E-commerce warehouses are a place to keep your inventory, but in reality, it’s more than that. In addition to receiving shipments from suppliers, holding inventory, and sending products to customers, an eCommerce warehouse plays a vital role in your operations too. Furthermore, it helps to ensure that the products are kept in a safe and secure environment, and also involves tracking their availability as well as tracking their movement.
Basically, you can keep your customers happy through good ecommerce warehouse management. In order to keep up with the rising demands of the eCommerce industry, warehouse setup needs to be more flexible than ever before. Setting up an eCommerce warehouse is easy if you follow these steps:
1. Planning the Layout
A proper layout plan ensures you’re maximizing your warehouse storage space. Layout designs serve primarily as visual representations of warehouses, including all of their various locations and functions. It provides a comprehensive overview of the entire warehouse, allowing you to determine the optimal supply chain strategies quickly.
Your inventory will be stored here along with your packing and shipping materials. Hence, you should plan the layout of the facility in such a way that it is easy for personnel to navigate between sections of the facility and locate and pick items without having to move other items. Consequently, your productivity will be enhanced and orders will be fulfilled more quickly.
2. Business Plan
It is imperative that you consider your business plan and the financial plan before setting up an ecommerce warehouse to assess your financial situation. This is because Ecommerce warehouses could be outsourced to a 3PL provider or set up in-house. So, you should conduct a feasibility study on the investment and the impact it will have on the overall return on investment of your business.
3. Interior Setup and Civil Work in the Warehouse :
In a warehouse, goods and materials are kept in a covered enclosure that provides protection from the natural elements. So, warehouses have to be designed in a way that the material to be stored, the handling equipment involved with that material, the receiving and logistics operations, as well as the loading bays, can be accommodated, along with the operating personnel’s needs. All of this must be planned well in advance depending on the state of the infrastructure, allowing operation to commence as soon as possible.
4. SOPs & Systems
Integration enables business systems to share data seamlessly, which can lead to greater efficiency, cost reduction, and error reduction. IT systems, such as a web-based warehouse management system (WMS) or an outsourced warehouse management system (OMS) are essential and must be integrated with customer service software. An effective WMS provides automated pick paths for a warehouse rather than requiring manual entry.
Furthermore, it is necessary to define SOPs for order fulfillment for the warehouse and customer service team in order for both teams to work in a systematic manner toward order fulfillment and order return management. Automating these processes is a definite way to increase efficiency.
5. Last-Mile Delivery Partners
Consumers have become increasingly likely to purchase products online, especially in recent years. It is the expectation of modern consumers that they will receive fast and cheap delivery, or, better yet, free delivery. In order to complete the delivery process on time, LMD partners and courier partners would need to be onboarded. There must be planning for both first-mile and mid-mile deliveries, along with last-mile deliveries.
During first and middle-mile deliveries, goods are often palletized or packaged in batches, whereas last-mile deliveries involve labeling and transporting individual items to the final destination. The last mile delivery is the final branch of an e-commerce supply chain that connects a brand with a consumer or buyer through the physical delivery of the product through the e-commerce supply chain which needs to be planned very carefully to deliver the product to end customers quickly.
About YRC Warehouse Consultants
The excitement and stress of running an online business can make it easy to overlook the importance of ecommerce warehousing. Warehouse is an important piece of the ecommerce puzzle that can make a significant contribution to your bottom line.
If you want to understand more about how to set up a warehouse for your ecommerce business, then contact Your Retail Coach today. At YRC, we provide a variety of warehouse consulting services to help clients run their ecommerce businesses successfully. A team of experienced warehouse consultants works closely with you to help you with warehouse setup and planning.