How to Optimize Your Shipping Process Workflow

For enterprise ecommerce businesses, a well-optimized shipping process workflow — starting with an order and ending with a delivery — protects margins, enhances customer satisfaction, and boosts the bottom-line profitability.

Let's break down seven steps to help you refine your current fulfillment approach and establish strategies to facilitate continuous improvement.

1. Map out your current shipping workflow

The first step in optimizing your shipping process is developing a solid understanding of your current performance. To fully grasp the big picture view of your ecommerce supply chain, you’ll need to perform:  

• Process analysis: Identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflow to expose operational roadblocks that impact delivery speed.
• Task tracking: Review time investment for each step of your shipping operation and analyze the costs involved.
• Resource audit: List all tools and resources currently used to identify potential system consolidation opportunities, necessary staffing increases, or required technology updates.

2. Improve your inventory management

From improving customer satisfaction and maximizing sales opportunities to streamlining warehouse packing, inventory management — or placing your products relative to your customers — is a big piece of the puzzle. As you work to strengthen how you manage your stock across all your channels, from warehouses to stores, you should target:

• Real-time tracking: Implement automated inventory monitoring solutions to prevent stockout and overstock situations.
• Demand forecasting: Use predictive analytics to anticipate inventory needs across all your channels and optimize stock levels.
• Warehouse organization: Structure storage layout based on picking frequency to reduce fulfillment time.

Once you have automated systems to manage your stock across all your fulfillment centers effectively, the goal should be refining your inventory placement. For example, if you sell down-filled jackets and mittens, storing products in your California warehouse instead of your North Dakota warehouse could incur unnecessary logistics costs as you prepare to ship customer orders to colder states. 

Using a solution like Shipium, you can leverage your existing forecasting insights to get warehouse allocation recommendations that enable you to provide customers with quicker deliveries and reduce your parcel expenses.

3. Refine your packaging

Smart packaging choices reduce shipping costs while ensuring products arrive safely, while inefficient options can be a costly waste of resources. For example, shipping a single pack of toothbrushes in a box twice as large as the product can result in you paying to ship air. 

To enhance your packaging process, target:

• Box optimization: Select right-sized packaging options to minimize dimensional weight costs, lower shipping fees, and speed up order picking.
• Packaging standards: Create consistent packaging rules for product categories to streamline packing decisions.
• Damage prevention: Choose appropriate, cost-effective protective materials, like air pillows, bubble wrap, and custom inserts, to reduce returns and customer dissatisfaction.

Explore how you can optimize cartonization with Shipium's Packaging Planner API.

4. Streamline carrier selection process

When refining your shipping process workflow, it's important to consistently select the right carrier, considering factors like inventory placement, regional considerations, and constant macro-environmental changes across your network. 

Poor carrier selection can lead to excessive spending and delivery delays. For example, defaulting to national carriers for local deliveries could mean paying premium rates. Optimize your process by improving your:

• Carrier diversification: Balance between national and regional last-mile carriers to ensure that you optimize for cost, delivery speed, and resilience — especially during peak season.
• Rate comparison: Implement and automate fully loaded rate shopping that includes accessorials and surcharges to select the most cost-effective shipping options.
• Performance monitoring: Track carrier delivery metrics to help maintain service quality standards as you strive to hit the best possible rates.

The right mix of carriers can help protect your fulfillment margins. Case in point: after switching to Shipium, Saks OFF 5TH went from one primary carrier to a network of 12, significantly reducing their shipping cost for packages delivered in three days or less.

5. Implement advanced technology in your shipment process

Modern shipping challenges require the right shipping technology, and the best options should unify your systems. Disconnected solutions that create data in silos, for example, using separate systems for rate shopping and generating labels, or using legacy systems that aren't in constant sync, reduce productivity and can lead to wasted resources.

To modernize your shipping tech stack, prioritize:

• API integration: Connect with carriers to automate tasks like shipping label creation and order tracking updates in real time.
• System connectivity: Link existing supply chain platforms, such as order management systems (OMS) and transit management systems (TMS), to create a seamless data flow, improving how you manage inventory and fulfill orders.
• Parcel intelligence: Implement a closed-loop system to gain end-to-end visibility of the shipments processed through your network.

Unlike legacy shipping solutions that require long lead times to implement changes, modern cloud-based platforms like Shipium allow you to pivot in real time, from adding a new carrier to adjusting routing rules, without extensive development investment. This faster time-to-value means you can make optimizations and start seeing results immediately.

6. Enhance customer communication

Making ordering and shipping as frictionless as possible reduces the resources necessary to manage customer service inquiries and increases brand loyalty. One of the best ways to boost buyer experience is to add more touchpoints throughout the order delivery process — from “Should I buy this?” to delivery.

You can improve your transparency and communication with customers by providing better:

• Shipping options: Present multiple shipping speeds, letting customers choose their preferred service and price levels.
• Delivery estimates: Display accurate delivery promises at checkout to set clear fulfillment expectations.
• Status updates: Keep customers informed of their shipment progress, reducing support calls and anxiety.

7. Establish a feedback loop for your shipment plan

The most important step in improving your shipping process workflow is to lay out a clear strategy for evaluating how your network is performing at every link of your supply chain. A feedback loop that collects data and remediates gaps or inefficiencies in your operations helps you remain continually optimized thanks to:

• Customer insights: Gather feedback on the shipping experience to identify improvement opportunities and pain points.
• Performance metrics: Set clear shipping KPIs, such as delivery speed and per-parcel rate, to help accurately measure and track operational success.
• Data analysis: Review shipping patterns and trends to refine your fulfillment strategy accordingly.

Discover how Shipium Simulation insights drives faster feedback loops for your ecommerce business.

Increase the efficiency of your order to delivery process with Shipium

For high-volume shippers, order fulfillment execution is one of the most significant expenses in their budgets. Adopting an end-to-end shipping platform like Shipium can help reduce spending by up to 10% on average, with a suite of capabilities that bridge your existing systems, enhance the management orders across your network, and increase conversions with delivery promises.  

Book a demo to see how Shipium optimizes the shipping process workflow.