Ship Multichannel Orders Faster with Organized Inventory

This blog was contributed by Avery Walts of SkuVault, an inventory management software system. Avery Walts is a Partner Marketing Manager at SkuVault where she focuses on producing content to support the efforts of SkuVault’s eCommerce partnerships. 

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday around the corner, retailers are looking to ship multichannel orders as fast as possible to meet demand. Not only do they want to ship fast, but correctly, and on time. In fact, according to a recent study, 84% of respondents said delivery is an important factor in the online shopping experience. 72.7% said they are “unlikely to do business with a brand again after a poor delivery experience.”

With Amazon’s delivery model increasing competition for independent brands more and more every day, the stakes to ship faster are at an all-time high. The secret sauce to get retailers there starts with organized inventory. Organized inventory is better managed with inventory management software, and inventory management software features help ship multichannel orders faster.

Organize Inventory Across Channels with Quantity Syncs

The last thing you want as a multichannel seller is for quantities to display differently across channels. Not only does this confuse customers, but also makes your brand seem unreliable. With inventory management software, users can implement automatic quantity syncs to keep product listings consistent.

Inventory data is pushed to each product listing and adjusted accordingly across all channels simultaneously when a purchase is made. For example, if you have a red backpack listed on Amazon, Walmart, and eBay and someone purchases two of them on Amazon, the new quantity will sync across channels to reflect the updated amount. When quantities are synced like this, it reduces the risk of out of stocks and oversells, which means you can ship orders confidently.

Go Paperless with Picking Workflows

Customers want their deliveries fast. Your job is to find a way to do that efficiently. Picking efficiently is at the core of inventory management functionality. To satisfy customers across multiple channels, implement a method called Wave Picking. Wave Picking is a paperless and digital pick method that takes pickers around the warehouse in sessions (or waves) and has them pick by date, SKU, or shipping method.

Wave Picking is ideal for multichannel orders because it targets which items to pick rather than which orders. Pickers can pick items for different channel sales at once instead of zig-zagging across the warehouse for each order. It’s also a digital pick method that can change in real-time, which is handy to have during peak season when demand can change unexpectedly.

Ship Faster with Better Reporting

The best business decisions are made with reliable and historical data. Shipping is one of them. When you implement an inventory management software, your historical inventory information is stored in a multitude of reports. This is an invaluable way to organize inventory for more efficient use. 

Reports give you insight into past and current inventory activity and serve as a great resource for sales forecasting. But most importantly, users can replenish inventory across sales channels with the click of a button on the Replenishment Report. The Replenishment Report is a customizable report that users utilize to replenish inventory when it’s running low. You can even use it to replenish FBA orders. 

With reports like this, inventory is better organized and less prone to human error mistakes like mis-picks and manually input sales data. Users can ship multichannel orders with ease knowing the information is housed securely and ready to be viewed later for improvements. 

Summary

The path to successful deliveries is quite simple. It starts with organized inventory. If you don’t have that, the rest that follows won’t go to plan.

Merchants who want to get multichannel orders out the door faster need to organize their inventory in-house with an automated inventory management software. This is the piece of the puzzle that can take you from cancelled orders to Amazon delivery competitor.