E-Commerce Fulfillment Automation

Enhance your competitive advantage and meet customer demand, quickly

Customers today expect companies to provide a fast and seamless eCommerce shopping experience. Providing a quick turnaround time, fast shipping, and accurate order fulfillment are critical to meeting these expectations. Luckily, eCommerce fulfillment automation makes that possible.

Here’s how e-Commerce fulfillment automation helps:

Accuracy

Eliminate inventory errors with automated sorting, picking, packing, and retrieving.

Speed

Shorten eCommerce turnaround times by improving the efficiency of order fulfillment.

Scale

Flexibly adapt your warehouse productivity to meet fluctuating customer demands.

Automating the e-Commerce Fulfillment Workflow

Graphic of E-commerce fulfillment automation lifecycle

Automating your eCommerce fulfillment workflow ensures that your customers never have to deal with delays in turnaround time, inaccurate orders, or slow shipping from manual fulfillment methods. That’s because our automation solutions are with you every step of the way.

Receiving Inventory Shipments

With several sortation automation solutions, sorting inventory can be customized to the exact needs of your warehouse. For instance, you can choose from the following automated sortation solutions:

AutoStore, our Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS), helps you save up to 80% of your available floor space with 4X the storage capacity. With AutoStore, your eCommerce inventory is stored in bins designed to stack together in columns controlled by robots. These robots are small carts with wheels that glide across a compact aluminum grid. And the configuration of this system can be customized to any facility layout to maximize inventory storage.

AutoStore also helps improve the efficiency of your eCommerce order processing to ensure that your supply chain is ready to scale with your customers’ demands. AutoStore robots are designed with an elevator-type mechanism that retrieves the correct bins for an order, and transports these bins to a port where the person at the port is presented with each bin and told precisely which items to take out.

With full order consolidation at each port, eCommerce orders are ready for shipping in faster timeframes, with fewer inventory errors. This means that your customers can receive their orders in the turnaround times they expect, offering a positive overall shopping experience.

If customers aren’t satisfied with a product, you can automatically process and sort the return or exchanges. Likewise, the correct bins for storage can be transported to the port automatically for the item to be exchanged or stored properly in the warehouse. This process can be customized to reflect your unique business policies. 

Warehouse worker standing at AutoStore station with box

eCommerce Industry Challenges

While the eCommerce industry has lots of benefits, there are also significant challenges that threaten to hold companies back. Notably, the eCommerce industry is driven by customer demand via technology. Likewise, in order to be successful, supply chain management and fulfillment must match the technological innovations fueling this demand. Manual order fulfillment is simply not able to match online demand, resulting in the following challenges: 

  • Expedited turnaround time and delivery requests 
  • Inventory sorting, picking, packing, and retrieving issues
  • Varying and seasonal customer demand
  • A high volume of product SKUs
  • High competition in the eCommerce marketplace
These challenges must be thoughtfully addressed for companies to succeed in the eCommerce industry. 
Man and woman thinking while looking at a lap top.

eCommerce Fulfillment Considerations

When evaluating eCommerce fulfillment solutions, it’s important to consider the following aspects: 

  • Pain points in your current customer experience 
  • The size of your inventory and potential new product development
  • Warehouse storage needs
  • Shipping locations
  • Software capabilities
  • Future growth and scalability

Automated eCommerce Fulfillment Solutions

eCommerce Fulfillment Automation FAQs

In the eCommerce industry, fulfillment is the process of sorting, storing, retrieving, packing, and shipping orders, as well as managing product returns or exchanges.

eCommerce fulfillment automation is a new method of fulfillment that uses technology to sort products, store inventory, retrieve items, and pack and ship eCommerce orders. Automating the time-consuming fulfillment workflow reduces inventory errors, saves time, and improves turnaround times.

eCommerce Order Fulfillment is automated with the help of sortation equipment and an Automated Storage and Retrieval Solution such as AutoStore. Together, these solutions automate every step of the fulfillment process and streamline eCommerce operations.

eCommerce is a notoriously difficult and competitive industry, and automation is important because it makes it possible for companies to overcome these challenges. With improved order accuracy, eCommerce turnaround times, and scalability, companies are empowered to provide a positive customer experience and establish a competitive advantage.

Secure Your Competitive Edge with AutoStore

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