4 Ways to Prevent Shipping Delays With Feedonomics

Much like your grandma’s ancient jar of black licorice, shipping delays can leave a bad taste in your mouth. Subpar order management leads to bad customer reviews, especially for time-sensitive purchases or special occasions.

You know you should avoid shipping delays, but do you know how much they impact your brand’s reputation?

A study from Koerber—which surveyed 2,200 customers across eight countries—found that 70 percent had experienced a shipping delay over the past six months. Almost 60 percent of those customers said they relayed their shipping delay difficulties to someone else or left a bad review, and 40 percent said they would be less likely to buy from the seller both online and in-store.

While the statistics don’t paint a pretty picture, there are still proactive measures you can take to prevent unnecessary shipping delays. Read on to learn how Feedonomics can work in conjunction with your order management system (OMS) to streamline operations.

1. Implement inventory buffers

For multichannel merchants, carefully managing inventory counts across marketplaces is key to avoiding shipping delays caused by overselling. 

Overselling happens when real-time inventory counts aren’t synchronized across your channels, leading to customers unknowingly buying out-of-stock products.

For example, if you’re selling gas grills on your own website and three additional marketplaces—like Amazon, Walmart, and Target Plus—and you only have two units stocked, it’s possible for those units to sell out through your website before you update the marketplace stock quantities. Marketplace customers could continue to purchase your grills, forcing you to cancel the orders after the transactions are complete. 

Overselling is more likely to occur during a surge in product sales, such as promotional events, flash sales, or with your high-demand products. Since brands usually promote products during high-traffic shopping days and time-sensitive gift-giving events, customers are more negatively impacted by delays, making inventory buffers a crucial reputational safeguard.

Product feed management platforms allow you to mitigate this problem by applying inventory buffers. 

Inventory buffers allow you to set a certain quantity of products to be reserved, so you can display less inventory than you have on hand. You could choose to mark your product “out of stock” on Amazon and Target whenever your inventory dipped below four units.

2. Utilize order routing and splitting

Some merchants use more than one fulfillment solution to keep orders moving. For example, they might ship bulky products from a warehouse, fast-moving products through Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment, and all other products through their ecommerce platform. Being able to automatically route and split orders to the preferred fulfillment solution is a great time saver, and Feedonomics makes it simple with its automated order management technology, FeedAMP. 

With FeedAMP, you can specify rules that direct order information to the appropriate fulfillment methods. Orders can be routed by brand, SKU, availability, custom labels, and other product data. These criteria can even be used to split line items from the same order to different fulfillment methods. 

3. Leverage automation and consolidation

Using multiple dashboards to manage orders from different sources is inefficient. Using an OMS in conjunction with FeedAMP can streamline this process, allowing you to manage orders from a single dashboard.

Rather than manually processing orders from each selling channel, you can automatically pull order information into FeedAMP at regularly scheduled intervals, which saves you time and reduces errors during fulfillment. 

The order information from your channels is passed through to your OMS or ecommerce platform, so you can take action on the orders from a single dashboard. This gives brands a scalable approach to their order fulfillment and allows them to view the order lifecycle across all channels.

4. Translate order data

Different selling channels use different data formats, which makes data translation a challenge if you want to fulfill orders through your existing systems. Translating data into a usable format is a crucial aspect of multichannel selling when data is funneled downstream to your OMS, customer relationship management (CRM) system, or back to your ecommerce platform. This also makes FeedAMP a crucial tool for omnichannel success.

FeedAMP translates data to match your system’s requirements, so you can synchronize inventory and order information. Additionally, this translation function means you can flexibly add new channels, or switch to new downstream systems, without having to worry about the order information being in an incompatible format.

Streamline your order management with Feedonomics for Marketplaces

Feedonomics uses automated order management technology to synchronize data between the marketplaces you sell on and systems like your OMS or ecommerce platform. Enjoy the benefits of automation with the backing of a team of marketplace specialists.

Don’t just take our word for it—schedule a free demo today to find out how Feedonomics can improve your ecommerce operations.