An essential piece of the e-commerce puzzle is effective warehouse management. As you scale your e-commerce business, this piece often becomes less feasible to handle internally. Managing your own warehousing and e-commerce fulfillment may seem more cost-effective at first, but it can actually lose you a lot in abandoned shopping carts, mismanaged inventory, and unhappy customers if not optimized for logistics success.
Benefits of E-commerce Warehouse Management
Are you outgrowing current fulfillment practices for your e-commerce business? Then it may be time to consider partnering with an e-commerce warehouse management provider. Here are some of the ways e-commerce warehouse management is beneficial:
1. Eases the Burden of Fulfillment
Warehouse management goes beyond being a basic storage unit for your inventory. Working with a third-party e-commerce warehouse management company who has high-end logistics strategies in place and established relationships with last-mile carriers takes the burden of inventory management and delivery off of your shoulders and gives your customers a more seamless experience.
2. Provides Inventory Storage
Of course, what would warehouse management be without a warehouse? As an e-commerce business, you likely have too much ever-moving inventory to reasonably store with your manufacturer or in your own spaces, but not enough to fill an entire warehouse.
Instead of storing all of your products in your garage, your office space, or stacked up in a disorganized storage unit, warehouse management gives your e-commerce business an organized place to store your products in a strategic manner that makes picking and packing a breeze.
3. Cost Savings
Outsourcing your warehouse management is a great way to reduce lost sales from shopping cart abandonment, returns, and dissatisfied customers. Warehouse management covers several e-commerce fulfillment needs all in one place, including:
- Inventory storage
- Order visibility and processing
- Product picking and packing
- And connecting with last-mile delivery carriers like UPS, USPS, and Fed-Ex to get the best possible shipping times and rates!
4. Increased Accuracy
With integrated technology and warehouse management systems to track and manage your inventory, warehouse management can give you better visibility of your existing inventory, making it easier to plan for replenishment and never run out of stock on your most popular products.
Six Things to Look For in an e-commerce Warehouse Management System
When searching for a high-quality e-commerce warehouse management system, you need to find one that supports your needs and helps your business to grow. Here are six things you should look for in warehouse management:
1. High Visibility and Accuracy
An inventory management system that doesn’t give you complete visibility of your inventory and orders is an immediate red flag. These third-party fulfillment providers are stewards of your products, so all the information should be readily available to you at the click of a button!
Your warehouse management system should have a modern, detailed online inventory system where you can easily see what products you have in stock, what orders are being prepared to ship, and statistics on your order history and most popular products. Smart Warehousing’s SWIMS inventory management system aims to give this control and visibility to our e-commerce clients with cloud-based data including real-time inventory insights, transaction-level updates, and activity summaries.
2. Scalability
E-commerce is the future of product sales and an extremely fast-growing platform for small businesses. As your business grows, your warehousing needs to be ready and able to grow with you. This requires a network of warehouses at essential locations and cloud technology that can foresee your growth as it occurs, predicting trends and helping you determine how much warehouse space you will need both in peak seasons and as your business grows.
3. Innovative Technology
This should come as no surprise given the emphasis so far on technology for visibility and scaling, but automation is the name of the game when it comes to high-quality warehousing and fulfillment. As automation through logistics software and machinery become more and more efficient, this saves a lot of time and money on order fulfillment and inventory management. The best warehouse management systems for e-commerce should be eager about the latest innovations and technologies, ready to implement anything that can make the industry more efficient and reliable for e-commerce businesses and customers alike.
4. Quality Customer Experience
When orders get lost, products arrive damaged, or other errors occur in the fulfillment process, it reflects poorly on your business. Your customers should never feel the presence of a warehouse management system in their journey from shopping to cart to receiving their order! The best warehouse management systems will provide you with a reliable fulfillment process that leads to a streamlined and positive customer experience.
5. Strategic Logistics and Integrations
Storing your inventory and picking and packing orders is all great, but without the support of strategic logistics it can only take you so far. With high-level logistics as the backbone of your e-commerce fulfillment, your supply chain and inventory will be managed so seamlessly that your business should never be stalled by shipping issues or back-ordered products.
The right warehouse management partner should also be able to integrate with your existing technologies as well, whether you use Shopify, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), or an ERP system. With connectivity across your processes, data can easily be directed into actionable insights that help you sustain and scale your business.
How a 3PL Can Boost E-commerce Success
The best solution to all of your warehousing and logistics needs as an e-commerce business is a third-party logistics provider (3PL). With over two decades at the forefront of logistics technology, Smart Warehousing has everything your e-commerce business needs for warehouse management that will give you and your customers complete peace of mind. To learn how your e-commerce business can thrive by partnering Smart Warehousing, contact us today to request a quote!