As a small business owner, your attention needs to be on multiple things at once every day, especially when it's busy! Orders become overlooked very quickly. The more orders you get, the harder it is to spot an error.
For example, it's easier to find 1 blue marble within 5 red marbles than amongst 15,000 red ones.
It's the same with orders but you want more orders. So how can you easily find this one blue marble with a countless number of red ones? How can you make sure that you minimise the number of order errors, whilst also increasing the overall number of orders?
Have a routine
You could compare it to working out. If you only work out occasionally, as and when you feel like it, it never becomes part of your daily routine.
Just like working out, collecting orders can be annoying at first. You must constantly remind yourself to check and update them, but when you do this regularly it soon becomes part of your daily routine. So eventually no orders get left behind, your customers are satisfied and the number of returns is reduced.
Connect all of your marketplaces
Even the best routine won't help if you spend half the day collecting your new orders alone.
Being visible on multiple marketplaces has plenty of advantages but having to collate all the orders is certainly not one of them. There are plenty of tabs with granular detail and just yourself in the middle, trying to make sense out of it all.
Using software, you can connect all of your marketplaces within one area so that you can focus on maximising your number of orders without the additional hassle.
With Siid, you just click on "sync orders" and all of your orders from each platform is automatically pulled through. It doesn’t miss any orders and saves you the time of having to manually collect the orders together.
Transparency is king
So now that you have all the orders collected, the subsequent significant risk of forgetting an order comes with the processing.
As more orders arrive and the status of an order stays the same, it becomes overpowered by new orders as is gradually gets pushed down the list to be forgotten. This is one possibility of how orders are overlooked, yet it can easily be avoided.
Updating an order status and filtering
Order statuses allow you to filter and process orders into batches. It allows you to check which ordered need dispatching. So, when you are waiting for part of an orders stock to arrive, you can simply refer back to ensure no orders have been forgotten about.
Using order management software, not only you but everybody in your team can now check and change the status of an order. So, if you did make the mistake of not dispatching an order, you can easily refer back using filters to spot this straight away.
Again, make this checking process part of your daily routine. Just pull in the orders in the morning, work throughout the day as you would usually do and then check in the afternoon how many orders are still open for processing.
Forgetting an order is frustrating for everyone. Your customer is unhappy. You must deal with their WISMO call and your whole order processing routine is disturbed by just one interruption.
With Siid, you have all the visibility you need to reduce the number of order errors, whilst managing more orders.
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