You’ll remember that in the first part of this blog series, we told you about the land mines that could be buried in the first two phases of your products’ fulfillment journey: receiving and inventory management. If your fulfillment provider has a disorganized receiving process or an inefficient inventory management system, the end result could be customers that don’t get their deliveries on time (or at all), and/or rising costs that you have to pay due to mistakes made by your fulfillment team.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that your products have made it safely through those two phases, and it’s time to examine the last two. Pick and pack fulfillment and shipping take place after a customer places an order, and there are plenty of land mines that can be lurking there.
3. Pick and Pack Fulfillment
How does your customer actually place an order for the items that you offer them? If it’s through a cheaply made, unreliable website that raises questions about data security, your customers might not be willing to use it. Today’s shoppers and B2B customers are very wary of the potential negative fallout of entering sensitive information on a website that isn’t secure, so it’s important that your online storefront be trustworthy and easy to use.
Once the order arrives at your fulfillment provider’s facility, it’s time for team members to pick the right items and pack them in preparation for shipping. The obvious land mine here is inaccuracy. If the wrong items are put in the box, there’s a long and complicated process of reporting the error, deciding what to do about it, and processing a return/refund, all while attempting to preserve or perhaps regain the customer’s trust.
Some clients’ products are obviously more prone to this issue than others. A client who ships many different slight variations on a single product, for instance, needs a fulfillment team who is committed to closely examining each item, comparing serial numbers, and conducting quality checks to make sure that everything lines up as it should.
Spectra’s Solution
Spectra offers a powerful online storefont to clients, which gives customers a great experience and protects their payment and other types of data. The online storefront is white labeled, so each client can give their customers, whether B2C or B2B, a fully branded experience. Ask us about our customization options; with our storefronts, it’s possible to offer curated lists of products to different customers in order to make the ordering experience even more streamlined and intuitive.
When it comes to pick and pack fulfillment, our team has a healthy respect for the land mines that are possible even in the most meticulously organized process. All it takes is one distracted worker, one misplaced item, or one box in the wrong spot on the shelf in order to send an incorrect shipment to the customer. To mitigate these risks, we follow an internal process that we’ve refined over the decades to check all of our pick and pack activities. We do everything we can to account for the fact that humans are imperfect, and use digital tools to their best effect to help us get each shipment right.
4. Shipping
One of the biggest potential land mines in the shipping phase is damaged products. A shipment can have the correct complex arrangement of products packed inside it, but if the box is incorrectly packed, items could be damaged when they reach the customer. The result, again, is a returns process that could frustrate the customer and lead to lost business in the future.
Returns and refunds are not always the result of mistakes, however. Giving B2B customers, for instance, the ability to return unused items following a marketing campaign allows your organization to get more value from those materials in the future. A smooth, efficient return process also opens up the opportunity for offering reusable items to customers, such as large format signs and banners.
The last land mine to consider in this area is more of a lost opportunity. If you offer great marketing materials for your B2B customers to use, but it’s too difficult for them to return unused or reusable items after the campaign is over, then not only has your customer paid for items that they won’t need in the future, but your organization has to pay to reorder items that could have been placed back in inventory.
Spectra’s Solution
The land mine of damaged product is one that Spectra’s team is highly qualified to avoid. Along with our pick and pack skills, we know what to look for with potentially fragile items, and we keep a variety of packing materials in stock that we can use to protect them. This is another instance in which our personal experience in the fulfillment industry is a valuable asset to our clients, as we use our real-life experience and knowledge of the shipping process to give their items adequate protection on their journey.
Spectra also has a versatile, efficient reverse logistics system. We regularly work with franchisors and corporations with hundreds of retail partners around the country, setting up logistics programs by which they can provide marketing materials and supplies, then have unused and reusable items returned to our facility through a very convenient, efficient process. Our team takes care of inspecting these materials, making sure they are in good condition, and placing them back in inventory for the next order.
Avoid the Fulfillment Land Mines
At Spectra, we have heard many sad stories about just how things can go wrong in the fulfillment journey. Most of those stories could have been avoided if the fulfillment provider responsible for the process had been more experienced, more organized, and more committed to giving the client the customized set of services that best fit their products and customers. That’s where Spectra shines, with more than two decades of experience and a highly organized, versatile fulfillment facility offering reliable pick and pack fulfillment services. Get in touch with us today to transform your fulfillment process.
