Automated order processing: why do you need it to unlock your eCommerce growth?

Automated order processing is becoming the key to one of the most tedious challenges of eCommerce businesses – order management.

Order management is one of the vital factors deciding the growth of any eCommerce business. If it is done right, it can bring wonders for business in many aspects.

Before digging into why you need a robust automated order processing system, let’s find out what is order management and why it is so important?

Order Management Definition

You have an online store and invest a lot of effort to get your customer to click the button “Buy”. Yet, that may be a happy ending for your online store if you only need one or a few orders to fulfill.

Yet, if you have hundreds or thousands of orders awaiting, you will need order management.

Order management is the process of receiving, tracking, to fulfilling customer orders. This process begins when a customer places an order and ends when the customer receives their package at their door.

With the fulfilling stage, there are 3 small steps including

• Step 1 – Picking: retrieve the ordered item for the warehouses which are usually lined with shelves and stocked with different types of products. Your warehouse staff will need to pick the item accurately and quickly.
• Step 2 – Packing: you will need to pack the item with the right packaging materials to ensure it reaches the customer intact and in good condition.
• Step 3 – Shipping: your warehouse staff who are in charge of shipment will need to take care of 3 tasks: handling the package with accurate customer information to shipping partner, marking the order as shipped on the sales channel, sending out shipping confirmation and shipment tracking emails to the customers.

This order management process involves multiple stages with many tasks. Meanwhile, it has high requirements for accuracy and speed.

It is possible to run this process manually if your store is new with a few orders per day.

However, it will be is a real challenge along with your business growth, when you sell your products on multiple platforms and store them in multiple warehouses. It’s essential to automate and streamline this process — otherwise, you’ll eventually be flooded by the sheer number of orders coming in.

Benefits of an Automated Order Processing

Automated order processing is considered the rising trend to fulfill the mountain of order efficiently from the rise of e-Commerce.

According to Statista, the worldwide automated warehouse management marketing is expected to increase from €12.4 billion back in 2019 to €24.8 billion by 2026.

The figure is the obvious proof of the exceptional benefits of an automated order processing system:

• Automate data entry
• Improve productivity
• Enhance customer satisfaction
• Increase visibility
• Eliminate waste

1. Automate data entry

An automated order processing system helps you to avoid inserting the same data multiple times and taking the risk of data errors and data loss.

By integrating your sales channel, accounting with the warehouse management system, data about orders will be synced across this platform.

For example, once a customer places an order, the information will be tracked and allocated to the relevant management system. The order information including product variant, customer information, the delivery address will be sent automatically to the warehouse management to process the order fulfillment.

You can manage to grant the right person to access the right data. You can set rules to ensure everyone can access only the data they need to do their job.

2. Improve productivity

Processing orders automatically allows you to speed up the whole order management process. Your staffs are free from manually re-entry information on multiple software. Moreover, many tasks in the shipping and fulfillment process can be automatic such as printing our shipping labels, order verification.

Thus, adopting robust automated order processing can help you to reduce the required amount of time for each step. Then, you can process more orders in a shorter time.

Your employees can have more valuable time for more productive tasks and decision-making.

3. Enhance customer service

One of the biggest rewards from automated order processing is improving your customer services and enhancing the customer experience.

By implementing order processing automation, you can ensure accurate and faster delivery and clear communication with customers.

You can integrate order management software with your enterprise and CRM (Customer relationship management), then your sales team and helpdesk staff can access all necessary customer information. Thus, they don’t need to ask around to collect data about customer queries and be able to organize them according to their order status.

Integrating order management with CRM also allows you to automatically send emails updating when an order is received, processed, being prepared, and shipped. Emails and calls can be decreased as customers can track the order themselves.

4. Increase visibility

An automated order processing system would provide you with an intuitive dashboard. You can access the real-time data of processing orders, pending delivery, and their status.

You can also ensure that orders go through every fulfillment check gate and all exceptions are flagged.

When you have complete visibility, it helps mitigate risks and forecasting, budgeting, and workflow optimization. The visibility that automation and dashboard analytics can give you will help you take a high-level view and make decisions with greater speed, clarity, and strategy.

5. Reduce costs

According to McKinsey, order process automation can help businesses result in an overall cost reduction of up to 15%.

As you automate tasks for maximum efficiency, order fulfillment costs decrease, and therein lies one of the most significant benefits of an automated order processing system.

Your automated ordering system can validate data against information stored in another record and even check that sales tax and shipping charges are calculated without errors.

A fully integrated system requires less labor to run it and results in a decrease in cost. As if the time savings and improved customer services weren’t enough, an automated ordering system improves your bottom line as well. The financial benefit is hard to gauge because, in some areas, the cost-saving is explicit, while in others, it is not.

Learn more eCommerce integration: Top 5 must-have integration to drive holiday sales 2021 in Hong Kong

Conclusion

Order process automation software will help you save loads of time, add speed, reduce errors, improve customer service, and increase employee satisfaction.

Sales order automation not only accelerates business growth; it also allows you to focus on more challenging tasks and, most crucially, on generating profit. Order fulfillment quality will be improved, and you can also use your data to gain valuable customer insights.

Arestós provides bespoke and robust automated order processing solutions. We help you connect your customer order on your eCommerce website with your order processing management to automate and streamline the process.

We have talented consultants and developers with a wealth of experience in building exceptional solutions helping eCommerce businesses to unlock their potentials and growth.

Contact us now to find the best solution for your eCommerce business.