“Tis the Season” and if you are one of those businesses that
experiences extremely high order volume during the holidays you may be looking for
that light at the end of the tunnel following Christmas. Unfortunately, that light may be a
train!
The Black Friday statistic for 2017 were pretty
interesting. Foot traffic in retail
stores stayed pretty steady, dropping at most by 1-2% while on-line shopping
increased by over 16% according to CNN Money.
Some of the big winners between Black Friday and Cyber Monday were
Amazon, Walmart and Target – all retailers that have embraced the on-line,
ecommerce, drop shipping business model.
There was also a statistic reported that Amazon managed over 700 ORDERS
PER SECOND. WOW!
The on-line, ecommerce world with its inherent need to drop
ship directly to consumers has been experiencing double digit growth
year-over-year for a while now – it’s apparently unstoppable. So, the question is, how many seconds does
it take you, as a supplier, to process a drop ship order? It’s pretty clear that there are going to be
more and more each year. Are you going
to be able to keep up?
To compound matters, expectations are getting higher and
higher regarding supplier performance.
If a consumer orders something at 3:00am Saturday morning,
they want to see an acknowledgement, tracking number and expected delivery date
very quickly. They also expect to
receive that order in a few days at most.
Marketplaces want their suppliers to drop ship from their
own warehouse rather than one of their fulfillment centers, provide
acknowledgement, tracking number, ship it in a maximum of one to three days,
provide accurate invoicing and provide them with accurate item inventory
updates on a frequent basis.
Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of good tools to automate
this and make it feasible to really fill all of the orders you possibly can
without adding a bunch of seasonal staff.
Much of what is available is cumbersome, requiring you to cobble
disparate technologies together to ease some of that labor intensity. This usually includes things like an
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP system), a method to translate, send and
receive data to / from the marketplace, software to automate management of that
data and software to communicate with shipping carriers – all of which usually
still requires some level of dedicated staff and time to ensure everything goes
smoothly.
This dramatic supplier need led to the creation of OPAL (www.meetopal.com), the first and only smart
platform that combines all of the needed capabilities into one place for drop
shipping. It automates and enhances your
ERP order processing capability, requires no human intervention, works 365x24,
is fully compliant with all marketplace requirements, provides document data
translation and transmission without errors at zero cost, and works with your
3PL or warehouse to provide all labels and information needed to pick, pack,
ship and track an order.
And, best of all, it will process those drop ship orders in
less than 8 seconds. How many seconds
and how many people do you currently need?