Organising your online dispatch process
Once someone’s placed an order you need to follow through with a great online delivery experience - this is dependent on an efficient online dispatch process and excellent customer service. For 96% of shoppers, a positive delivery experience would encourage them to shop with a retailer again. We take a look at how you can organise your online dispatch process, to ensure you give shoppers a lasting, good impression of your business.
Get your orders organised
To avoid confusion and costly errors, it’s important to look at a future-proof, reliable dispatch process that will grow as your business grows. In particular, if you sell on eBay or Amazon you need to meet their dispatch times, so getting orders out the door as quickly as possible is crucial.
Order management
The first part of any good dispatch process is keeping on top of your orders - having them all in one place where you can easily view them, organise and dispatch them.
Reliable shipping software will be able to import your orders from multiple sales channels such as eBay, Amazon and Shopify. If you don’t have a system in place and you’re logging into each platform to view orders, mistakes are easily made, orders missed and you’ll also struggle to fulfil them chronologically. Any gains you make from selling across multiple channels will be lost in refunds and time spent chasing orders.
Organising your orders
When you have all your orders in one place, you can organise them in whatever way suits your business, for example by order status, product, or shipping service. Within Zenstores, you can flag your orders making it easy to filter, find and dispatch the relevant orders each time.
Dividing your workload
If you work as part of a bigger team, you need to divide up your workload by assigning orders to certain members of staff. This will help you to avoid the same orders being fulfilled and dispatched more than once, and allow you to work through orders more efficiently.
Picking and packing
Picking lists and job sheets
Printing a job sheet or picking list to help fulfil the orders will minimise mistakes and speed up the process. A picking list is a sheet with all the products required for a selected number of orders, a job sheet lists all the orders and the products required to fill each one. Some retailers also find using an integrated label with an invoice on the same page as the address label a better way to work.
Picking lists, job sheets and integrated labels can all be printed through Zenstores - saving you time and streamlining the picking stage of your dispatch process.
Packing orders
A dedicated packing area with all the necessary supplies is essential. You should have a range of packaging, suitable for all the products that you sell, close to hand - packaging products correctly will save them from getting damaged during shipping. Print your shipping labels in bulk to minimise the amount of time spent addressing each parcel.
Learn more about how to package products quickly here.
Dispatch notifications
To maintain a good relationship with your customers, you need to keep them informed about the progress of their order - it also reduces the number of enquiries you receive. 82% of shoppers say that it’s important that retailers proactively communicate every fulfilment and delivery stage.
After you’ve created and printed shipping labels in Zenstores, you can mark the orders as dispatched and this will automatically update on eBay, Amazon and other sales channels - triggering the dispatch notifications for customers.
From the moment an order is placed to when it’s handed over to your courier, you need to have an organised, streamlined process for picking, packing and dispatching orders. Find out more about how Zenstores can help you to organise your online dispatch process here.
