Order Fulfillment Basics

Every successful business needs to make a profit. But no matter how much revenue you bring in, if your operations are inefficient, your company will either underperform or take a loss. This is a hard fact of life and business. There's no getting around it. Lean supply chain management is...

If you followed the news in the post-pandemic season, you probably noticed that a lot of goods were in short supply. Everything from semiconductors to sausage, rental cars to lumber had been hard to come by. You could blame the pandemic for many of these shortages, sure, but the underlying...

Roughly 10% of packages get damaged in the mail. Naturally, this is not a comforting statistic if you are in the business of shipping fragile items. Our source here is the Fulfillment Lab, which considered the average damage rate over 15 billion packages delivered in 2022 and 2023. As you...

Have you ever ordered something online and wondered how exactly it got to your house? You’re certainly not alone – people may shop online a ton, but the order fulfillment process is still a little opaque.

Supply chain management, done well, is a bit like magic. Online shoppers can go their whole lives without really understanding how items get from Point A to Point B. And that’s the way we like it!

But still, you might be curious about how the whole thing works. So to satisfy your curiosity, here are the 11 order fulfillment steps that take place within the walls of our warehouse – and other warehouses like it – that make online shopping possible.

Shipping your own orders gets old fast. But finding the right order fulfillment partner to take care of it is a tough decision and one you want to make properly.

Picking the right order fulfillment partner can save you time, money, and energy. That way, you can focus on growing your business because you’re not the one putting every box in the mail.

But if you pick the wrong one, shipments might get lost and customers might get angry. You might end up paying bills and not entirely understanding why.

It’s complicated. So to help you pick the right order fulfillment – and tell when it’s the right time to be thinking about this in the first place – we’ve put together this guide.

Fun fact - 1.7 million packages are lost or stolen in the United States every day. That's about 620 million packages per year according to a 2023 report by Security.org. Obviously, that is a terrible fact, but it's also an unavoidable one. So it begs the question: "who is liable...

Order fulfillment is incredibly important in eCommerce. It affects customer happiness directly. Problems here can cause bad reviews, lost sales, and less brand loyalty.

If you want to avoid these issues, you need to make your order fulfillment process smooth, clear, and reliable. Fixing common problems and giving great service will help you keep up your reputation. And that will help you keep your customers happy and loyal, and your store profitable.

How do you know when you need help with order fulfillment? It’s not an easy call. But deciding when to outsource order fulfillment is absolutely critical if you want to grow your business and keep it running efficiently.

As your business scales, shipping physical products becomes increasingly difficult. So does handling the logistics in-house. This can quickly become overwhelming and expensive.