The ecommerce fulfillment trends you should keep an eye on in 2022

There’s no shortage of blog posts out there that purport to tell you the hot new trends for ecommerce fulfillment in 2022. When it comes to the topic of ecommerce fulfillment trends 2022 lists could be written, and each and every one of them would be different. We want to put forward a different theory: the idea that the hot new trend in the ecommerce and fulfillment industry is to minimize as much frustration, inconvenience, and hassle for your customers as absolutely humanly possible.

This means that it’s actually quite simple to put yourself head and shoulders above the competition. Your first tactic should be to put the customer first and predict which issues they’re likely to experience so you can head them off at the pass before they become any sort of issue. Read on to discover some of the aspects of ecommerce that are troubling customers of the modern day, and what you can do to alleviate these difficulties for your shoppers.

Inventory inaccuracies

Have you ever heard of ghost inventory? We’re not talking about the kinds of ghosts you might meet on Halloween. Ghost or phantom inventory refers to the event where products are shown to be available by your point of sale system, but aren’t actually available in your store. This is especially problematic in e-commerce, where a merchant may offer a product through multiple selling channels, and therefore oversell product without realizing. The more products and SKUs representing them that you have, the harder it is to identify and prevent phantom inventory from causing mischief in your operations. It’s important to have a robust inventory-management system for this exact reason, to prevent complications and miscalculations relating to intake delays, glitches, or shrink.

Theft

The jury is in and the numbers are solid: porch piracy is an epidemic of epic proportions. In the United States, 1.7 million packages go lost every single day. 90,000 in New York City alone. Yearly losses due to package theft climb to 25 million. This is not some petty cash. And in a business environment where the seller is considered responsible up until the moment the customer has their chosen items in hand, in the event that one of your products ends up going missing, you’ll be expected to foot the bill for a new one.

Manual entry

Many companies are unfortunately still stuck in the 20th century where clipboards and manually copying down product numbers and SKUs was the order of the day. Thankfully, we live in the future now, and such endeavors are no longer necessary. Even still, more corporations than you would expect have yet to realize this fact. Manual intake and changes are not only slower than the alternative, but introduce an element of human error into the equation which can translate into costly mistakes and slip-ups. Why even take the chance? Instead, make use of barcodes, scanners, and software that automatically sends necessary orders to the warehouse.

Team miscommunication

All the technology and smooth operation in the world won’t help if you and your team aren’t speaking the same language at the end of the day. What do we mean by this? Well, your employees aren’t mind readers. You may think you’re being perfectly clear, but if there are repeated mistakes or things are consistently done incorrectly, consider that you might not be communicating quite as clearly as you think you are. Implementing regular team meetings, a centralized messaging system, and an extremely clear order of operations when it comes to your key processes can go a long way towards reducing the sorts of misunderstandings that begin to pile up in a million little ways, grinding your operations to a screeching halt.

A lack of integration

Seamless integrations and connections are one of the best technological tools we as modern fulfillment experts have at our disposal. In this day and age, there’s simply no reason to manually port everything back and forth, painstakingly copying and pasting different data values. Having one main interface where you can manage everything from generating shipping labels to ordering new product to be manufactured to adjusting your distribution across your warehouse network goes a long way towards streamlining your operations and ensuring everything runs as smoothly as humanly possible.

In conclusion

By following these simple tips, you can keep inconveniences to a minimum and leave yourself free to explore other direct to consumer trends that will make a long-lasting difference to customer satisfaction. P2Pseller is happy to help you get there. We offer a number of key software integrations to make sure that you’re able to have real-time updates as to the location of every single order, which can be conveniently checked through either the website or mobile app. No matter whether you’re at the office, on the bus, or sitting on the couch, you always have the option of tracking each and every parcel you send out. Register a free account with us today in order to browse all our offerings and see how we can help you scale infrastructure, sell more, and grow your business. All with zero stress and zero phone calls.