What is WooCommerce Order Fulfillment and How to Optimize it

As most online sellers know, making your eCommerce platform as good as it can be is a long, complex, and ongoing process. You’ll only get the most out of this tool once you’ve optimized every aspect of the portal.

Most sellers make the mistake of focusing only on the steps before a purchase, ignoring what comes after.

Of course, the process leading up to the sale is crucial, but you also need to make sure that order management is optimized so that your WooCommerce shop runs smoothly and there are no complications.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at exactly what order fulfillment is, why it’s so important for your site, and we’ll also find some useful WooCommerce tools to improve this aspect of your WooCommerce store.

Let’s start with a definition.

What is Order Fulfillment on WooCommerce?

Order fulfillment refers to the process of managing and shipping products purchased by customers. It includes the period from payment to delivery and encompasses aspects such as:

• Order verification and preparation.
• Product preparation, address retrieval, and packaging.
• Shipping and delivery tracking, communicating with customers, and ensuring product arrival.

These steps might seem obvious, but there are definitely ways to make them more effective. Just take a few simple precautions, use the right tools, and you’ll be all set.

But why do this? Let’s take a look together!

Why Optimizing the Fulfillment Process is Crucial

It’s easy to see how optimizing the purchasing process is beneficial, but it’s a different story for the fulfillment process. What are the advantages for the seller?

• Customer satisfaction: The period right after a purchase, especially the first one made on your portal, is when customers are most vulnerable. They have the most concerns and second thoughts. So, it’s important to manage customer expectations and keep them informed about the shipping status and make sure the shipping process is quick and smooth. This will result in more satisfied and confident customers, who, therefore will purchase again in the future, and fewer messages and support requests about the status of their order.
• Reduction of human error: The more automated and efficient a process is, the less room there is for human error, such as incorrect shipments or products, forgotten items, and much more. This means lower costs for you and happier customers.
• Scalability: A manual and clumsy process might work when there aren’t too many orders, but as the number increases, it will become essential to automate it, make it error-proof, and avoid potential problems.

And a lot more. So, let’s go over the steps to get your fulfillment working at its best.

Key Steps for Efficient Fulfillment Management

eCommerce fulfillment boils down to two priorities: shipping efficiently and keeping customers informed.

For the first part, you’ll need to move outside of WooCommerce and choose a shipping service that works for your business. You’ll also need to make sure your packaging and shipping process is fast and error-proof. These days, customers have very little patience for deliveries. Services like Amazon deliver the day after you buy something (or sometimes even on the same day).

So, choose a secure service with great reviews and make sure the shipping process starts as soon as possible after payment is processed.

Once you’ve got shipping covered, it’s time to start communicating with your customers. The best way to avoid potential problems, refund requests, angry emails, and much more is to anticipate concerns and answer questions before they’re even asked.

How? For example, you can allow order tracking directly on your store’s “My Account” page. This way, customers can see where their product is at any time and feel reassured, reducing the number of communications and the time you have to spend answering their questions.

It’d be great if you could find a tool that automatically gives you the supplier’s tracking number, because that’d make things even easier. It’s also important to keep customers informed about the status of their order, showing them how it’s going from purchase to delivery.

Make sure your inventory management is always up to date. Selling items you no longer have in stock can quickly lead to disappointed customers and damage the reputation of your WooCommerce business.

How to Speed up Fulfillment with YITH Plugins

On top of the shipping tips we’ve gone over, if you’ve set up your WooCommerce store, you can use some plugins to make your portal more efficient with just a few clicks. YITH is one of the many developers of WooCommerce plugins, and it stands out because of its lineup of dozens of plugins, all of which are perfectly compatible with each other.

Today, we’re going to take a look at two of them: YITH WooCommerce Custom Order Status and YITH WooCommerce Order & Shipment Tracking. These tools help you talk with customers about WooCommerce shipping and order status.

But don’t worry, we’ll go over them in more detail!

YITH WooCommerce Custom Order Status

Let’s start with YITH WooCommerce Order Status. This plugin takes WooCommerce’s basic order status functionality and makes it better and more customizable.

When a new order is created on WooCommerce, the system assigns to it one of the pre-configured statuses.

But most of these statuses only cover the short time between ordering and processing the payment. They’re not great for showing all the steps involved in delivery, and they’re even worse for WooCommerce stores that have extra steps, like stores that sell crafts or art.

But, you can take things to the next level by using a plugin like YITH WooCommerce Custom Order Status.

Once you install and activate the plugin, you can go to its control panel and create as many statuses as you want. You can base them on the ones normally included in WooCommerce or create new custom ones:

During this creation process, you can decide what permissions to give the user during that specific status, which statuses come next, and how the transition to that status affects the customer orders:

Once you’ve created your new statuses, they’ll show up in the plugin dashboard:

And they can be selected on the product order page:

This way, you can keep your customers updated on every stage of the preparation and shipping of their orders.

But that’s not all. We also make sure to stay in touch with our customers. Let’s take a look at another plugin that’s key to the success of your online store.

YITH WooCommerce Order & Shipment Tracking

YITH WooCommerce Order & Shipment Tracking is another option. It lets you offer tracking codes from hundreds of different shipping companies and give customers the option to track their order directly on your website. It’s a simple, fast, and intuitive way to do it.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, you can choose which delivery service (GLS, DHL, etc.) you’re using from the extensive list:

You can set the default courier and plugin settings:

So, after each shipment, you can go to the order page and add the tracking code in just a few seconds. Just open an order and go to the top right corner:

If you enable this option, you can enter all tracking data on your eCommerce site:

At this point, the customer will only need the order ID and their email address to check the product tracking:

And the system will let the customer know right away:

Conclusion

We know how important it is to optimize the process that leads to the sale of a product, but precisely because every customer is so important, we invite you to also pay attention to what comes next, namely order fulfillment.

This is the only way to make sure your store is error-proof, your customers are happy and loyal, and you have smooth communication. Check out YITH plugins today and take your online business to the next level!