Shipping is crucial in modern business functions; it acts as an intermediary between products and customers. Choosing reliable and advanced shipping methods is essential as it can have a great influence on customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and overall business revenues, essentially in the world of global commerce and e-commerce mastery. With the growing expectations of consumers and a rapidly evolving technological landscape, shipping has technologically upgraded from a simple logistics tool to a critical tool that impacts customers’ behaviors and purchase decisions. Want to experience a shipping process with no missed deliveries, no tracking chaos, and zero angry customer emails? This may sound dreamy and impossible, but not anymore with the automated shipping system like ShipRelax.
The 3PL fulfillment partner and platform together can help automate manual shipping workflows like order sorting, order processing, documentation, label printing, packaging, and other processes. Automation in shipping is reshaping the logistics industry, enabling businesses to optimize their shipping functions, automate complex processes, reduce errors, and enhance customer experience. From smart routing to AI-driven inventory tracking, shipping automation isn’t just a necessity but a strategic benefit in today’s ever-dynamic ecommerce landscape.
So, how does automated shipping work? And more importantly, how it can be a strategic advantage to your business, boost delivery speed, brand reputation, save you time, money, resources, and stress. Let’s delve into this and explore how automation of shipping operations can revolutionize your business operations.
How Automated Shipping is Reshaping Order Processing and Fulfillment?
Automated shipping is a strategy that uses both integrated software and hardware systems to optimize and simplify the complex shipping processes. From picking items, packing, labeling, loading, selecting carriers, and transporting goods to the final destination, it includes several critical stages. Automation of these processes helps eliminate manual intervention, enhancing delivery speed, accuracy, experience reduction in errors and costs, and most importantly, facilitating growth and long-term success.
For e-commerce brands, adopting automated shipping is essential to gain a competitive edge. Automating shipping tasks helps improve the speed and accuracy of delivery, enhances customer satisfaction, increases brand trust, and helps businesses scale faster and smarter.
How Automated Shipping Works and Boosts Productivity for Growing Brands?
Shipping automation leverages technology to manage, automate, and transform intricate logistics and shipping processes. Automated shipping systems are designed to simplify and optimize order processing and fulfillment, eliminating manual intervention, reducing human errors, and improving customer trust and experience. Here is how automated shipping works and helps businesses maximize productivity and revenues:
- Order Integration: When a customer places an order, the role of a 3PL automated shipping system arises as it facilitates the import of order information from the e-commerce store into the shipping software. This will eliminate the need for manual data entry, minimizing errors, saving precious time, resources, and money.
- Inventory Control and Coordination: A powerful, end-to-end shipping automation platform seamlessly connects with inventory management systems. This helps provide automatic stock updates, ensure optimal inventory availability, and allocate products effectively for fulfillment. This merging makes sure that the right items are picked and packed, preventing delays and inaccuracies.
- Generation of Labels: This step involves the generation of shipping labels, barcodes, and tracking numbers utilizing order information within the automated shipping system. These labels are printed and applied without manual input, boosting the packaging process and reducing the risk of human errors.
- Selection of Carriers: The system smartly selects the most suitable and cost-effective shipping carrier for each order. This will ultimately support speeding up the delivery process, package weight, and shipping costs, enhancing decision-making.
-
- Dispatching a Package: Once items are packed and labeled, packages are routed to local carriers or shipping hubs using predefined workflows. In larger fulfillment centers, this step may include automated conveyor belts or robotic loaders to efficiently handle high volumes.
- Real-Time Tracking: Customers are provided with stock updates and tracking links to help them track shipments in real time. Businesses can leverage these tracking insights to deliver orders on time and even fix any shipping issues.
- Delivery Confirmation: Once the package has received its ideal destination, the software updates the order status to both customers and the business automatically. This is the final step of the fulfillment process and ensures an enhanced customer experience.
How Automating Shipping Operations Can Help Your Business Scale Smartly While Reducing Costs?
Automates Order Picking and Packing
Order picking and packing, if done manually, can drain your time and money. Automating these processes can significantly reduce errors and save valuable time.
You can begin with a WMS that improves layout, picking and packing speed, and more. For further improvements, you can consider robotics like AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles), AMRs (Autonomous Mobile Robots), or AS/RS (Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems).
Automated Shipping Labels
Once orders are picked and packed, shipping them effectively can be challenging. With multiple carrier options, varying rates, and service levels, it’s difficult to know if you’re getting the best deal.
Tools like ShipRelax and FulFillor 3PL WMS can ease this process by generating shipping labels and applying predefined rules to ensure consistency and precision. You can choose shipping methods based on factors like package weight and size, and generate labels in bulk to reduce costs, manual workloads, and errors — ultimately saving resources and time.
Shipment Tracking in Real-Time
Consumers today expect high visibility into their orders — over 90% want to track their packages, 41% prefer real-time updates, and 50% just want to know where their orders are. Unfortunately, according to a recent report, one-third of consumers were unable to track their most recent delivery.
Using the right shipping automation tool means you’ll get real-time, automatic inventory updates. This not only keeps your customers informed and satisfied but also reduces pressure on your support team and builds brand loyalty.
Inventory Management
Our inventory management software can help automate complex inventory processes. Handling stock manually is time-consuming and demands constant attention and expertise.
The tool can automate the entire process by tracking inventory in real-time, sending alerts for low stock, and automatically reordering inventory as needed.
Simplify Shipping Operations Using ShipRelax
ShipRelax is a full-fledged 3PL fulfillment service provider when combined with FulFillor 3PL Warehouse Management System, an advanced, AI-driven fulfillment solution that simplifies shipping tasks by seamlessly integrating order information with a platform, tracking shipments in real time, gaining control over inventory, generating labels, selecting the right carriers, and more. We’re a 3PL partner and platform that can empower your shipping strategy and help your business scale faster and smarter.
To know about our next-gen automated shipping system solutions, you can either book an appointment or talk to our experts!
