Turning Your E-Commerce Business into Reality
You've turned your long-planned e-commerce business into reality, and now you have a company with customers, sales, and profit goals. Everything looks good so far, but if you fail to deliver the products purchased from your website to your customers accurately and on time, your decline will be swift and severe!
E-commerce offers numerous attractions, including the flexibility not found in physical stores, reaching more customers quickly and cost-effectively, various incentives, and more. However, one of the most common challenges that every e-commerce business must address to succeed is logistics.
Storage
The first step in logistics is storage, which requires careful planning and constant supervision. In complex operations like e-commerce, it's important to establish and maintain methods for warehouse organization and entry and exit processes. Products with expiration dates should be stored and sold according to the FIFO (first in, first out) principle. Additionally, the warehouse location should be easily accessible to the shipping companies you work with. If your warehouse is difficult to reach or far away, issues with shipping companies and consequently inconveniencing your customers are inevitable.
Distribution
For e-commerce companies that want to deliver products to consumers through their own distribution network, managing this network meticulously is crucial for ensuring that products reach customers accurately and on time. The number of staff, branch locations, and other factors should be carefully planned and executed based on your company's structure. Pay attention to how your staff represents your company and their communication style and competence with customers.
Action Plan
When planning the logistics aspect of your e-commerce operations, having an action plan for potential challenges is essential. These plans provide the flexibility to continue operations without harming your company's profitability when difficulties arise. For example, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, e-commerce companies that had planned well experienced rapid growth and diversified their business. In contrast, companies lacking action plans, or only managing to get by, faced obvious consequences. Therefore, always keep in mind that even the most labor-intensive e-commerce companies can be doomed to failure due to a lack of action planning.
The pandemic highlighted cases where e-commerce sites were delayed in meeting consumer needs. Sometimes, consumers struggled for days or even weeks to receive their purchased products. Those with sufficient resources restructured their logistics and shipping networks, achieving success and standing out from competitors by reaching a broader audience.
Franchises
You might be selling products from different companies under a franchise model or engaging in dropshipping (stockless e-commerce), a popular recent business model. In both cases, the stock count of the products offered will not exceed a certain number, or you might not deal with logistics at all. In models with no logistics involvement, you are more likely to face issues due to dependencies. To prevent this, you should either correctly design the supply process or utilize support from various automation solutions.
Each step of logistics operations involves different dynamics and requires attention. We want to mention a solution that can help with stock control, regular deduction of sales from stocks, warehouse inventory, and product delivery to consumers.
Comwize offers an integrated solution that provides the software support and services needed by e-commerce companies for their logistics operations. We recommend reviewing Comwize’s services for warehouse management, stock tracking and management, order management, shipping integration, and tracking.
