Online store owners are constantly in search of new ways to streamline their operations. With eCommerce growing at a ferocious rate, it becomes more and more necessary to deliver orders to your customers with accuracy and efficiency. Continued loyalty of customers might even come to depend on your ability to fulfill their unique specifications while still ensuring that orders are processed and shipping quickly and efficiently. Order synchronization and automation are the keys to achieving this.
What is the normal process without order synchronization? Well, something like this:
- Your store gets an order. You have the products, so someone from your operation gets the items, pays the supplier for them through their payment gateway, whether that’s Stripe, PayPal, or something else.
- Without order synchronization you must then communicate the SKUs to their supplier via a website, or maybe even just a phone call or simple email. Without automation this is a manual process. You then have to copy and paste all the order details over to the supplier.
- Then the supplier boxes the items, adds the labels, and so on. There are also tracking numbers (UPS, Canada Post, FedEx, etc.) which need to be sent from the shipper back to your store — and then forwarded to the customer. These tracking numbers must also be manually copied over.
- There may be other pieces of information which likewise would have to be copied and pasted, communicated manually to the customer. These can include line items, addresses, notes, or anything else required.
- Finally the supplier gets the order and fulfills it, and you must then send confirmation to your customer.
This is a far cry from the ideal scenario, where your store receives customer order electronically in a clean and consistent format, which is then automatically translated into a sales order, which is then communicated to the supplier in the exact format they require, fulfilled, and the confirmation automatically received by you in a form that can be instantly transmitted back to the customer. The advantages of this process over the old one should be self-evident: your team can stay focused on doing what they do best – creating excellent products and, marketing them and making sure your customers remain satisfied. Better still, automating your order synchronization process decreases human error so you don’t have to worry about your store’s reputation being trashed at Amazon, Ebay, or some other crucial supplier.
Until recently this scenario has not been possible, but now it is. We can reduce your cost per transaction, shorten your dispatch time, and virtually eliminate the manual steps of the whole order fulfilment process. And we can automate this entire process for you, without you having to learn to use any new tools, or wade through any technical mumbo jumbo!
With order synchronization our system will automatically:
- Map your store’s shipping methods to your supplier’s shipping method — since in the “real” world, those don’t always match
- Synchronize the tracking data. Once the order is fulfilled by the supplier, we retrieve the tracking numbers and send them back to the store.
- Notify your customer that their order has shipped, as well as transmit the tracking numbers.
Does that sound simple? That’s because it is! Sometimes you want to keep your order process simple, and keep the details to a minimum, but then when you go to your supplier they might have 5-10 shipping methods! We can help you pick the shipping and routing methods that will best streamline your process while still maximizing satisfaction to your shoppers. If yours is not a big store, that’s not a problem. Our solution works for all sizes of stores from a mom-and-pop style startup to a entire online marketplace. Whatever the size of your operation, Data Here-to-There’s Order Synchronization will virtually eliminate your manual labour and potential for human error.
