A successful Shopify ecommerce business not only drives sales but also delivers a seamless fulfillment experience. Efficiently managing products throughout the supply chain is critical to meeting evolving customer expectations.
Let’s unpack ten best practices for Shopify fulfillment that your ecommerce business needs to know.
Accurate inventory management provides customers with reliable delivery dates, optimizing your fulfillment process. While Shopify offers native inventory tracking, it may not work for enterprise ecommerce businesses, especially those fulfilling orders across multiple locations.
A robust system for managing your product inventory enables real-time stock updates and accurate demand forecasting, helping you:
Implement a solution that integrates with all your existing systems (OMS, WMS, TMS). This approach will facilitate automation, improve customer experience, and provide data that helps inform business decisions.
As your volume of online orders grows, you need streamlined Shopify order management, especially when optimizing time in transit. Fine-tuning your order processing workflow reduces delays and improves overall efficiency. Start with:
Properly orchestrating your orders so that they ship from the right place at the right using the correct shipping method is a central process that affects timelines and drives costs for both you and your customers.
These are two key considerations when selecting the best fulfillment services for Shopify:
Using a shipping platform like Shipium can help simplify this process. Our Fulfillment Engine maps all the locations in your Shopify fulfillment network, analyzing shipping costs and delivery times to determine the most cost-effective way to distribute and ship the order — reducing your parcel spend by at least 10%.
Choosing the proper packaging for your Shopify shipments impacts consumer satisfaction and your bottom line. Proper-sized boxes can reduce per-package prices, improve warehouse operations, and speed up order processing. Poor packaging choices, on the other hand, can damage products and increase returns, affecting customer loyalty.
Enhance your Shopify packaging processes by:
Learn how to optimize cartonization and lower shipping costs with Shipium's Packaging Planner API.
Consumers value the availability of choices. Providing diverse shipping options lets customers pick delivery methods that work best for them. For example, they may be willing to wait a little longer for their product if that means saving on Shopify shipping. This flexibility reduces cart abandonment rates and increases the likelihood of completed purchases during checkout.
Consider these factors when optimizing your strategy:
Any overarching Shopify ecommerce fulfillment strategy should prioritize providing a positive overall experience to your customers, from purchase decision to final delivery. A seamless experience can foster brand loyalty and recommendations, while a negative experience, whether the result of sluggish shipping or lack of transparency, can result in a dissatisfied customer switching to a competitor.
Ensure your customers remain positive brand ambassadors with:
How effectively does your business process customer returns? With the average return rate for ecommerce reaching 17.6% in 2023, according to a report by the National Retail Federation, it’s clear that not having a well-managed system for returns can affect your bottom line. A smooth process boosts repeat business and builds consumer confidence. Here’s how:
To continually improve the efficiency of your entire ecommerce supply chain, you need a clear picture of its performance. For a data-driven Shopify fulfillment, you need to track and understand:
With a solid understanding of your historical performance, you can harness predictive analytics to forecast and plan for the future. Tools like Shipium Simulation leverage machine learning to help you visualize how potential changes might affect your shipping operations, enabling you to adjust your processes for optimal performance proactively.
Your business can tap into a broader customer base by offering products across various platforms, from online marketplaces and physical stores to social media and mobile apps. This multichannel approach boosts sales potential, enhances the shopping experience, and increases brand exposure.
When adopting multiple sales channels, keep in mind:
For ecommerce businesses, peak retail season means surges in traffic, sales, and shipping. Without proper preparedness, you leave yourself open to lost opportunities, operational overload, and increased shipping rates due to reliance on premium services to keep your delivery promises.
As you head into peak season, focus on:
Adopting flexible technology into your Shopify shipping operations enables quick adjustments to meet increased seasonal demand. For instance, a Shipium customer shifted their holiday strategy from prioritizing cost-effective shipping from November 15 to December 15 to prioritizing Christmas Day delivery from December 16 onward. Shipium's API-first approach facilitated this quick pivot without extensive developer intervention or system overhaul.
With Shipium, you get an end-to-end platform that unifies your existing systems and streamlines your shipping process, helping you reduce your delivery times and costs. By leveraging our suite of services, including our Fulfillment Engine and Carrier Selection, you can enhance your customer experience and drive brand loyalty.
Schedule a demo today and discover why Shipium is the best solution for Shopify fulfillment.