If your ecommerce business sells merchandise, you need a place to store them—in an ecommerce warehouse, fulfilment centre or a distribution centre. You can purchase a piece of land, lease a large facility, or outsource ecommerce warehousing to fulfil your customer orders— but warehousing doesn’t start or end here.
Efficient ecommerce warehouse management will determine the overall efficiency of your business.
Otherwise, you will be stuck with mismanaged inventory, inefficient fulfilment, poor performing staff, a low-profit margin and high operating costs. Not to mention, damaged relationships with your customers.
What is warehouse management?
Warehouse management is a set of operations involved in running the day-to-day operations of an ecommerce warehouse. This includes receiving, tracking, and storing inventory, training warehouse staff, picking, packing and shipping orders.
What is a Warehouse Management System (WMS)?
A warehouse management system (WMS) is a software solution that consists of a set of policies and processes to organise the work of an ecommerce warehouse so that the facility can be operated efficiently and meet its objectives.
A warehouse management system (WMS) can help businesses in resource planning, supply chain logistics, and ecommerce order fulfilment. Here are more features of a warehouse management system (WMS):
Provide real-time insight into inventory quantity across locations Leverage data to conduct demand analyses, forecast sales and create efficient daily operating plans through automation Share data with other systems, software or modules to increase the efficiency of fulfilment operations Monitor and report productivity of warehouse and fulfilment operations Give suggestions to make improvements to warehouse geography for optimising space
What are essential warehouse management processes?
1. Receiving and stowing inventory
One of the fundamental ecommerce warehousing operations is to receive inventory from trucks at loading docks and then stow them in the warehouse. First, the received boxes of inventory are scanned to record the SKUs and their quantity. Then, the inventory is put away in its designated storage location and scanned again. These warehouse operations are performed with clear instructions for the staff, so they know how to receive, unpack, retrieve, pick, pack, and ship inventory.
2. Inventory tracking and management
Inventory tracking is the process of monitoring inventory levels, so you know:
The SKUs (stock-keeping units) you have in your ecommerce warehouse The number of SKUs The exact locations where SKUs have been stored in the warehouse If your inventory is in transit from a manufacturer or products have been shipped to the customers
Thus, inventory management lets you know how many products are ready to be shipped if a customer places an order and how much inventory you should store in your warehouse based on customer demand.
3. Picking and packing
Picking and packing are two core functions performed in an ecommerce warehouse. When a customer order is received, picking lists are generated for each picker to retrieve items most efficiently. This picking list contains the list of the items ordered and storage locations at the warehouse. The picker then collects the ordered products from their respective locations.
Once an order is picked, it is then handed to a packer responsible for securely placing the items in a box or poly mailer, adding in any needed packing materials, and putting a shipping label on it. The orders are then marked “ready-to-ship.”
4. Shipping orders
The shipping carriers pick up orders from the ecommerce warehouse and then ship them to their customer location. Once the order ships, your warehouse management system (WMS) automatically sends ecommerce order tracking information back to the system so that you and your customers can track the shipment.
Wrapping up
Warehouse management is a tricky thing to get right if you’re trying manually. By investing in a warehouse management system (WMS), repetitive tasks will be taken off your warehousing team’s plate. As a result, you’ll be able to improve order accuracy, ship orders faster, and have the data you need to make the warehouse operations run at peak efficiency. Moreover, outsourcing warehouse management to a 3PL provider like Eshopbox can help you reap multiple benefits of seamless ecommerce warehousing and fulfilment to scale indefinitely.
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