For enterprise ecommerce businesses, a well-optimized shipping process workflow — starting with an order and ending with a delivery at the parcel’s final destination — protects margins, enhances customer satisfaction, and boosts bottom-line profitability.
Let's review the benefits of an optimized shipping workflow and break down seven steps to help you improve your current approach and establish strategies to facilitate continuous improvement.
A shipping process workflow is a sequence of coordinated activities and procedures determining how products move from a seller’s location to a customer’s final destination. This structured approach to sending shipments is a blueprint to help organizations maintain consistency and reliability in their operations. The final goal is to align people, technology, and resources to ensure packages are delivered on time and meet buyer’s expectations.
For enterprise shippers, an optimized shipment process provides these benefits:
Here are seven steps your ecommerce business can follow to refine your existing fulfillment practices — ultimately increasing your margins.
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:
From improving customer satisfaction and maximizing sales opportunities to streamlining warehouse packing and preventing human errors, 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:
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.
Smart packaging choices minimize 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:
Explore how you can optimize cartonization with Shipium's Packaging Planner API.
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 and enhance efficiency by improving your:
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.
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 platforms 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 the following:
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.
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:
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:
Discover how Shipium Simulation insights drive faster feedback loops for your ecommerce business.
Here are the three main stages of the shipping process:
Shipium's enterprise shipping platform optimizes every step of the order-to-delivery process. From routing orders to fulfillment locations closest to your customers and improving delivery speed to predicting scenarios using advanced analytics, our solutions enhance the customer experience and improve decision-making across your operations.
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, according to a report by Nucleus, 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.
How does an international shipping workflow work?
The shipping workflow to send or receive international goods typically includes these steps:
Commonly required documents in the shipping process workflow include: