In ecommerce, success does not come from merely fulfilling an order and shipping it to the customer. Rather, it comes from delivering the perfect order: accurate, on time, and damage-free.

Perfect order metrics are key performance indicator (KPI) that measures supply chain efficiency. By measuring perfect order metrics, you can determine the perfect order rate. 

Learn the KPIs that measure perfect order performance, and how ShipBob can help you track, calculate, and increase order accuracy through supply chain optimization. 

Order metrics you need to track

Perfect order metrics help you to determine how accurate orders are being fulfilled, shipped, and delivered based on several different factors. Here are the four order metrics you’ll need to measure in order to calculate perfect order rate. 

1. Orders arrive damage-free

Damaged products are a huge pain point for merchants, as they are often outside of their control, can affect customer satisfaction, and are very costly for high-quality products. Once an order is shipped and is in the carrier’s hands, what happens during last-mile delivery is often out of your control. But there are precautions you can take to prevent shipping damage, such as adding enough dunnage or choosing the correct box.

If you’re having a problem with shipping damages, make sure to record every damaged package, the type of damage, how it happened, and take steps to prevent these damages from reoccurring.

2. Orders delivered on time

Another metric to follow is on-time deliveries. There are several ways to ensure orders arrive on time, including offering different shipping options for customers and choosing the right carriers to partner with. You can better manage on-time deliveries by tracking carrier trends, but since so many factors can cause delays in shipping, it’s important to make sure you have a system in place to track orders, so you can communicate with customers and keep them up to date. 

3. Orders filled accurately

Nothing is more frustrating to customers than receiving a much-awaited order only to find that it’s the wrong order at their front door. Perfecting order accuracy rate is extremely important to keep customer satisfaction high. It’s also something you can easily control by optimizing your picking and packing process to implementing technology and automation to improve order accuracy. 

4. Orders packed with the right documentation and invoicing

All customer orders that leave a warehouse or a fulfillment center should have the right invoice in the right box. The invoice (or packing slip) should have all of the items ordered with the matching quantities and any other important details your customer requested. The unboxing experience is an opportunity to leave a lasting impression, and packing slips are one way to display your brand. This can be as simple as adding your logo to each packing slip. 

Why your order metrics need to be perfect

Customer satisfaction andbrand loyaltythrive when customer expectations are fulfilled. When a customer fails to receive the correct items they ordered on time and in pristine condition, they are far less likely to purchase again in the future. 

In addition to this loss of revenue, the cost of correcting order errors (reshipping the right items, covering the cost of returns management, or refunding the customer) takes a toll on your bottom line. By fulfilling orders accurately the first time around, you will save valuable time and money, as well as meet customer expectations.

Tracking order metrics won’t help you make improvements if the metrics fail to reflect the reality of your business’ throughput, so you need to calculate your KPIs correctly to get the most accurate results. 

Insight based on accurate order metrics will inform your decision making — so while it’s not glamorous to track metrics like fill rate, cycle time, or on-time delivery percentage, doing so will help you take control over your logistics operations.

Optimize fulfillment with ShipBob’s perfect order metrics

At ShipBob, our mission is not only to assist ecommerce business owners in calculating their perfect order metric, but to help them improve it. Here are some of the things that ShipBob does to help you achieve higher order accuracy.

Monitors perfect order metrics on your dashboard

With ShipBob’s proprietary technology, you will have access to your own dashboard where you can see real-time updates on all customer orders at every stage of the supply chain. 

From the ShipBob dashboard, you can find data on all distribution metrics you’ll need to calculate your perfect order metric, as well as other metrics, to give a comprehensive, at-a-glance view of your supply chain performance at any time

Maintains high order accuracy rates

Here at ShipBob, we understand how important order accuracy is to you and your customers. We strive to eliminate human error and take continuous steps to improve our operations.

Whether it’s assigning pickers optimized routes, opening more fulfillment center locations to cut down on shipping times, or improving our warehouse picking and packing processes, ShipBob is constantly looking for ways to improve and achieve higher levels of order accuracy.

In addition to focusing solely on order accuracy rate, we also closely measure ‘support cases per order,’ which is a bigger indicator on how well we’re performing as your logistics partner.

This metric also provides you with information you can use to prepare your customer service team for future growth based on the projected case volume per number of orders.

“We were only gone from ShipBob for a month and a half, and it was a terrible experience. With the new fulfillment network, we experienced a huge surge in fulfillment errors and countless complaints about orders being inaccurately fulfilled. Errors will inevitably happen when you fulfill orders at large volumes, but not like this.”

Gerard Ecker, Founder & CEO of Ocean & Co.

Improves the entire inventory management process

To maintain perfect order metrics, you need to be sure that all of your ecommerce inventory is being processed, stored, picked, and recorded properly. 

At ShipBob, we offer built-in inventory management software and other tools to help keep track of the inventory and order manage process across our fulfillment network.  This way, you can stay on top of your inventory accuracy while also reducing the likelihood of stockouts, backorders, delivery exceptions, and late deliveries that hurt your perfect order metric.

“ShipBob provides the storage conditions we need to ensure our highest-quality food products are stored and delivered to our customers in a safe and effective manner. ShipBob is really committed to their customers and keeping themselves accountable.”

Pablo Gabatto, Business Operations Manager at Ample Foods

Optimizing the supply chain regularly

With ShipBob as your 3PL, you will benefit from our growing and international fulfillment center network, best-in-class technology, and expertise that allows us to optimize the ecommerce fulfillment process.

We are constantly revising our operating procedures and implementing best practices, technology, and automation to stay at the cutting edge of order fulfillment, warehousing and inventory management.

As your partner, ShipBob strives to make continuous improvements to our operations to help you grow and become more successful.

“About a year and a half after building out our business, we figured it was time to optimize some of our processes, including returns. The ability to work with one of the co-founders of ShipBob to launch a new, custom returns process was awesome. Returns were taking a lot of time and resources to process on our end, but ShipBob was super helpful and critical in creating a solution for us.”

Nikolai Paloni, Co-Founder of Ombraz Sunglasses 

How accurate order metrics helped MANSSION

The first time the stylish yet affordable mens’ jewelry brand MANSSION tried outsourcing their order fulfillment to a 3PL, their perfect order metric dropped to an all-time low. 

 “The old 3PL charged for each pick and pack, wouldn’t take responsibility for any errors they made, and getting orders fulfilled would take up to 20 days in some cases.”

Torii Rowe, COO & Co-Founder of MANSSION

Hardly any customer orders were fulfilled perfectly until MANSSION switched to ShipBob. 

In addition to plenty of attention and drastic cost savings, ShipBob was able to provide the top-notch picking, packing, retail fulfillment, and automated shipping services that MANSSION needed to achieve over $1M in sales their first full year. 

With the help of ShipBob, this edgy yet sophisticated brand continues to deliver error-free, damage-free, timely, and properly documented orders to fashion-forward individuals all over the country.

“Before ShipBob, we used to work with another 3PL that was terrible. With our old 3PL, we’d have to reach out 3-4 times per day, and I even had the CEO’s number because there were so many issues and fulfillment errors all around. I’m super happy we switched to ShipBob. We got a fresh start, and it was a very smooth and easy transition.”

Torii Rowe, COO & Co-Founder of MANSSION

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Order Metrics FAQs

Figuring out which order metrics to track and how to track them can be tricky at first for new ecommerce business owners. Here are some of the most common questions and answers related to order metrics and how ShipBob can help you track important supply chain metrics.

What metrics does ShipBob track?

ShipBob’s advanced analytics and reporting tool tracks all the fulfillment and logistics metrics you’ll need to make data-driven decisions for your business. Some of these metrics include the number of orders placed, fulfilled, shipped, and processed; the number of products that are out of stock and the quantity of orders affected by that stockout; the fulfillment cost per unit and per order; the percentage of orders fulfilled on time; the revenue per order; and shipping insights and transit time.

What is perfect order metric?

The perfect order metric (or perfect order rate) is a composite metric representing the number of orders that are delivered on time, damage-free, error-free, and shipped with the correct invoicing and/or paperwork. Perfect order metrics are often used in benchmarking and assessing overall supply chain performance.

How do you track perfect metrics?

To track perfect order metrics, you’ll need to track how many of your orders are delivered that are completely damage-free, are packed accurately, arrive on time, and include the proper documentation. Once you calculate these key performance indicators (KPIs), you can determine how many of your orders meet all four criteria and divide that subset by the total number of orders to arrive at your perfect order metric.