Robert Blaise

The order fulfillment plight

Okay so you finally made the leap of faith and invested in your online store. After a few weeks of tweaks on your Google Ad campaign you finally have your first sale, awesome. From this point forward How your business handles orders will have a major impact on your customer experience, from encouraging initial interest to prompting repeat business.  While several factors - price, quality of product or service, range of goods, stock availability - are vital to achieving sales in the first place, a responsive, fully automated order fulfillment procedure plays a key part in overall customer satisfaction.

Having a rock solid plan on how you will logistically manage orders will save you lots of headaches once you are up and running at full steam.  The key here is to understand the order flow and have a plan to address all possible issues that may arise during a sales transaction. Since at one point or another we are all consumers I like to start just by jotting down a few notes from good and bad personal experiences that I have had while shopping online. Next let’s evaluate your product is it a physical product like a phone or is it a digital product like software? How will your customers receive their product? Who will be responsible for the shipping charges? In either case there must be a process that is initiated when a purchase is made on your site. Remember not all customers will be happy with the quality of products purchased via the Internet and there will undoubtedly be a certain percentage of defective or damaged products, irrespective of the quality or type of product being sold.  You should have a plan on how to address an unhappy buyer as there is still an opportunity to salvage the relationship. I have found that a good well thought out FAQ can go a long way and actually help to increase sales.

So remember, invest some time in planning your overall customer experience and how their products will be delivered to them. This is a critical process in the entire transaction and should not be overlooked. Brows a few sites, purchase a few products, write down your likes and dislikes and soon you will be on your way to a better sales fulfillment process.