Fulfilling ecommerce orders has never been a more demanding task. Not only are there more shoppers ordering online than ever, but buyers have come to expand faster and cheaper shipping over time. Orders must be shipped as soon after they were placed as humanly possible in order to satisfy your customers and keep them coming back for more.
The problem is that your day-to-day focus isn’t on getting your orders out the door — at least, it shouldn’t be. Fast-growing brands can’t afford to spend all of their available hours on shipping orders. You need to be working on growing your business, not just satisfying existing sales. So how can you automate the work that goes into daily order fulfillment?
The simple answer is to mimic what’s already being automated in your operation. Let’s take payment processing as an example: the whole pipeline of card verification, charging, address validation, and customer notification is (most likely) handled by your shopping cart or marketplace. This is an incredibly valuable innovation we’ve enjoyed over the last few years, and it’s made possible by a few simple tenants of automation: memorization, automation, and calculation. Let’s apply those same concepts to automating your order fulfillment decisions.
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