Creating a visually stunning website with seamless navigation is great – but if customers have trouble placing orders, it’s all for naught.
The order placement process can make or break sales. If customers cannot easily place their orders, or if your business doesn’t capture accurate or necessary information at checkout, it can lead to fulfilment errors and lost sales. But if your brand’s order placement process is streamlined and optimised, you’ll set your business up for higher conversion rates and success down the line.
In this guide, we’ll cover what seamless order placement looks like, how it impacts customer satisfaction, and how to optimise the process with a logistics partner like ShipBob.
What is order placement?
In ecommerce, order placement refers to the process of placing an order on an ecommerce website. Placing an order triggers the rest of the order processing workflow, making order placement vital to your overall fulfilment operations.
During the order placement process, your business must accurately capture essential order details such as customer information, shipping details, and payment information. If there are any errors in the process, it could delay shipping or result in incorrect shipments.
You must also ensure that your customers can complete the checkout process without glitches and disruptions. Technical errors during the placement process can cause orders to be lost or placed inadvertently, or simply frustrate customers and deter purchases.
The ins and outs of order placement
The entire order processing workflow begins with order placement. This means it’s the first stage of the fulfilment process, where order details are captured and then sent on to fulfilment.
1. The customer clicks “place order”
Prior to order placement, the prospective customer must add items to their cart and proceed through your brand’s checkout flow. Depending on what data your business needs to process the order, this can include steps like:
- Logging into their personal account
- Inputting valid billing information (such as a credit card number)
- Inputting the address they want their order shipped to
- Selecting a shipping method (standard, expedited, etc.)
- Previewing their order (including viewing total cost including taxes and processing charges)
The order placement process should begin as soon as a customer clicks the final confirmation button (usually labelled “Place Order” or something similar) and enters their order.
2. Your order management system captures order details & confirms the order
When a customer clicks “place order” on your brand’s checkout page, the information they entered during the checkout process is sent through your order management system (or OMS). That system then confirms the order, and may also automatically send an email to the customer confirming that their order has been accepted and relaying an order tracking number.
3. The OMS forwards the order to an ecommerce warehouse or fulfilment centre
The OMS then forwards the order’s information to an ecommerce warehouse, where the order is received and put in queue for fulfilment. When brands have multiple fulfilment centres or warehouse locations, the OMS forwards the order to the most strategic facility from which to fulfil the order based each facility’s proximity to the order’s end shipping address and product availability.
4. Fulfilment begins
Once that fulfilment centre or warehouse receives the order details, the fulfilment process can begin. Picking lists are generated based on the order information captured during the order placement process, and assigned to relevant picking staff who locate and collect the items in the order.
Once the customers’ orders are packed at a packing bay, they’re ready for shipping. Shipping labels are generated using the information captured during order placement, applied to the corresponding package, and sent out to relevant couriers for final-mile delivery.
The impact of seamless order placement on customer satisfaction (and fulfilment success)
When the order placement process is seamless, there are number of ways it can impact customer satisfaction, as well as directly and indirectly benefit your business.
Enhanced customer shopping experience
If your order placement process is optimised, your customers can easily complete their shopping journey. This means that they won’t face interruptions or issues while they enter their shipping information and payment details. Additionally, the payment is seamlessly processed in the payment processing system and quickly received by your ecommerce platform.
Being able to place orders without glitches is what ecommerce shoppers expect, and meeting that expectation helps create a positive shopping experience and increases customer satisfaction.
Order confirmation notifications that reiterate essential details like order number also boost customer satisfaction, as they reassure customers that their order has been successfully placed and gives them the opportunity to review the information and make any necessary changes before the order gets shipped out.
Improved order accuracy
An optimised order placement process ensures that order details (such as SKUs, item quantity, customer name, billing information, and shipping address) are accurately captured.
