TABLE OF CONTENTS Hopefully, the reader remembers from the previous chapter that customer service is the best marketing tool at your disposal. Logistics and fulfillment is an arm of customer service. Thus to guarantee the best customer service, don t separate your warehouse operations from your order management or from your customer service. This is true no matter what the size of the e-commerce operation.
A small entrepreneurial startup may have little experience with shipping products. A click-and-mortar has an infrastructure in place that is, in all probability, geared toward shipping palettes or cases to distributors or stores not quantities of ones and twos. Websites have customers with high expectations, they want their products fast, and they may expect shipment of different products to different addresses, and ask for instant credit for returns.
To be a successful e-commerce business you must be able to process customer orders efficiently and correctly and to deliver the product as promised. This can get messy unless you have the right tools to help you; but many times the e-commerce solution you use to power your site won t provide you with all of the tools needed. To help you handle back-office order processing and fulfillment chores you need tools that can help you keep track of pricing (including special sales), sales tax, shipping costs, items shipped, split orders, back orders, returned orders, drop-shipped orders, customer inquiries, and more.
There are a few shopping cart programs that provide most,...
