Ecommerce warehousing is a key process that’s essential for scaling your ecommerce business. While many ecommerce businesses start from a spare room at home, it’s easy for retailers to quickly run out of space for stock as their order volumes grow. You may have already upgraded to a warehouse, but are you utilising it to its full potential?
Efficiently managing a warehouse for your ecommerce business is crucial for reducing delivery times, increasing order accuracy, and ensuring that your customers are satisfied and more likely to make repeat purchases.
What is Ecommerce Warehousing?
Ecommerce warehouses are storage facilities where products available from online stores are kept. When a customer places an order, an item from the ecommerce warehouse is picked, packed, and shipped to their address.
These warehouses stock a wide range of products, from perishable foods requiring specific storage temperatures to delicate items that require careful handling during picking and packing.
Small businesses often utilise these warehouses or third-party fulfilment providers when their inventory levels and number of orders exceed the capacity of their current location.
Ecommerce warehouses have to manage and monitor several variables, including:
Goods-in: These are deliveries of stock to the warehouse. A well-run warehouse can handle early or late deliveries effectively
Storage and stock locations: ensuring that products are stored in the most efficient locations for picking and packing routes
Picking and packing: the process of selecting items to create an order that can be packed and shipped to the customer
Inventory management: ensuring that enough inventory is kept in reserve in the warehouse to deal with demand and potential supply chain delays
Managing returns from unsatisfied customers: ensuring the returns are processed correctly and inventory is replaced as needed
The 5 best practices for ecommerce warehousing
1. Use a warehouse management system:
A warehouse management system (WMS) can be used to track inventory, create automated workflows, and increase overall visibility and control over your ecommerce warehouse. Warehouse management systems can produce reports and analytics using real-time data from your warehouse as well as data from your ecommerce store.
How a WMS can support ecommerce management:
- Improved Inventory System Picking Accuracy
- Improved Customer Service
- Reduced Stock Inventory Costs
- Reduced Time Spent Managing
- Increased Speed of Orders
2. Picking and Packing:
Picking and packing is the process of selecting and packaging products in a warehouse. It’s important to reduce human error in your pick and pack process to ensure orders are accurate and fulfilled on time. Speeding up areas of your pick-and-pack process can lead to quicker order fulfilment times, meaning your customers receive their orders quicker.
- Improve your picking and packing process by:
- Use technology to create the most efficient picking routes, saving time and increasing the number of orders that can be picked.
- Store your inventory in the right locations, frequently ordered items can be placed closer to the packing station.
- Make use of mobile barcode scanners to reduce the number of human errors, ensuring workers have picked the right item and help track what items have been picked from a shelf.
3. Inventory management and tracking:
Keeping on top of your inventory tracking allows you to understand how much inventory you have left and where exactly it is in your warehouse. Issues arise when there is more or less inventory than is expected in the warehouse, which can lead to overselling or understocking. Ultimately, this leads to inefficiencies and a poor experience for your ecommerce store customers.
Improve your inventory management in your ecommerce warehouse by:
- Making use of an inventory management system
- Check, monitor and update inventory levels
- Perform routine checks to see if inventory levels match the software.
4. Integrations for autonomy:
It’s likely your ecommerce business has many moving parts from your website to your warehouse, to shipping and to marketing. It’s crucial all these components are connected, communicating and working together to improve your processes and customer experience. By connecting your WMS with well-known platforms, you can automate a number of processes.
Helpful Integrations for warehouses:
Courier and multi-carrier integrations connect your store and warehouse with a vast range of couriers like DHL, Royal Mail and many more. Shipping rules can be created to ensure the most cost-effective courier is chosen based on your shipping information.
Accountancy system integrations automate financial processes like invoicing, payments and receipts. Reducing the need to manually log onto multiple systems and manually enter data.
Marketplace integrations create a centralised location to manage orders and inventory. Bringing multiple marketplaces together like eBay, Amazon and Onbuy.
Shopping cart integrations can connect platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce and SquareSpace. Automatically sending data from these platforms to your order management, tracking and accounting software.
5. Demand Forecasting:
Fluctuations in purchases occur often and sometimes seemingly at random, especially for ecommerce stores. Demand for your product might increase at certain times in the month or even year, and online sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are becoming increasingly popular in the UK.
Using historical data can help to spot trends from previous years or changes in order levels, however it’s important to remember that a social media post might go viral, creating unprecedented demand for your product.
The different types of demand forecasting:
- Passive demand forecasting
- Active demand forecasting
- Short term projections
- Long term projections
- External macro forecasting
- Internal business forecasting
Unlock the potential of your ecommerce warehouse with Mintsoft
We’ve briefly touched on the importance of using warehouse management software like Mintsoft to improve inventory accuracy, reduce picking and shipping errors, and streamline warehouse operations.
If you need a little more information, read our guide on how to choose a warehouse management system for your ecommerce warehouse, or learn how much a warehouse management system costs.
Book a 1:1 personalised demonstration with us today to see how the Mintsoft warehouse management system can transform your ecommerce warehouse.
This article was originally published on the Mintsoft website: https://www.mintsoft.com/resources/blog/ecommerce-warehousing/
Ian is Head of Supply Chain Products at The Access Group, looking after a host of ERP products, including Mintsoft. He has extensive experience in software products, which he uses to sculpt Mintsoft into the industry’s go-to platform for all its order management and warehouse management needs. Ian is always looking ahead to drive Mintsoft forward for its customers and create a stand-out solution.
