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The global supply chain is growing at a tremendous rate, putting pressure on wholesalers and retailers to get more mileage out of their warehouses. These giant storerooms must hold more inventory, and stock has to be processed faster. A good way of achieving this is by adopting a lean method of warehouse management.

What is the lean approach?

Developed by Toyota for its auto manufacturing plants, the lean approach is all about paring processes down to a minimum, leaving only what’s necessary and essential in place. When applied properly and strategically, a lean approach can significantly reduce costs. It can also improve customer satisfaction.

What is lean warehousing?

Just as the lean approach cut out anything unnecessary in Toyota’s manufacturing plants, in a warehouse, it means having the least amount of inventory to satisfy demand while streamlining processes to ensure there are no extra steps.

In addition to reducing overall cost and increasing efficiency, lean warehousing also leads to more accurate control over inventory. With such control in place, the whole supply chain runs smoother and more efficiently, and customers get their products in good time.

Here are a few more ways lean warehousing helps retailers and wholesalers:

• Provides better visibility into warehouse activities,
• Enables quicker decision-making,
• Reduces lead times,
• Improves operational efficiency,
• Ensures the accuracy of data, and
• Reduces unnecessary inventory.

How does the lean approach reduce waste in a warehouse?

Less wasted inventory

With the lean method, a warehouse stocks a bare minimum of inventory, holding only what’s going to be used or sold in the near term. As a result, there’s less chance of a company being left holding stock it can’t sell.

More cost-effective transportation

Here, the lean approach means finding direct routes when making deliveries. To meet customer expectations, transportation should be aligned with customer service so the entire transportation process becomes smooth and cost-effective.

Efficient flow of inventory

The route taken by inventory in a warehouse should be the quickest and most effective. This route goes from collecting the items to getting it to the packing department and the packing process itself. In other words, every time inventory moves from one area to another, it should only be in the service of the actual fulfillment process. This also eliminates the time inventory sits in the warehouse.

A system is overprocessed when it has steps in it that have no direct purpose. Those steps are a waste. By applying lean warehousing principles, the whole process can be analyzed and tracked to ensure that every action taken is there for a reason: to fulfill orders as fast as possible.

No more paper

Lean principles make the warehouse go paperless. That means no paper pick tickets, packing slips, or other such paperwork. Lean warehousing shifts all these forms to electronic devices like cell phones, computers, and tablets. This can lead to big savings over time, while cutting down manual errors.

What are the five S’s of lean warehousing?

There are five practices that have to be paid attention to with the lean method. Each is equally important, and each begins with the letter “S.”

Sorting

This is about stock control, making the best use of the inventory. You should:

• Remove damaged, outdated, surplus, broken and defective stock from the warehouse.
• Only move inventory around the warehouse when it’s necessary.
• Automate inventory control, logging it in and tracking its movement with electronic devices like scanners.

Straightening

When you’ve sorted out the stock, you have to make sure it’s organized in the best way.

• Place frequently used items in areas that are easy to get to.
• Clearly label the inventory, and tag everything.
• Put up signage that clearly shows where everything is and gives directions to get to it.

Shining

This is about the whole facility being clean and tidy. When the warehouse is well-maintained, efficiency is increased and accidents are reduced. When applying shining, you need to do the following:

Have the warehouse cleaned after every shift.

• Maintain hygiene in the warehouse.
• Place garbage cans everywhere to prevent littering.

Standardizing

In a warehouse, all employees and managers should follow the same procedures to ensure the warehouse is run well. Warehouses are standardized in the following ways:

• Set standards and clearly defined processes that help weed out ambiguity.
• Make all the standards easily accessible to the staff.
• Translate processes and procedures into simple pictures, and place them visibly around the warehouse.

Sustaining

Sustaining means making sure good operational procedures and processes are continued over time. Here’s what you need to do:

• Implement behaviors and habits that will maintain standards in the long run.
• Frequently evaluate success by conducting regular audits and reviews.
• Follow up on creative ideas from the employees, and use them when they’re good ones.

Make your warehouse lean with Cin7 Omni

If you’d like to introduce lean practices into your warehouse, take action and get in touch with a warehouse management team that knows the method inside out. At Cin7 Omni, we’re confident in our ability to streamline your warehouse processes and can help you implement all of the five “S” operations.

Reach out to our team today, and let us help you eliminate warehouse waste, cut down overall costs and optimize your warehouse operations. Book a demo with our experts now! We are all eager to assist you.

What goes on behind the scenes to get goods to a customer after clicking the “buy” button is a lot more complicated than most realize. While the process for getting an online order to a shopper breaks down to collecting, packing, and shipping the goods off when you consider the vast number of orders that consistently come in from many different online channels, you can see there could be complications that have to be overcome. Factor in the possibility of these goods being stored in any one of several gigantic warehouses, and you understand how important it is to have everything well organized. That organization, basically, is order management.

When order management works at its best, your customers are left satisfied. That’s because a well-run system keeps them and their needs in mind at every step. In this blog, we will closely examine how order management and an order management system make it all happen.

What an order management system does

An order management system (OMS) is a software application that automates every aspect of order management. It keeps accurate records of everything from the inventory you hold and the purchase orders you issue to your sales and payments. It also handles invoicing and maintains relevant customer information. All the information the system manages is stored in one location that can be accessed from anywhere.

With all the data and information it collects, a reliable and robust OMS, such as Cin7 Omni, can make forecasts about your inventory, letting you know what items to stock up on. Forecasting inventory is possible because the system knows what items are selling best and which storage locations they’re selling best from. As for working out the most efficient way to fill each order, the software can use its knowledge of where items are stored to determine which facility is best placed to fill them. This stored information about who buys what and where can also be used to make important business decisions, like offering a new fulfillment option such as curbside pickup.

4 order management functions that give shoppers a better buying experience

1. Inventory control

When prospective customers think of buying something from a website, they like to know that the item is available before they opt to purchase it. If your site lets them go through the whole purchase procedure — from selecting the size, color, and quantity to choosing payment options and filling in their details — and only then lets them know an item they want is unavailable, they’re going to be a little annoyed. If they go through the whole online purchase procedure, and you later send an email saying the item is unavailable or that it’s going to take a while to arrive, they’re going to be even more annoyed.

A good OMS lets you know how much inventory you have in stock and gives this information to your customers. Cin7 Omni’s inventory management software syncs your website or social media with real-time inventory availability, so customers can make more informed choices. This knowledge also enables the automated system to let your online customers know when particular items they want will be available.

So when it comes to inventory, with an order management system, you’re on top of everything, and your customers have every reason to trust you and your company. It’s what they call a win-win.

2. Delivery

Today’s shoppers like to have options, especially when choosing which way to get their orders into their hands. These options could be anything from delivery times, like one-day, two-day, or three-day shipping delivered to their homes, to curbside pickup to collecting their packages at a brick-and-mortar store (that’s BOPIS or buy online, pick up in-store.)

With its integrated warehouse management software, Cin7 Omni is designed to enhance your order fulfillment processes by expediting shipping, reducing errors, and boosting your team’s productivity. This feature is equipped with advanced tools that enable efficient management of all aspects of shipping, including order tracking, stocktaking, and label printing.

Again, a win-win.

3. Multichannel fulfillment

Just as shoppers have a lot of online and offline options when they want to buy something, you, the seller, have options. These run from numerous online marketplaces and social media to apps, email, and even brick-and-mortar stores. Nowadays, it’s called omnichannel marketing. For you as a seller, it means getting more visibility for your products and getting your name out.

Cin7 Omni offers a comprehensive solution that automates the entire order process by seamlessly integrating with all sales channels, allowing you to conveniently manage your sales from one system. By connecting all of your sales channels in one place, Cin7 Omni enables you to easily collect information about which items are being purchased from which source. This eliminates the need to manually enter and manage orders from multiple channels, saving time and reducing potential errors.

4. Reverse logistics

Last but not least, businesses often have to deal with return requests due to late deliveries, delivery of wrong items, damaged products, and more. While this can cause short-term dissatisfaction, a displeased consumer could be placated with effective return management.

Cin7 Omni can boost customer loyalty with quicker and more efficient returns and replacement logistics. You can establish the return policy and eligibility and initiate client-specific return processing. Furthermore, depending on its condition, you can choose whether to refurbish, refill, or discard the returned item.

Upgrade your order management system to Cin7 Omni

An OMS is good for you and your customers, but management systems do more than just handle inventory and orders. They also connect with CRM, ERP, sales, service, and commerce systems and other software you use that impacts the purchasing process. The beauty of an OMS is that when all these systems are integrated, the information each holds is available on a single platform and can easily be accessed by employees.

If you’re looking for an order management system that can help you improve your customer experience, Cin7 Omni could be the way to go. Book a demo today to learn more and understand why Cin7 Omni is the right choice for you.

Wholesalers stand between manufacturers and retailers, buying in great bulk from the first and selling in small quantities to the second. What these two sales entities have in common is inventory and the fact that they have to manage it well.

To do that, the right tools have to be in place. Today, these tools are the inventory control and order management systems. The functions carried out by these automated systems are the same for both entities, but for wholesalers, large quantities of goods have to be handled.

In this blog, we’re going to lay out the reasons why Cin7 Omni software is a good option for wholesalers when it comes to their inventory and order management.

How Cin7 Omni’s order management system helps a wholesaler

For a wholesaler, buying in bulk and selling in small quantities to several retailers involves everything that order management covers, from knowing what to buy from suppliers to delivering the items to retailers.

Cin7 Omni’s order management software takes care of every step in the process easily. That’s everything from tracking orders, invoices and purchase orders, to warehouse management, and shipping. Cin7 Omni also has integrations that will let a wholesaler track all its business transactions, minimize dead stock, use several different couriers for shipping, and accept payments in many currencies.

Here are some of the ways Cin7 Omni’s order management system can make a wholesale business run better:

1. Keep on top of sales to your retailers.

With Cin7 Omni, all your retail partners can be centralized on a single dashboard. Through this one hub, information about the goods ordered from manufacturing and importers on one side, and purchase orders received from retailers on the other can be recorded, tracked, and synced to inventory, all in real time.

Because this dashboard is the central control, it also displays the inventory in a warehouse. If there are several warehouses, the display makes it easy to move any of those goods from one facility to another with a few simple instructions. Knowing what’s in stock and where it’s stored at all times in real time will, in addition, prevent stockouts. As an added bonus, Cin7 Omni supports pre-orders and backorders.

2. Have all information about purchases and sales displayed in a simple format.

Any information Cin7 Omni is storing about inventory or order management can be brought up on the dashboard at any time, and it can be presented in as much or as little detail as is wanted. For instance, you could bring up everything about a particular order — order number, order date, name of retailer, payment method, shipping carrier, and so on — or you could bring up one or two of these identifiers. There’s also a filter that lets you display information in categories. These could be anything from outstanding invoices to unfilled purchase orders to what inventory is stored in a particular warehouse. If a category you want is missing, a custom feature that’s part of the system lets you add it.

In short, Cin7 Omni is a highly flexible system that puts you in the driving seat at all times, giving you the ability to pull up the data you want on the dashboard.

3. Speed up and simplify the order management process.

The mission-control dashboard that comes with Cin7 Omni does more than just display your data, it’s also the tool through which you can make additions or changes: Add details that help you identify orders like due dates, tags, comments, and instructions; confirm, cancel, export, and import bulk orders; create new orders and picklists; download and print invoices and shipping labels. Maybe most useful of all, with this system, you can process many different orders simultaneously.

4. Maintain total control of inventory.

Just as inventory is central to the wholesaler, inventory management keeps the business flowing smoothly and efficiently. An automated inventory management system will make sure you have the right amount of stock at all times for your company’s needs, doing this by setting triggers to go off at preset lows and sending out purchase orders for more when those levels are reached.

With Cin7 Omni, you can also handle any returns you may have. It can initiate a refund, if your returns policy allows for it, and can log the items back in your storage.

5. Sort out the best way to deliver your products.

When it comes time to ship out your retailers’ orders, Cin7 Omni has everything under control. Right from that same dashboard, you’re able to choose a delivery service that’s best for each company you’re delivering your products to, even if they’re in another country, and there are several courier services to choose from. Another feature of the automated system considers factors like price, discounts, package size, location, and delivery date.

6. Coordinate and communicate.

Keeping a good line of communication with the manufacturers and importers you deal with — your suppliers — is as important as maintaining inventory levels and getting orders out efficiently. Cin7 Omni lets you do that, giving real-time, up-to-date information on all your dealings with them as well as the other areas of your business. Because all this happens from your all-purpose dashboard, everything you do is coordinated and based on accurate information. It’s all designed to make your wholesale business run as smoothly and cost-efficiently as possible.

Wrapping up

We’ve shown how Cin7 Omni’s order management and inventory management systems can help you conduct your wholesale business at an optimum level.

To find out more, talk to one of our Cin7 Omni experts today.

Any customer buying online is taking a leap of faith. They’re trusting that the item they’re buying is everything they think it is, and they’re trusting that the website they’re buying from is honest.

As an ecommerce seller, the best way to assure customers that you won’t be running off with their money is to provide a window into your fulfillment process. Let your customers know at every step that their items are reliably on their way. This way, they will feel confident in their purchase and feel good about you as a seller. The window you provide is called order tracking.

We’re going to take a close look at order tracking: what it does, its benefits, and how to make the best use of it.

What order tracking software is and how it works

Order tracking software is part of, and runs in tandem with, an order management system (OMS). This software knows where an order is at every stage of the fulfillment process and can post that information for the buyer as, and when, requested.

Here’s basically what the order tracking software does:

• As soon as an order has been placed, it will send the buyer an email confirming the order has been received. This email lists all the details of the order and gives it a tracking number.
• This tracking number identifies the order through the picking/packing stages, and a notice on the website will let the buyer know their order is being processed.
• The buyer can visit the website and enter the tracking number to check the live order status and expected delivery date.

All this reporting is in real time.

Reasons to have an order tracking feature

1. It builds trust.

Order tracking gives your company transparency. It’s like you’re opening your doors to your buyers and inviting them to see how you operate. And when you do that, there’s no reason for them to mistrust you.

Customer trust is the foundation of repeat business. While this maxim applies to all sales businesses, it’s especially true for ecommerce where there’s no personal connection and where products can only be seen in an image.

Being able to follow their orders through the system also gives buyers a sense of control, and that will leave them feeling that they’ve had a good shopping experience. It’s the kind of satisfaction that will also lead to repeat business; plus, it will give your buyers a reason to recommend you to their friends.

2. It frees up customer support staff.

Ecommerce sites that don’t have an order tracking feature will have to dedicate precious customer service hours to dealing with inquiries about order status. If your customer service staff have to spend all their time doing this, (a) they won’t be able to do anything else, and (b) you’re going to have to hire a lot of them.

With an order tracking feature your customers can use at any time, your customer support staff can focus on resolving those rare issues when things go wrong for the buyer. That, in turn, will make even those shoppers who’ve had complaints feel they’ve had a good experience with your company.

3. It helps you stay on top of your fulfillment process.

The order tracking software doesn’t just let buyers know the status of their orders, it tells you where every item is in the system. Monitoring in this way provides a valuable way for you to gauge how well your fulfillment process is working. It will tell you where bottlenecks are occurring and identify areas that aren’t running as efficiently as they could. With this information, you can make adjustments to smooth things out.

Ways to make the most of order tracking

1. Confirm you’ve received an order and provide a tracking number.

You have to keep your buyers in the loop at all times, and you have to do this from the minute they’ve placed an order to the minute it’s delivered to them. Start with an email that confirms you’ve received the order and have processed their payment. Use this email to let your buyers know that the order you have is correct by listing every item and all relevant information about those items. Then provide the tracking number you’ve assigned the order, explain what it is, and provide the URL of your site and the page they should open for tracking.

Make sure your tracking page is simple and easy to navigate.

2. Put all relevant information on your website’s tracking page.

The following, ideally, should be included:

• Complete details of all the items in the order – size, color, quantity,
• The stage of the process the order is in – being processed, being shipped, etc., and
• Estimated date/time of delivery.

This information should be in real time.

3. Send frequent notifications to buyers.

In addition to posting up-to-date tracking information on your site, you could also update customers via email and text. It’s a simple enough thing to do with the software, and it tells your buyers you care about them.

4. Make recommendations for other purchases.

Since you know your buyers are going to visit your online tracking page regularly, it provides a great opportunity to upsell or cross-sell your other products.

5. Get feedback.

Don’t be shy about asking your customers to rate your performance as a company as well as giving an opinion on the products they’ve received. You can also ask them how they felt about the shipping company that delivered the goods. It’s information you can put to good use, and gives your customers more input into the process.

Cin7 Omni’s track order feature

Cin7 Omni can take care of all the aspects of order tracking described above and more. The perfect tool, it can accept orders from several different platforms, keeping them in their separate silos as the software logs and reports tracking details. These platforms include Amazon, Shopify and WooCommerce, as well as social media sites and your own website.

Call one of our experts today and book a free demo.

’Tis the season for joy, merriment, and giving. That last part is the important one for retailers everywhere. That’s because Christmas is the biggest shopping season of the year. Over the last five years, Christmas-season sales have averaged around 19% of total sales for the year, and that percentage can be higher for some retailers, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). The NRF also predicts 2022 Christmas sales to exceed those of last year’s by between 6% and 8% and to bring in between $942.6 billion and $960.4 billion – and sales in 2021 were pretty amazing.

To fill all these sales, retailers have to have large stocks of inventory and ramp up fulfillment, but preparing and coping with that presents huge challenges. To overcome them, having optimal inventory is vital, and automating with an inventory management system is essential.

In this blog, we’re going to explore how Cin7 can help you get the right level of inventory for the holiday season, and take a look at shortcomings you should try to avoid.

Inventory management problems to avoid during the holiday season:

1. Stockouts

The last thing any business wants to do is run out of stock during the holiday season. In fact, getting items to customers by Christmas Day is the most important thing they have to do at that time of year.

To make sure the level of stock at hand is at optimal levels to fill these orders, you have to anticipate the amount you’ll need and stock up ahead of time. This can’t be done without a complete understanding of the marketplace and consumer spending patterns. Complementing that is the importance of having real-time insights into inventory levels, complete oversight of its movement through the supply chain, and knowing what items are selling more and which less.

2. Shipping delays

While shipments can be affected by factors like extreme weather conditions that are outside the retailers’ control, every effort has to be made to get items to customers on time – meaning before Christmas Day. With the high increase in orders during this holiday period, additional planning and resources are a necessity. The right tools and technology can make this planning a lot easier.

3. Managing sales on multiple channels and venues

This year, customers are returning to brick-and-mortar stores. But that doesn’t mean they’ve left online behind. On the contrary, as Fit Small Business has shown, more than half of shoppers check items out online before buying in-store – or vice versa; and 47% of shoppers are more likely to buy online if they can return it to a physical store. Maybe a more important bit of data from that Fit Small Business survey is that retailers who sell on more than three channels increase their order rates by 494%.

The takeaway from this is that retailers and ecommerce companies not only have to sell on several channels — websites, online marketplaces, social media, and apps — they have to coordinate them. Shoppers have to be given a seamless experience, so that if they’re looking at something on one channel and they switch — like say from social media to a company’s site — the items they’re looking at will pop up. This multichannel, or omnichannel, selling can only be achieved with a robust automated system, and there’s no better time to get one than the holiday season when sales and orders spike.

Manage holiday inventory like a pro with Cin7

Cin7 is a fully-integrated cloud-based inventory and order management system equipped with all the features necessary to meet the increased demands of the Christmas season.

1. Say no to stock outs

As we’ve discussed, the best way to ensure you have the right level of inventory for the holiday season is to put good inventory planning in place.

Cin7 can help you with that. First, it creates detailed reports for your sales and inventory. These reports are in real time, and if you have multiple sales channels and warehouses, are individualized for each of them. Armed with this up-to-the-minute tool, you have an accurate picture of what’s selling well and where, information you can use to forecast your needs so you’ll get the right level of inventory in to meet them. What’s more, because the automated system is keeping accurate records of your inventory and its movement through your supply chain, noting each time something is removed from storage, you always know exactly what you have and where it is.

This ability to know what’s in storage leads to another benefit Cin7 gives you: keeping stock at constant levels. To enable this, the system can be programmed to register when these levels reach a predetermined low. When that happens, triggers will automatically send purchase orders (PO) to your supplier for more.

Stock transfer is another great capability of Cin7, one that can be especially useful during high-demand seasons like Christmas. What it does is arrange for items to be transferred from one warehouse to another. This is useful when, say, it makes sense to fill an order from one location rather than another, or — with the holiday season in mind — you need to take care of a bulk order.

2. Work hand in hand with your suppliers

Cin7 connects your suppliers, shipping partners, warehouses, stock locations, physical stores, and online sales channels, saving and constantly updating all information relating to them, and displaying this on a single, intuitive dashboard. This information includes everything from supplier details to POs and orders to payment terms to delivery locations.

While useful all-year round, during the high-demand holiday season when increased levels of inventory make it more likely for suppliers to get things wrong, having this information at your fingertips means that any mistakes in orders can be identified and corrected quickly and easily.

3. Sell on as many channels as you want, both online and offline

As mentioned, the Fit Small Business survey found that retailers who sell on more than three channels increase their order rates by 494%. That’s a whopping amount. Fortunately, a large number of retailers do use several channels both online and offline.

What’s needed, then, is a digital inventory management system that can keep track of all the channels and orders. In addition to coordinating online sales platforms like websites, social media, and apps and offline stores into a single system, Cin7 can incorporate dropshippers and online marketplaces like Amazon.

For the retailer this coordination allows you to connect your sales from these multiple outlets to your inventory, centralizing inventory management so you’ll always be on top of your needs. It’s worth noting here that ecommerce giants like Amazon may lower a seller’s ranking if it runs out of stock and can’t fill orders. All this means is that preventing stockouts is important on so many levels. Especially during the Christmas season, having a system like Cin7 to prevent stockouts is invaluable.

In conclusion

The spike in sales during the holiday shopping season creates challenges for retailers. While we’ve looked at these challenges for inventory, we haven’t explored other areas like expanded customer relations, added labor, and the need for more work and storage space. The thing is, when you have a feature-packed tool like Cin7 to take care of everything concerning inventory, you’re free to focus on those other areas.

To learn more about Cin7, call one of our experts today and arrange to be given a demo.

In a way, customers are like golden geese: The fact that they buy your goods is the reason you have a business and are making profits, but they’re likely to fly away if you don’t give them a good shopping experience.

For a customer, this good buying experience comes down to finding the products they want easily, getting them for a good price, and, for online sales, getting them delivered quickly. That last part is the final stage of the whole order fulfillment process, the behind-the-scene activity that takes place between an online order being placed and the products being sent out. To get products to the customer as quickly as possible, order fulfillment has to be working at its best.

The ecommerce order fulfillment process explained

The order fulfillment process starts in the warehouse when goods are received from vendors, moves on to these items being sorted and stored, and goes through to them being picked for an order, packed, labeled, and sent out.

While this all seems simple enough, the vast number of items stored and the enormous number of orders to be filled, often coming in from several different sites, create challenges. There are five main challenges to overcome.

Ecommerce order fulfillment’s challenges

1. Managing inventory

If you don’t have a product a customer has ordered in stock, you may have to refund the customer’s money, and you could end up looking unreliable. In other words, you’ll lose the sale, the customer, and your reputation.

An inventory management system (IMS) is the best way to take care of these issues. A software that does all the hard work for you, an IMS gives you minute-by-minute information on your inventory, letting you know where every item is at any point of the fulfillment process and the number of items there are in the system. Plus, it does all this in real time.

To make things even easier, barcode scanners that record every item in your inventory are available. This significantly reduces the chances of stockouts and overstocking.

Sometimes, despite all the precautions you take, things happen and you run out of items that have been ordered. Maybe your supplier had a problem, or the goods are tied up in an overseas shipment. For cases like these, there’s backordering. It means you sell products even when they aren’t in stock and fulfill them as soon as you have them again. Cin7 handles this by sending timely alerts, so that you can create a backorder and avoid letting your customers down.

2. Monitoring orders from several online channels

Perhaps you have heard the expression: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” In general, the expression means to diversify. That way if something happens to one “basket” to destroy whatever is in it, you still have something — eggs, money, inventory — in another basket. Applied to ecommerce, it makes good business sense to sell your items on more than one marketplace and use other online possibilities like social media, so you open your business up to more customers, get more sales, and become a recognizable name.

However, while it’s easy to set these channels up, keeping all the orders that come through them in their separate silos, monitoring them, and turning them around quickly is a challenge.  An ecommerce order management system, like Cin7, is essential in this situation. The beauty of this software is that it puts all the channels you sell through onto a single platform. That’s how you’ll never overlook a sale, or deliver one through the wrong site. To simplify the process even more, this automated system lets you process items in bulk. Order management software cuts back several administrative tasks, streamlining your fulfillment as it saves you time and money.

3. Picking the right items from the warehouse

Knowing exactly where everything in a warehouse is stored and being able to map the best route to collect items for orders in the fastest way is important. Your employees shouldn’t have to search through every bin in every aisle to find each item. Thus, even before items arrive in the warehouse, decisions about where to place them have to be worked out, and those decisions have to be recorded so everyone is aware of them.

With this organization in place, items for orders can easily be found. They’re pulled from their storage spots by “pickers,” who work from “picklists,” which are lists of items for orders organized so that actual collecting takes the shortest route around the warehouse.

Creating picklists by hand can result in problems. It’s easy to leave an item off or get an item wrong, and if the warehouse is large and stores a lot of things, working out the best picking route to take is almost impossible. The easy answer to these pain points is to have a modern warehouse management system (WMS) installed. These automated systems generate flawless picklists, tell the picker exactly where each item is located, and list them in the quickest picking order. With Cin7, you can also create picklists from multiple orders in bulk.

As a complement to everything, and as a final way to make sure all the correct items have been collected, barcode scanners can do a final verification after the picking has been done.

4. Coping with returns

It’s your responsibility as a seller to make sure your buyers get exactly what they order, in good order, in good time. Your customers are trusting that you’ll deliver your goods as promised.

But however hard you try, and no matter how good an automated system you put in place to ensure accuracy, things can go wrong. An item may end up not being what the customer imagined, or they may have just made a mistake in selecting it. For cases like this, part of the trust you build with your buyers is giving them an easy way to return items and get their money back.

The best way to do this is with returns management. Cin7 software can process returns quickly and easily. It lets you approve the return, keeps customers in the loop by sharing status updates via phone and email, and arranges refund payments. For the returned items, you can decide which warehouse they should go back to, and log them back in the system if they’re in a good enough condition to be sold again.

5. Shipping orders quickly

In a world where giants like Amazon offer one-day shipping, the bar for delivery time has been raised for everyone. To keep up, you may want to contract with fulfillment services providers that offer an expedited service at affordable costs.

Cin7 offers third-party logistics that you should find helpful. Nearly 200 3PLs are integrated into the software, and more 3PLs are added monthly. This enables you to leverage local 3PL services to prevent slow delivery and guarantee that your clients always receive what they purchased.

To speed up the time between an order being placed online and the goods arriving at the customer’s address, getting the items sorted and packed needs to be as quick as possible. If you promise a three-day delivery and your warehouse operations take two days to prepare an order, for instance, your window to physically transport it will only be one day. With automated order routing, online orders can now go straight to your 3PL warehouses, ensuring that orders are shipped from the nearest location.

Making order fulfillment easy with Cin7

Cin7 can help you overcome or prevent altogether most of the order fulfillment pain points we’ve discussed in this blog. As a tool, it will give you the kind of accurate, real-time check on your inventory that will make sure you never run out of an item again or end up with too many of something you can’t sell. Cin7 can automate your purchase orders as well.

Our software can also present information from several sales platforms on a single dashboard. No matter how many online marketplaces or sites you advertise your products on, you’ll be able to take care of every sale from this one place. This centralized system also means that any changes you have to make on all these sales platforms, like updating product listings or prices, can also be taken care of from this single area.

When it comes to managing warehouses, Cin7 is there for you as well. On top of monitoring stock and making sure there’s enough of it on hand at all times, it will produce picklists and register barcode scanning to double check that the right items are being picked. Since Cin7 automatically generates packaging slips, it also makes that part of the process easy.

If you like what you’ve read about Cin7, you can book a demo with our experts today.