Many e-commerce businesses point the finger at carriers for late deliveries. The fact is, the delays often occur long before a shipment arrives at any given dock. Picking mistakes, manual entries, chaotic warehouse configurations, and siloed systems tack on hours, if not days, to the entire fulfillment process. If you want to remedy slow shipping, start by fixing what’s going on inside your four walls first.
Audit Your Fulfillment Workflow Before Changing Anything
The place to start is by making sure your click-to-ship time and your transit time aren’t getting mixed up. These are two different problems, and if you blur them together, you’re wasting your energy. Click-to-ship is the window between a customer hitting ‘submit’ on their cart and the carrier scanning the package. Transit time is everything after that.
If click-to-ship is hovering at 24 to 48 hours when you thought you were hitting the same-day or next-day sweet spot, that’s an internal problem. A slower transit time than you based your decision making on could indicate a carrier problem or poor routing decisions on your part. Count ’em, see which one is causing you grief, and they become your focal point.
Walk your order flow from when an order comes in, when the label is printed, when it’s packed, and when it’s out the door. Write yourself a map of every single chokepoint and every single pass-off.
Rethink Your Warehouse Layout
Optimizing slotting may sound complex, but in theory, it’s simple – place your fastest-moving products nearest to your packing stations. If your top 20% of SKUs by volume are sending pickers to the far reaches of your warehouse, you’re effectively paying for that distance in time and wear every day.
Extract your velocity data (units sold per SKU in the last 90 days) then adjust storage positions. High-velocity items reside in the forward zone closest to packing and dispatch. Slower movers and seasonal items are located in the shelves at the back. This can drastically reduce picker travel time without having to hire new staff.
Combine this with better picking methodology. Most new facilities begin with wave picking (one order picked by one picker). Batch picking increases efficiency by having one picker collect product for multiple orders in a single trip. This is achieved by grouping orders together based on the location of the products they require. Zone picking even further stratifies this process by assigning individual pickers to a single zone in the warehouse. Pickers only ever pick for their section and follow a similar process to an assembly line. Both options lead to more picks per hour and fewer overall steps taken.
Use An FMS To Automate Carrier Selection
Rate shopping manually – checking two or three carrier portals every time you need to book a shipment – doesn’t scale. It’s slow, inconsistent, and relies on whoever is on shift making a good decision. A good FMS solves this by automatically comparing carrier rates, transit times, and performance data at the moment of dispatch, routing each shipment through the best available option based on your defined criteria.
That automation removes the manual lookup, standardizes carrier selection across your team, and keeps dispatch moving at volume without adding labor. It also lets you plug into multiple carriers from the one system, so as you grow, your carrier network can grow with you without adding complexity.
Close The Gaps Between Your Software Systems
Lack of communication between different software systems is often the culprit behind mistakes in order processing. For instance, if your sales platform does not communicate directly with your warehouse or shipping software, orders must be entered manually. This opens the door to mistakes in addresses, incorrect product codes, and delays in processing hundreds of orders each day.
The integration between your online store and your inventory management system is the one that matters most. In the event of an order on your platform, your inventory management system should immediately update the available stock, not wait for batch synchronization every couple of hours. The lag in updating stock often causes overselling or stockouts.
If your warehouse management system fetches real-time order data from the same system, your staff never has to rely on outdated pick lists. Your shipping software should receive order information directly instead of waiting for someone to re-enter all the details.
Reportedly, 71% of online shoppers expect their orders to be delivered within 3 to 5 days, and approximately 33% will cancel an order if they are unaware of the delivery time or the proposed shipment time is too long (Pitney Bowes). There is increasingly little room for delays caused by internal bottlenecks.
Build A Returns Process That Keeps Inventory Moving
Reverse logistics is often considered a secondary process. However, a slow returns process has a direct impact on the available stock. If returned items accumulate without inspection in a receiving zone, that inventory dies. It can’t be resold, and it’s using up space.
A standardized returns protocol should take three things in mind: A quick inspection step to determine the grade of item condition. As clear of a decision path as possible for restocking, refurbishing or disposing. And immediate system updating on items passing inspection and returning to available inventory. The tighter you keep this process, the quicker that returned stock returns to your sellable pool instead of sitting in limbo for weeks.
SKU Rationalization As A Maintenance Habit
Ecommerce product catalogs usually grow at a rate faster than they shrink. And, typically, many products are added season after season and year after year without any review or analysis as to whether they should be there. Regularly conducting SKU rationalization – auditing the performance of every product and eliminating the nonperformers – will help ensure your warehouse doesn’t fall into chaos. The fewer SKUs, the easier the slotting. The easier the slotting, the fewer the exceptions in the pick path. The simpler the pick path, the more efficient your pickers. And, of course, it will also help simplify your inventory picture.
This isn’t a one-and-done effort. Do this quarterly. Pull your last 90 days of sales data and identify anything that hasn’t sold. Then be ruthless. If it hasn’t sold in the last 90 days but you’re convinced it’s going to, great. Keep it in the selection. If it hasn’t sold but you’re only keeping it around because “maybe” it will… time to convert that thing to cash (however you can) and get it off your floor.
Faster shipping isn’t mainly a carrier problem. It’s a workflow, layout, and software problem – and those are all within your control to fix.