The year’s end is a wonderful time for e-commerce owners: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year…People are full of enthusiasm for shopping in holiday seasons. But it’s stressful as well, the flood of orders is coming, it’s better to make sure that you are well prepared. More than that, holiday season sale is a good opportunity to expand business, a satisfying shopping experience during Black Friday and Cyber Monday will bring the consumer back to your store in the coming year. Here are some fulfillment tips to improve your consumer satisfaction and streamline the order fulfillment process during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Provide more options for consumers.
Holiday season is the widely known global shipping rush hour, some consumers will be happy to pay for the faster shipping, while the others don’t mind to wait longer to save money, just give them the options. Providing different options for consumers with different needs can improve the customer satisfaction and ease off the fulfillment pressure. For example, use near-consumer fulfillment and near-source fulfillment at the same time, provide 80% discount or free shipping for the consumers who don’t mind to wait longer. If an e-commerce business owner who sources products from China and sells to domestic consumers, he or she can keep a small amount of inventory at hand before the holiday season sale, and outsource the fulfillment to Chinese order fulfillment company like ChinaDivision. The products sent from the suppliers can arrive ChinaDivision warehouse within 3 days, then ChinaDivision will do the inspection, inventory management, packaging and ship the products directly to the buyers according to the e-commerce business owners’ needs.
Presell some of the products.
Another way to reduce the fulfillment pressure is to start your holiday sale early. Don’t make all the target consumers flock to your website and place orders in a short time, presell some of your products. According to the research, 40% of customers begin researching and doing their holiday shopping as early as October. Marking some of your products as Black Friday/Cyber Monday presale a month earlier not only grabs these consumers, but also avoids the logistic peak season.
Communicate with the suppliers.
Make sure your suppliers are ready for your holiday sale as well. It’s better to give them a estimated order amount during the whole holiday season, so that they can manufacture/order the products in advance. Like I mentioned in another article 3 Key Points to Consider When Sourcing from China, you have to consider the language barrier and culture difference during the communication. In this condition, it’s a good idea to leave the hassles to ChinaDivision. As a dedicated order fulfillment service provider and a China local company, ChinaDivision is not only good at communicating with Chinese suppliers, but also more professional in the inventory management, value-added services and global shipping area.
Make the shipping solution flexible.
Being flexible is very important during holiday season. Since global shipping refers to long distance transport and a number of links, the probability of problem occurrence is relatively higher. When a shipping route has problems (shipping delay, high loss&damage rate, etc), it’s essential to change to another one quickly. Being the long-term partner of multiple world-leading express carriers and an order fulfillment company with years of global shipping experiences, ChinaDivision provides flexible shipping solutions for e-commerce business owners, which helps them to success in holiday season.
Automate the fulfillment.
Automated fulfillment not only saves time but also avoids errors in the manual data transmission. ChinaDivision has developed fulfillment software for e-commerce business owners who use Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, eBay, OpenCart and Magento. By installing the fulfillment software, e-commerce business owners can one-click sync orders, inventory and tracking numbers between their website and ChinaDivision order fulfillment system, which saves the valuable time in the holiday sale.