The pandemic drove massive growth in e-commerce — but with it, ingrained consumer expectations for fast, free order delivery. By the beginning of 2022, e-commerce sales were forecast to surpass $1 trillion for the first time, a milestone that, at least pre-COVID-19, wasn’t anticipated until 2024.

Although big names like Amazon.com and Shopify faced a rough quarter recently, the overall e-commerce market is still growing rapidly. E-commerce has more than doubled in the past five years and will account for more than 20 percent of global retail sales by the end of this year. The pressure is on to stand out as a company by effectively handling sales and fulfillment across all channels to attract and retain customers. This is true not just in retail, but within a wide range of industries, including bulk goods, dry storage, pharmaceuticals/nutraceuticals, bottled goods, etc. Entrepreneurial brands are taking note.

Success right now depends on the ability to fulfill consumers’ demands anytime, anywhere, and from any channel. This omnichannel fulfillment strategy relies on a unified inventory management and order processing approach across all sales channels. By using the same inventory, order and return processes across all channels, omnichannel fulfillment allows either brands’ in-house fulfillment or third-party logistics warehouses to streamline order fulfillment and distribution from multiple selling channels. The result: an ability to meet the needs of customers quickly and efficiently.

Today, supplementing in-house fulfillment efforts with third-party logistics that have geographically distributed fulfillment nodes isn’t a convenience — it’s a necessity. This approach to a unified physical fulfillment infrastructure helps brands evolve dynamically. E-commerce merchants can meet the demand curve as they grow without navigating complicated platform migrations or getting caught up with complex integration projects as they scale.

Scalability for Each Stage of the E-Commerce Lifecycle

Seamless scalability of e-commerce initiatives relies on actionable insights and flexibility, regardless of where a brand is in its e-commerce lifecycle. Brands that are just getting started and those with hundreds of thousands of orders monthly can find ways to support growth.

Those early in their lifecycle may pick, pack and label orders manually, relying on their e-commerce platform and Excel. Quickly, a small parcel shipping solution may be needed. An inventory management system (IMS) or cloud-based warehouse management system (WMS) may also be required to track inventory. Importing and exporting data from these systems may be performed manually or with integration software.

Integrating all these systems becomes complex and potentially unwieldy as businesses grow. Mid-lifecycle brands begin to sell through additional channels and fulfill orders from multiple locations. With growth comes additional software implementations, such as an order management system (OMS) to allocate the appropriate amount of inventory per channel, and a third-party logistics warehouse management system to maintain the e-commerce integrations of these 3PL companies. By the time a brand is mature, keeping these disparate systems in sync can become unwieldy, hampering the ability to test new sales channels and impeding both omnichannel selling and omnichannel fulfillment.

4 Steps for E-Commerce Scaling

Replacing outdated strategies can reduce fulfillment costs, accelerating order delivery and business growth. To move beyond the common e-commerce growing pains, focus on these four steps:

  1. Understand your consumer base. Have a clear vision of who your consumers are, their preferred channels for purchases, their geographic distribution, and the appropriate price points for your products. These fundamental elements help ensure that you’re delivering what your buyers genuinely want and help determine the appropriate warehousing needs (and shipping and fulfillment methods) that optimize the customer experience across channels.
  2. Find efficiencies. Finding the right partners for e-commerce can help improve overall efficiencies that then allow resources to be funneled into innovation and growth. Third-party logistics warehouses play a significant role in supplementing or replacing in-house fulfillment efforts for brands of all sizes. The growth of the third-party logistics market illustrates the importance of these partnerships: it’s estimated to have a 7.1 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2020 to 2027, when it’s projected to hit $1.7 trillion, according to Allied Market Research. Additionally, having clear business intelligence and reporting systems that show sales activities across all channels can provide a comprehensive view of customers and inventory, removing the silos that often impede growth.
  3. Optimize fulfillment. Today’s brands can’t fulfill all demand in-house; being entirely dependent on third-party logistics isn’t always the solution, either. With the dynamic distributed hybrid models common today, in-house and 3PL systems must function together seamlessly, even for complicated tasks, such as a brand accessing orders and/or inventory in the 3PL’s system. OMS capabilities help optimize a brand’s fulfillment strategy, intelligently routing orders to the warehouse with the available inventory closest to your customer. Ultimately, it adapts your programs to the solution best suited to your brand’s scaling goals.
  4. Rely on scaling infrastructure. The right technology can buoy growth. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) was designed decades ago to harmonize data across the enterprise, but the monolithic architecture of traditional ERP can no longer keep pace with the rapid growth or flexibility needed for omnichannel fulfillment. Instead, turning to connected, scalable infrastructure can help streamline all aspects of your e-commerce — e.g., integrating with marketplaces and shopping carts; running internal aspects of business; interfacing with vendors and partners; gaining clarity and visibility into inventory (whether in your own warehouse or from third-party logistics) and warehousing. WMS, IMS, OMS and integration platforms can offer brands the flexibility and scale required to fulfill demand and gain competitive value — without changing platforms.

Streamline Operations to Support the Growth Journey

Connecting your sales channels and fulfilling your orders should be easy regardless of which marketplace or channels you prefer. A collaborative software system helps streamline operations in order to meet consumer expectations and growth goals through intelligent distribution. Stay focused on the metrics that matter — i.e., growth, the competitive landscape and demand curve, product innovation, customer satisfaction — rather than on order fulfillment infrastructure and integrations.