As an online seller, the delivery of your products is the one of the final steps in the customer journey and will leave a long-lasting impression on your brand. Your eCommerce business can stand out only by providing a seamless post purchase experience to your customers. This depends largely on how well your selling operations are aligned with your logistics setup. Hence, it is crucial for you to setup a logistics space that defines a successful delivery.

However, while on the pursuit, you may deal with some logistics challenges that may directly affect your eCommerce business. Let’s walk through the five common eCommerce fulfilment challenges faced by sellers such as yourself, and how to resolve them.

The challenges

1. Delays in order processing

It doesn’t matter if you are selling on a single store or multiple channels. When customers order products, you need to process it immediately within the specified time as defined in your service level agreement. Most marketplaces and sales channels expect orders to be processed within 1 or 2 days. Delays in processing automatically leads to issues in dispatch and delivery process which may further lead to frustrated customers and poor review ratings.

2. Errors in Inventory Management

Mismanagement and errors while updating stock can also hamper your logistics processes. Damaged products and unavailability of stock leads to order cancellation, refunds, and the need to incentivize the unhappy customer. Your logistics partners end up charging for all their services but you lose on the revenue.

3. Sudden surge in order volume

As an eCommerce player, you understand that seasonal sales are part of the marketing campaign. People like to shop in this period pushing the shipment volume to its peak. Your eCommerce store would actively engage with customers with all sorts of purchase, returns, feedback and retention. This can be challenging for your fulfilment service providers to organize and be ready for such situations without crashing down.

4. Managing selling operations manually

Your eCommerce business is based on the nature of persistent change. Time and efficiency is the key to success and your business needs to meet the promised delivery date to the customer at all costs. If you sell internationally, you are called to cater to different time zones, by handling all your processes manually, there are chances of manual errors hampering your logistics operations.

5. Entrusting your brand in your partners

Most sellers across Southeast Asia do not run their own logistics operations and depend on third party fulfilment partners. While outsourcing the most important aspect of your selling business, a lot of instances occur in which your brand’s or online store’s reputation may suffer due to your logistics partner’s mistake.

 

The solutions

1. Adopt a transparent shipping policy

A thorough shipping policy prevents logistics hiccups for various customer types. This give you greater control and transparency as a seller. Needless to say, a better delivery experience for your customers.

2. Leverage on logistics technology

Your goal is to understand the customers’ changing needs to provide the best services for maximum satisfaction. It is important, therefore to have a look at the trends and understand what the top sellers across Southeast Asia have been pursuing to take on their logistics challenges. The trends suggest that powerful technology – aligns with eCommerce and multi-channel selling – has the potential to significantly improve eCommerce logistics.

Multi-channel Selling Management

Top power sellers, brands, and retailers have been successfully using multi-channel selling management platforms (like Selluseller) and warehouse management systems (like Anchanto) to achieve the maximum possible efficiency in their end-to-end eCommerce operations.

As an online seller, you should look forward to being part of the logistics partners that run on powerful software applications capable of controlling the warehouse system and updating all the data in real-time, assuring minimum errors and maximum work management. An even better way is to adopt such an eCommerce selling management platform yourself, so that you can streamline your selling better and scale your profits.

These highly optimized software enables strategic partnerships, omni and multi-channel marketplace management along with connecting you with a huge seller network. At the end, better selling management leads to fewer errors, resolved challenges and more happy customers.

 

Written by Anirudh Venkat, Country Head- Singapore & Indonesia, Anchanto.

Anchanto is a global B2B SaaS product company headquartered in Singapore, with operations & customers across 14+ countries. Through its proprietary SaaS products (SelluSeller & Wareo) and strategic partnerships, the company helps online sellers, SMEs, Micro SMEs, Brands, Retailers, 3PLs, simplify and run highly successful end-to-end eCommerce operations.

Anchanto operates from its offices in Singapore, India, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, and Philippines. The company currently serves a massive customer base of 7000+ businesses comprising of SMEs and global enterprises.

 

Disclaimer:

These comments are the views and opinions of the author and should not be construed as advice. You should act using your own information and judgement. Whilst information has been obtained from and is based upon multiple sources the author believes to be reliable, we do not guarantee its accuracy and it may be incomplete or condensed.

All opinions and estimates constitute the author’s own judgement as of the date of the briefing and are subject to change without notice.

We have no commercial affiliation or commercial interest regarding the businesses mentioned in this article. The information is only provided as gathered and should be verified before, using your own judgement.