Every business loves repeat customers. Customers are more likely to purchase again if they had a pleasant ordering experience in the past. The good news is that businesses can control and optimize their order management process to deliver a great ordering experience for their customers. An order management software offers significant advantages over manual methods in helping your business optimize and streamline your sales and fulfillment processes.
What is order management software?
An order management software is a solution that helps businesses receive, process, and fulfill sales orders. It also enables customers to serve themselves by placing orders and tracking them through an online portal.
Five ways to optimize order management process
1. Enable customers to help themselves
A B2B portal makes it easier for your customers to check the availability of products and order them online. Customers can also track the status of their order using the portal. In addition to enabling customers to serve themselves, a B2B portal can save your business considerable time and resources spent in answering customer queries via phone or email.
2. Automate routing orders to warehouse for fulfillment
If your business offers a large number of products and variations, the probability of incorrectly fulfilling orders is high. Customers are unlikely to return if they’ve received incorrect items. Moreover, the cost of handling return and replacement to your business could be high. An integrated order fulfillment software can help you improve the accuracy of fulfillment as it eliminates the need for manual re-entry of orders. It also helps you to speed up fulfillment as orders are automatically converted to pickings instantly.
3. Real-time inventory visibility
Having real-time visibility of inventory levels and lead times to your sales team is an essential step towards enabling them to make specific commitments. An inventory management software will help you maintain accurate inventory records and automatically update inventory levels in response to sales and purchase transactions.
4. Forecast inventory accurately
Accurately forecasting inventory levels is undoubtedly a challenging task for most companies. Understocking often results in losing potential sales and having too much stock results in your capital getting tied up to your inventory. It is clear both understocking and overstocking is terrible for businesses. A smart inventory forecasting software could help you save thousands of dollars and increase profits by helping you forecast correctly.
5. Automate shipping
There has been a recent increase in the number of shipping API providers. Shipping APIs gives you the ability to integrate your order management software to accurately estimate shipping costs, book shipments, and print shipping labels automatically.
