Magento Order Management – Best Practices
So – you’ve got your Magento store up and running and have a Magento order management system to make your job easier. What next?
Of course, ensuring that order management is seamless goes beyond this. There are a few things you need to do yourself to ensure that not only the order management tools you have in place are being used productively, but also that your order management processes are contributing towards the overall success of your business.
We have compiled a list of tips and tricks that will help you tackle Magento order management challenges, and make overall Magento order management a lot more efficient:
1. Centralise order related data.
If you are selling your products on multiple channels, you must aggregate the order data from these stores with the order data you get from Magento. This centralised data will help you gain a holistic view of your order activity. Syncing this data is very important because if you deal with it separately, chances are that it will manifest as a bottleneck in your supply chain.
An Magento order management system can help you achieve all this and more. However, your manual efforts also come into play here. Although you will be automating and uploading and syncing this data with your order management system, you must also regularly check all these channels individually to ensure that everything is in place.
2. Maintain inventory accuracy.
To ensure that the order management processes in your Magento store are seamless, you will have to ensure that the inventory activity and stocking handling in your warehouse are also seamless. For this, you must have an inventory management system that streamlines all aspects of keeping a stock and integrates your inventory with your order management system.
Good inventory management also involves real-time tracking, which can also be achieved with robust order management and inventory management tools. However, it also consists in building a culture in which you and your staff regularly check your stock, and ensure that there are no discrepancies – so, if you want to optimise your Magento store, you will be focusing more on your inventory management processes!
3. Ensure visibility across the fulfilment process.
You need to ensure that there is complete visibility across your supply chain. This is because only where there is full visibility can you address the shortcomings in your business performance and ensure that all the aspects of your fulfilment procedure are aligned to meet customers’ demands.
To do this, it would be helpful for you to collaborate with your suppliers and ensure a clear communication line between you. This way, you will ensure that you have all the relevant product data at hand and sufficiently avoid any discrepancies from miscommunication.
Ensuring visibility across different aspects of the supply chain will also involve taking all of your sales staff on board and ensuring they have access to real-time updates on orders and inventory. This will ensure that it is not only you, but the rest of your team that is in line with increasing the visibility of your order management procedures.
4. Automate wherever you can.
As mentioned earlier, there should be some manual effort from your end to ensure that your Magento shop is optimised to entertain as many orders as possible. Yet, it’s best if you try and automate wherever you can.
This is simply because with the help of automation, you can ensure that all your processes are being completed at lightning fast speed, and that your customers don’t have to wait a lot before their orders are correctly processed!