Unlike the old days when you were shipping large pallet orders a few times per month, the transition to drop ship orders can be pretty traumatic. The pain extends all the way from order processing where you are now going through the same old steps, but for potentially 100s or 1,000s of orders per day.
Then you can add in the compliance requirements your trading partners have surrounding acknowledgements, ship notices, inventory feeds, etc., etc., and their branding requirements. Not to mention mounting chargebacks if something isn’t done perfectly.
And, lastly, there’s the chaos it creates in your warehouse or 3PL because the warehouse layout and optimal picker and packer productivity needed to handle large numbers of small parcel shipments is so entirely different from normal pallet shipments.
All in all, this makes adequate profit hard to achieve…especially with small basket size orders. Trading Partner portals, EDI companies, ERPs and Shipping Platforms certainly ease some of the workload, but there are still a lot of steps that require a human being to sit at a keyboard and make the next step happen. And Heaven forbid that they make a data entry error along the way!
Consider this scenario…OPAL removes ALL of the manual steps required to process orders, completes all of the transactions required by for over 70 top retailers and e-tailers, is compliant with ALL of their requirements and has the capability to increase warehouse shipment productivity by 25%-50% if needed.
Below is one common example of how it increases profitability just in the drop ship order processing realm. And this doesn’t even include the time spend at the end of each day to upload your inventory feeds to your Trading Partners or lost warehouse productivity. Your individual situation may vary, but you’ll get the idea….
