You’re using software to manage orders. But are you shipping Ideal Orders?
Starting now, you can.
Etail Solutions announces the introduction of Ideal Order Insights – the first of a suite of ecommerce tools designed to help brands manage inventory to optimize profitability on every order.
“The concept behind Ideal Order is to set a new gold-standard metric to help ecommerce brands measure and manage their fulfillment operations,” said Michael Anderson, CEO of Etail Solutions. “An Ideal Order is an order that’s been optimized to meet shopper expectations while also maximizing profitability on that SKU for the seller now and in the future.”
Ideal Order Insights is a standard feature of Etail’s enterprise SaaS order optimization solution but is also available as a standalone option for Shopify users shipping from multiple locations, Anderson said. Ideal Order Insights works with order management, inventory management and warehouse management that ecommerce brands already have in place, he added. No IT involvement is required to set it up.
Here’s how it works.
Most successful ecommerce sellers ship from multiple fulfillment options – their own warehouses or DCs, 3PLs, retail locations or other fulfillment options. Sellers use multiple locations to help cut shipping time and expense to shoppers who’ve grown to expect fast and low-cost or free shipping.
Typically, the seller receives an order from a sales channel like Shopify and processes the order – shipping it from a fulfillment location that has inventory available. It’s the logical choice for fulfilling that order.
But is it the best choice for fulfilling future orders and maximizing potential profits?
Ideal Order Insights calculates all possible options to determine what the most profitable option would have been if inventory had been available at all locations. Then it determines what product inventory should be added to specific locations to maximize profitability.
“It can be expensive to have inventory at multiple warehouses,” Anderson said. “ But it’s even more expensive not to have the inventory available where and when you need it to meet current and future demand at the lowest fulfillment cost. With Ideal Order Insights, you know exactly what inventory you need and where to put it to make the most margin possible on your ecommerce orders.”
Ideal Order Insights monitors each order – assigning it an Ideal Order score that shows the profitability lost by not having the right inventory in the right location to fulfill actual and future demand, Anderson added.
That provides a single, data-driven, quantitative metric to use in inventory planning, forecasting and replenishment, and performance management.
Then Ideal Order Insights breaks the data down and aggregates it – identifying specific areas for profitability and performance improvement.
The results on profitability can be staggering, Anderson said, With Etail customers leveraging Ideal Order tools seeing an average of 30% shipping cost reduction yielding a 6% increase in gross margin.
Fulfillment cost is often the single biggest factor in ecommerce profitability, Anderson added. Ideal Order Insights evaluates, aggregates and scores nine fulfillment profitability factors including inventory location, packaging, carriers and cartonization options to highlight potential cost savings. That helps inventory planners immediately spot areas where they are doing well and opportunities for improvement.
Ecommerce and operations managers can also use the individual Ideal Order metrics to establish quantitative company performance objectives and to create and enforce service level agreements with carriers, suppliers and fulfillment partners.
Click here to learn more about Ideal Order Insights.
Additional resources
ETAIL PLATFORM OVERVIEWS
BLOG POSTS
How Order Simulation Plugs Net Income Leaks
The Power of Measurable Standards in Driving Ecommerce Success
The Ultimate Ecommerce Fulfillment Metric?
WHITE PAPERS
Ship Product. Not Profit: Ideal Order Insights Solutions Overview
The Ultimate Guide to Order Management
INFOGRAPHICS
Ideal Order: The New Standard for Order and Inventory Management
