Introduction
For most ecommerce companies, multichannel fulfillment is a complex task: you have to juggle picking, packing, and shipping multiple orders across multiple channels to locations around the globe, while meeting shoppers’ increasingly high expectations of fast delivery.
But getting order fulfillment right is critical to ensuring ongoing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Research shows that 62% of shoppers consider shipping speed a critical component of a positive online shopping experience. If ecommerce businesses want to delight their customers and increase their bottom line, they must provide fast, reliable shipping.
The key factors that determine if a company with ecommerce fulfillment software can help improve order fulfillment:
- Are they an overall solid 3PL partner: Engaging a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS), can help you manage your supply chain operations. ASCS is Amazon’s end-to-end supply chain solution with complementary services like ground freight, fulfillment, last-mile shipping, and more that can be adopted together or individually to help a business grow.
- Do they have best-in-class multichannel order fulfillment software: With the right ecommerce fulfillment integrations, you can automate and optimize the order fulfillment process to improve operational efficiency. More specifically, you can reduce manual effort and automatically connect and sync your order management, inventory management, and order fulfillment systems. Whether you outsource your order fulfillment or handle it yourself, you can use ecommerce fulfillment integrations to streamline and simplify your order fulfillment operations.
In this guide, we will delve into ecommerce integrations for order fulfillment, including:
- The different types of integrations that ecommerce companies use to automate their multichannel order fulfillment process with their 3PL
- The benefits of using these integrations
- Advice on how you can choose the right ecommerce fulfillment integrations for your business
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Direct integrations
This integration is a free-to-use app – built by Amazon – that provides a direct connection between MCF and Shopify. -
Third-party integrations
These integrations are apps – built by independent software vendors (ISVs) – that directly connect MCF with various ecommerce websites and marketplaces. WebBee and Bytestand are a few examples of applications that link MCF directly to your DTC website built on Shopify or BigCommerce, and the NeverSettle app can connect your WooCommerce website to MCF within minutes. -
Inventory and order management systems
MCF offers over 100 third-party integrations – including Rithum, ShipStation, Listing Mirror, Sellercloud, and Pipe17 – which can help streamline and automate your order processing and inventory management across all your sales channels. These inventory and order management systems are aggregators that take in orders from many different channels and route fulfillment requests to your 3PL or other fulfillment method. They enable you to keep track of inventory levels, customer orders, and tracking information across all your sales channels, and can support complex fulfillment rules. -
Custom API integrations
Some ecommerce companies – usually large enterprises that have their own in-house developers or engage external developers – opt to build their own custom API integrations to connect their ecommerce websites and order and inventory management systems directly to MCF APIs. MCF’s developer-friendly APIs make it easy to create these custom API integrations.
Broadly speaking, ecommerce integrations are software applications that connect your ecommerce website and other online marketplaces that you sell on with the back-end systems that you use to manage various areas of your online business including sales, CRM, inventory management, order management, and order fulfillment. A recent survey by BCG and World Retail Congress revealed that 60% of retail innovation leaders are prioritizing investments in ecommerce and two of the top investments are third-party marketplaces (42%) and social commerce (39%). Ecommerce integrations serve as a bridge between the ecommerce sales channels that you use and your back-end systems, allowing you to integrate, automate, and optimize your business operations.
When it comes to order fulfillment, ecommerce fulfillment integrations can connect your 3PL provider’s back-end systems with:
The ecommerce system on your ecommerce website
Most ecommerce websites today are powered by software systems designed by ecommerce providers such as Shopify, Adobe Commerce (Magento), and WooCommerce. These systems serve as the backbone of your direct-to-consumer (DTC) website, performing a wide range of functions including managing your catalog and listings, enabling catalog sorting, checkout, customer notification functionality, and routing orders to order fulfillment systems. The goal of these systems is to deliver a seamless experience for shoppers on your website, which can help you increase conversions and revenue growth.
The ecommerce marketplaces and social media stores that you use
Many ecommerce businesses today sell across multiple sales channels including ecommerce marketplaces such as eBay and Etsy and social media stores on Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms. In many cases, sellers route their social commerce shoppers to their website for checkout.
Ecommerce fulfillment integrations can help you connect your website and marketplaces and ensure the fulfillment process runs smoothly from online checkout to your customer’s doorstep. Most 3PLs provide some ecommerce integrations that you can use to connect their order fulfillment system to the websites and marketplaces that you’re using.
ASCS’ Multichannel Fulfillment (MCF) service, for example, offers four ways to integrate with its systems:
- Third-party integrations
- Inventory and order management systems
- Custom API integrations
- Direct integrations
Direct Amazon MCF integrations are free-to-use apps, built by Amazon, that provide a direct connection between MCF and ecommerce providers like Shopify.
Utilizing ecommerce fulfillment integrations to automate your order fulfillment process can deliver a number of business benefits including:
- Reduced manual effort: Minimize the amount of manual effort required to handle your order fulfillment operations. Instead of having to manually enter every order you receive into your 3PL’s order fulfillment system and then monitor it, you can automate this process. This saves a lot of time for you and your team, freeing you up to focus on those areas of the business that matter most to you, like sales and product development.
- Improved operational efficiency: Streamline the order fulfillment process by automatically creating inbound and outbound shipments with your 3PL, syncing inventory across different sales channels, and tracking orders in real time. This improved efficiency can result in faster and more reliable delivery performance, reduced out-of-stock rates, and greater customer satisfaction and retention.
Multichannel sales growth: Set up and integrate sales operations on multiple online channels including your DTC website, ecommerce marketplaces, and social media stores. With these integrations, you can automatically align your orders and inventory across existing sales channels and easily expand to new ones.
- Increase sales conversion rate: According to the Baymard Institute, 21% of online shoppers abandon their carts during checkout because the delivery estimate was too slow. With ecommerce fulfillment integrations, you can provide accurate delivery estimates for shoppers at checkout. And if your 3PL service can offer shipping speeds as fast as one day and real-time delivery estimates at checkout, the way ASCS’ MCF service can, you have a better chance of increasing your conversion rate and reducing cart abandonment.
By helping you connect, streamline, and synchronize your back-end systems, ecommerce fulfillment integrations can revolutionize your online business. Done correctly, these integrations can help drive greater automation and operational efficiency and improve multichannel sales growth and customer experience.
Online customers today demand a seamless shopping experience from click to delivery. And, with the right multichannel order fulfillment software integration in place, you can provide exactly that.
