#supply-chain
Thread
RETAIL OPERATIONS AND ORDER MANAGEMENT
Okay, we are growing heavily on our B2B / Retail Business. And we are getting overwhelmed by the manual work required.
Essentially, we are doing ~20 B2B orders on average weekly, with some being several pallets and others being a smaller package. It ranges from ~40.000 EUR orders to ~1.000 EUR orders.
However, we are currently managing this through our Shopify back-end, then sending it to a B2C focused warehouse, and then doing invoices in our back-end finance system. Very inefficient, highly prone to errors. We also currently have a full-time hire only handling this, which is just way too much salary for this process.
How do others here handle this process? Any system your are using? Any learnings? What is resources spent on managing orders?
We do this for NHS and research trials. Fairly similar system except we provide the buyer with an 100% off discount code so it is up to them to place the correct order on our ecommerce site. All orders are fulfilled through our B2C warehouse. For invoicing it's fairly straightforward because our discount code prefixes are unique to the buyer so we can download orders and filter by the correct prefix to collate all orders by a single buyer over a set time period. We only invoice monthly so it's very lightweight in terms of team resource, since ordering and fulfilment is all happening in the background without any intervention on our side
@Napala - Habitual okay, interesting - what size of orders is your average?
I would assumme then you don't need pallets sometimes, as that would require different packaging in terms of 6-packs etc. than B2C orders by your warehouse? Or how have you solved this?
I am unsure if I can get e.g. Douglas in Germany to order through our website...........
Pretty wide range, c £100-£3k. But you're right that they are usually not on pallets. In the cases where we have needed to send pallets we discuss with our 3PL before sending an order through. They are super flexible though so in the case of higher volumes of large orders we would probably negotiate a set rate. Fair enough re douglas though hah
hmm okay, that is pretty cool - do you have an automatic "warning" system that then stops the order, if it needs to go on a pallet?
Who is your 3PL? 🙂
they're called fetch, only in the UK though
got ya
we are on ShipBob in Uk
nothing automated atm for large orders, would go the other way in that if the 3PL sees something looks large they would get in touch with us about the best way to pack it
i dont think its the ultimate solution but works for current setup for us
Okay, got it! Thx a ton - maybe we could implement self-ordering for the smaller clients
yeah thats a good idea if you can manage to make the lower value ones a bit more self serve
Following as we’re looking to scale B2B too this year! I’m surprised you got Shipbob to manage your volume, they screwed up so many of our B2B orders that it was one of the main reasons we ran away from them 😅
We use Cin7 Core
As our software
Have tried a few of the shopify wholesale apps but it doesn’t rly work well. Shopify plus also not rly set up to handle B2B well in my opinion
Thank you @Fred - Out'n'About!!