Running a drop shipping business can be difficult, primarily if you don’t streamline the order fulfillment process. It can leave your business without a consistent stream of products to sell. Many drop shippers import their products from out of the country, which then has them:
- Find the right supplier
- Get an affordable quote
- Manually entering the information to the supplier and your customers
That can take up extra time when you can focus your efforts on marketing and providing your customers with excellent service.
But for every obstacle, there is a solution, and you shouldn’t have to navigate the order fulfillment process alone. While there are apps like Oberlo that will help you automate some procedures for you, it’s not streamlined to get the job done quickly. We will talk about how you can simplify your drop shipping fulfillment orders without pulling out your hair.
Why Streamlining the Order Fulfilment Process is Essential for Your Business
Your goal is to make sure that your products are sent to the customer promptly. If your order fulfillment process isn’t well organized, it will leave your buyers dissatisfied. This isn’t a problem if you own a brick and mortar business, because the customer can buy what they want and take it home right away.
But when you run a drop shipping store, it doesn’t work that way because the process is more complicated.
Making sure that your order ships on time and are accurate to what you’ve purchased is essential to make sure that your customers have access to their favorite products. By not streamlining the process, it can cause unintentional problems and reduced sales. So it’s a good idea to make sure you have a plan in place to keep a consistent stream of products available.
How Can You Improve Your order fulfillment process?
For small businesses, making sure that you can get your products from the supplier to your buyers is a critical step to make sure the customers are happy. But not all online shop owners have the time or resources to keep a list of suppliers to keep the products available. If you’re having trouble making sure that there is a consistent stream of products drop-shipped to your store, then by following these nine steps, you will be well on your way to making profits and keeping satisfied customers.
1. Use an Integration
Integrating the entire process not only saves time, but it can help you have a streamline of products that will ship directly to your customers. You can easily streamline the process by using an ordering management system to help you communicate with all your suppliers and enable faster shipping times.
2. Facilitate End-to-End Order Visibility
When you find the right OMS to link to, then you want something that will allow you and your suppliers the ability to view the same catalogs, order fulfillment processes and inventory, to make sure the products you need are available. Having the ability to have some clarity to see what’s available and how many products are in stock, and the customer’s ability to find out while browsing your online store.
3. Connect with the Right Shippers
Now that you have your integration and access to the catalogs for the products your customers want, it’s time to find the right group of shippers to get the products out to your buyers. Make sure though to perform frequent audits on your current shipping company, to ensure that their tracking is accurate and to see if there have been any significant changes in how they handle orders. If the changes happened for the worse, then it’s time to partner with a new company to meet all your fulfillment needs.
4. Find a Way to Manage the Exceptions
The norm is: you ship a package and the package is delivered in the correct time to the final customer, but not always this happens.
For this reason, we advise you to activate a software that can help you manage your shipments and deals with exceptions.
There are many software like for example Aftership, that can notificate you if your order didn’t arrive in the correct time, if the package is held by customs or if the package is been delivered but the customer was not home.
In this way, you can use your customer service to deal with this problem in advance and avoid customer complains.
5. Be Strategic With Your Shippings
When someone places an order, they expect their shipment to arrive on time, for this reason, it is important to have a fast and stable shipping service, this will:
- Reduce your customer complain
- Reduce returns.
Make sure you remember to add smart shipping algorithms to ensure that you choose the best shipping method every time, so your products arrive on-time to the customer, without paying a bunch of money.
6. Keep Good Communication with Your Suppliers
One of the most important things that any business can do, including yours, is to know how to communicate with your suppliers. You want them to walk you through every step of the process, so you know what is happening with your order and when your customers will receive the product. Buyers are more impressed when they receive their products on time.
7. Work with Suppliers That Accept Returns
Sometimes there are bad batches of products, and you want to make sure that if a customer receives something faulty, then you want to make sure that you can return their item without paying a restocking fee. The last thing you want for your business is if there is a product return, that it won’t cause chaos.
8. Optimize your inventory
Also if your is a dropshipping business, sometimes you need to buy products in stock. In fact especially when we are speaking about your most popular products, it is important to have a little stock of them always ready in your warehouse, to avoid out of stock problems and to keep a constant streamline during important periods of the year, such as Black Friday or Christmas. For this reason, is important to manage your inventory in the best way possible and to receive notifications when your best sellers are running out of stock so that you can have time to buy another batch.
9. Make Improvements to Your Flexibility
Sometimes life happens, and things can be out of your control, so it’s vital that you have a few options when you partner with a few different suppliers who carry your products. This way, you have flexibility in choices, in case one doesn’t have the inventory for what you need, then you have other options to choose from, so you’re always covered.
How Yakkyofy Can Help You Streamline Your order fulfillment process
Your goal is to find a product that will take care of all the things we have mentioned above, and at Yakkyofy, we have just the tool you need to streamline your drop shipping fulfillment process without additional stress.
With our web application, you will be able to integrate as many stores as you wish, Shopify and Woocommerce, and manage all operations from just one platform. You will have access to our catalog and to the catalog of the items you have requested via our amazing Google Chrome extension.
But there is even more! When an order arrives on your store is automatically fulfilled by our software and you will be able to check all your orders for all your products, coming from different suppliers from only one dashboard.
Yakkyofy will find for you all the products and all the supplier that you need, this means that not only we will source your product in China, but if a supplier stops the production for one of your item we will notify you and also find a new supplier for the same item.
When you purchase a stock of products with us, you will be able to view exactly how many pieces of product you’ve got left in your inventory and you will be automatically notified when the stock is running low.
Moreover, Yakkyofy will find for you the best shipping method available for your destination country and will continuously update them to give you always the best service possible at a reasonable price. On our dashboard you can easily follow all your shipping and thanks to the shipping status tab, always know where your package is and what happened to them.
As you can see, by using our services you can streamline your whole order fulfillment process and the best part is that our app is free. In this way, you reach your goal of simplifying the management of your business and you can focus on promoting your store.
So what are you waiting for?