 per month.
2 Responses
It is good that you do courier integrations as well! Does your system use courier rules to determine what order has what courier service? Also Does your software also perform supplier purchase orders and deliveries received?
Thanks Crackerjack, we do have courier rules that you can use to automatically pick the right courier services as orders are downloaded. We have a basic offering for suppliers but have a new module in development that will offer a lot more. We work with our customers to new features, I think you can do a better job by working that way.