As the cost of doing business continues to rise, even during these waning days of COVID-19. Warehouses have been looking for ways to combat these expenses.

It hasn’t been easy. Warehouses these days are doing more than they ever have, primarily due to the drastic increase in demand seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Online ordering reached levels unheard of in the past, even during the peak-est of peak season shopping, and no matter where your warehouse falls in the ecommerce ecosystem, you were likely affected by the increased costs of goods and services.

This has left warehouses at every point in the ecommerce pipeline trying to find ways to reduce their operational costs, both to help their bottom line and to avoid passing the expenses onto their existing customer base. And while most of these efforts have been further up the logistical chain, there’s actually a lot of internal processes that could be reviewed to reduce overhead while helping your warehouse run more effectively.

Reducing Expenses through Optimized Fulfillment

Better warehouse-platform integration

Whether you sell your goods directly through an online storefront, or you provide a digital platform for your clients and partners to track your goods, closer integration of your warehouse and online platform can go a long way towards optimizing the rest of your operations.

Accurate inventory management means less returns, less mis-picks from your current inventory and industrial storage shelving, and overall increased customer satisfaction without a lot of wasted effort. Providing your most accurate inventory information upfront will avoid the sort of confusion and spent energy that the usual sort of inventory issues bring about.

Faster, more efficient item organization

Speaking of items, a lot of ecommerce fulfillment expenses tend to come from wasted time down on the warehouse floor. With as many pallet racks, commercial wire shelving, and other storage options as you use in your warehouse, your team likely spends a long time trying to find certain items no matter how often they get ordered.

Rearrange your inventory to focus on high-selling items first and foremost. While this may go against the usual modern inventory management strategy, it will save your team a lot of time, allowing you to get more done – for less overhead cost than if they were wandering the building forever.

Bring more fulfillment in-house

Particularly if you control your own distribution center, fulfilling more of your own orders will help reduce your spend on third-party logistics providers. This will depend on a lot of things – how much of your inventory you keep on-hand, how many of your goods you ship from your own inventory without drop-shipping from a third party, and the like.

Even if you need to re-up on certain items more often, the drastic reduction in shipping & handling costs for items coming from elsewhere will add up over time, and provide you with a noticeable cost savings for your entire ecommerce business.

Whatever method you choose, reducing your expenses through smarter fulfillment should be the goal of any ecommerce business in the near future.