How iPaaS drives seamless order fulfillment journeys

With the increasing familiarity of digital users, the need to make available the products online have become mandatory. The game-changer, though, comes with the quality of service rendered to those who place the order. And more importantly, is it a hassle-free and seamless experience? Today, thousands of orders are processed through e-commerce stores with the mere click of a button. There are critical conversations around the process of what happens after the order is purchased.

Order fulfillment is possibly the most crucial customer touch-point. It can result in customers returning to you, and more importantly, it can encourage them to recommend your products and services.

However, the e-commerce industry faces multiple challenges, particularly after a sale has been made. They include:

Executing bulk orders
Taking incorrect orders
Managing out-of-stock inventory
identifying and tracking last-mile delivery
Ensuring safety of orders
Addressing customers in real-time
Managing refunds or replacements

There’s no denying that the global e-commerce business is going to skyrocket further.

According to Shopify, “By 2021, the estimated B2C eCommerce sales would be around $4.9 trillion”

Thus, the stakes are high for e-commerce businesses not just to put their best foot forward but to also ensure seamless order fulfillment in a cost-effective manner.

As a recent market study by Baymard has shown, “One could lose 61% of potential customers for factors such as the shipping costs being too high.”

Added to that, customer expectations are soaring too. Today, free delivery and exemplary customer service are no longer luxuries. They are value-adds that customers are actively seeking.

One of the biggest challenges faced by the e-commerce industry is the lack of integration in complicated retail systems, in which legacy and modern applications have to co-exist with each other. From process disruptions and repetitive workflows to inaccurate data collection, a wealth of order-related insights tends to slip through the cracks. To manage this delicate balance, iPaaS envisions the centralization of frontend and backend retail applications to create best practices and roll out an integrated order fulfillment experience.

iPaaS solutions, basically, enable multiple systems to talk to each other. What this ensures is a smooth data flow across the enterprise, with minimal organization-level changes. With iPaaS, one can change the way the organization works by affecting all tasks that directly and indirectly related to order fulfillment.

For starters, your agents can say goodbye to manual entries. When the customer places an order, the iPaaS platform has the ability to instantly capture, aggregate and process the order data before sharing it across your applications and service architectures. Let’s look at some of the other critical differentiators of iPaaS in powering order fulfillment journeys – internally and externally.

4 ways that iPaaS enables seamless order fulfillment

Real-Time Updates

At any given point, all activities related to the order fulfillment process are tracked. By proactively monitoring the status, iPaaS helps you to anticipate the risks rather than to identify the order fulfillment-related problems after they occur.

Live order tracking – ensure smooth last-mile delivery, ensuring proper order delivery
Payment tracking – stay on top of the status of payments and make sure the returns are processed hassle-free
Accounts – manage charges, taxes, and accounting tasks across the process chain in your organization

Streamlined Inventory Management

Real-time stock management is made possible through iPaaS, with just-in-time inventory to help in reducing storage costs. In case the organization has multiple suppliers, they can also monitor their stocks. This can especially work wonders in case there are replacements, returns or queries related to the condition of the product.

Unified Order Management

The iPaaS integration platform automates the flow of data between your systems. All points of interaction, right from when the order is placed, to packing through delivering, can be captured. It gives a wealth of information about the process, the time taken to execute a task, the assigned agent, etc. The one dashboard view also gives you a 360-degree picture of what is happening in the order fulfillment journey, which equips you to make decisions faster and more accurately.

Seamless Customer Service

Not only can queries about orders be managed more efficiently, but iPaaS also makes it easier to enable round-the-clock service. Furthermore, your agents can access historical data of customers, which puts them in a position to know and understand the person they are interacting with. Hence, customers do not have to repeat information or receive an order fulfilment experience that is nothing short of seamless.

Aspire Systems is one of the few Dell Boomi global certified system integrators. We help clients to get the most out of their Boomi iPaaS platform by providing industry-leading integration practices to build a connected business and drive digital transformation. If you would like to know about how we can smoothen your order fulfillment processes, please email us at [email protected].