Top Marketplace Order Fulfillment Practices

Best Marketplace Order Fulfillment Practices & Workflows

A key aspect for many marketplaces is order fulfillment which commonly occurs via drop ship, possibly from multiple locations as well. Even if it's just from a single location you're going to be providing different shipping options from, that is a logistical overhead that you want to consider. Weigh the different pros and cons for how to configure the user interface and the actual implementation of the fulfillment side of the marketplace. There are a lot of key pieces in regard to fulfillment; follow along with us as we take a deep dive into the many features that make a good marketplace order fulfillment workflow.

Consumer Fulfillment Needs Recognition

If you have multiple locations it's helpful to be able to incorporate those different locations and the associated shipping costs. So, if you're shipping or fulfilling from a warehouse, from a vendor that's in a different country or in a different part of the country, those lead times and shipping costs can be much higher and will need to be accurately accounted for.

Presenting all that information dynamically and allowing the user to control the different options allows them to find the right time/cost balance for them. You can further empower your users with a scenario configurator where they can map out all the possibilities for how their order will be fulfilled:

• Where will the order be shipped from?
• How many locations will the order be shipping from?
• Where will the order be fulfilled?
• Are there going to be multiple fulfillment locations?

You can get more granular with your configurator with partial fulfillments on orders or different shipping options from different locations, etc. Having this level of control and fidelity to be able to present different information going on behind the scenes is key within certain marketplaces.

Initial Fulillment Feature Needs

We don't typically recommend starting from scratch with something that's extremely sophisticated unless you have validated that the market can support it and that there is actual value to the user. However, those are the types of things that make a competitive marketplace: the ability to present accurate, easy to interact with data for the user. Another key feature with fulfillment is to have a persistent messaging system for the end user. It’s beneficial to provide confirmation of the order that can direct the user to their dashboard where information about their order is available. Upon confirmation, or any of the other stages in fulfillment, you can automate the sending of transactional emails that correspond with the different stages of a purchase: once the order has actually been processed, received, etc. Transactional emails are really key to reduce customer service needs and improve customer satisfaction because the customer doesn't want to have to call in. They want the information to intuitively be there.

Clarity Marketplace Fulfillment Experts

Ultimately, we recommend that you take a look at some of the detailed pages throughout our site where we've elaborated on these different topics. We always welcome the potential to collaborate with you on a project or just provide high level details on something that you'd like to review to see if there might be a fit. In addition, we've provided the resources and guides below that we strongly recommend you keep in mind if you are working on a marketplace project. We’d love to hear from you down the road as you continue your evaluation process.