While you cannot always prevent manual errors on the customer’s end (such as a customer misspelling their address), a reliable ecommerce platform and order processing system can reduce the risk of technical errors or help catch incorrect information before an order is processed.
With the right order data, you can pick the right items in the right quantities. This significantly improves your overall order accuracy, which allows you to deliver the right items to the right customers in the right quantities. This minimises the risk of customer complaints while boosting customer satisfaction. It also reduces delivery failures and the need for returns, allowing you to save money by cutting down on return shipments and refunds.
ShipBob has transformed our operations into a key competitive edge. I doubt any of our competitors can match our ability to receive orders and deliver them within two and a half days on average. With ShipBob, misshipments are rare occurrences, enabling us to consistently deliver on our promises to customers, ensuring they receive exactly what they’ve ordered.
Ali Shahid, COO of Our Place
Efficient order fulfilment
When order placement is seamless, orders can move to fulfilment quickly. As soon as order information is sent to your order management system, you can prepare to fulfil the order. If you have all of this automated, it speeds up the process even further and improves the efficiency of your fulfilment operations.
Moreover, when all necessary order information is captured accurately the first time, it reduces the need to go back and forth to get clarifications. This allows you to reduce order cycle time, so it gets shipped out on time. Timely shipments delight customers, which enhances customer satisfaction.
How to optimise the order placement process with a logistics partner
A smooth order placement process requires reliable technology platforms and partners. Ecommerce logistics experts like ShipBob can help your brand build a tech stack to power top-quality order placement, processing, and fulfilment, so your customers receive the best post-purchase experience possible.
Integrate with existing ecommerce platforms
To quickly process ecommerce orders coming in from multiple sales channels, you’ll need your order management system, existing ecommerce platform, and fulfilment solution to integrate with each other.
ShipBob’s software integrates seamlessly with leading ecommerce platforms (including Shopify, Amazon, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and even TikTok Shop), as well as OMS solutions so you can seamlessly sync all your ecommerce orders across tools.
ShipBob’s software also provides a unified view of your ecommerce orders across all sales channels in one place. Through a single dashboard, you can monitor real-time inventory levels, access key order data, and even edit individual orders to correct any errors.
Streamline order processing with automated integration
Having to manually process orders can take hours and still result in errors. ShipBob’s solution leverages automation, enabling brands to automatically process ecommerce orders quickly, accurately, and with less effort.
By implementing automated order processing through ShipBob, you can set your fulfilment process to automatically kick off as soon as orders are placed on your ecommerce store. As your fulfilment partner, ShipBob automatically captures each order’s information so you don’t have to manually input data for each individual order, ensuring that important details such as order number, shipping details, contact information, etc. are quickly and accurately recorded.
Enhance customer satisfaction with faster fulfilment
Customers today expect fast, affordable shipping, and ShipBob’s fulfilment solutions can help your brand meet the expectation.
Merchants can distribute inventory across 50+ fulfilment centres globally to reach customers all over the world more quickly and efficiently.
For more information on how ShipBob can help your brand streamline order processing and deliver a memorable post-purchase experience, click the button below.
Order placement FAQs
Below are answers to the most commonly asked questions about order placement.
What makes ShipBob’s order placement and processing different from other providers?
ShipBob’s order management capabilities integrate seamlessly with leading ecommerce platforms and marketplaces, allowing for a smooth order placement process across all your sales channels. ShipBob also automates order processing, so the correct information is forwarded to your fulfilment operations quickly and easily.
Can ShipBob handle international shipping and returns?
Ecommerce brands can ship to over 200 countries leveraging ShipBob’s solutions. Brands can also store their inventory in ShipBob facilities across the US, UK, Europe, Australia, and Canada to place inventory closer to end customers and reduce shipping costs and delivery times.
What is the difference between order placed and processed?
Order placed refers to orders that have been submitted by a customer via an ecommerce website. Order processed refers to orders that have been received and confirmed by the ecommerce seller, and that the seller has committed to fulfilling.
