Thread: Share your order shipping experience

This is what we do to when we receive the inventory and during shipping.

A lot of our products don't have UPC, so we can't use it. We create SKUs for every product. Do we use SKUs? Honestly not. When we process the orders, we pick the items from the shelves by looking at the product name and the option on the product. We don't use scanners or any automated process. We process less than 20 orders every day, so we don't have issue with this process. But we are scared of a situation we have to process 50 orders.

When we receive the inventory, we look at the product name and update the inventory in the admin area. It is painful as we don't use scanner. We can't repy on the UPC on the product, some products even don't have.

I'm looking at ways to improve our inventory management and shipping process. How many of you tag the product with a bar code when the items comes? Is your SKU based on the shelf location?

Please share how you do the inventory receiving and shipping.

We carry many products that do not use UPC codes as well. We do use SKU's though, and we have another wrinkle that makes things complicated. We sell on our store and on ebay and on amazon.

To beat that, we have an internal database to track our skus/quantites and we run sync processes to update our store, ebay listings, and amazon listings. the sync'ers also take care of delisting or relisting (for the most part anyways) everything.

If you are only using the store and you're using AspDotNetStorefront it should be taking care of your inventory for you.

I don't see anything wrong with looking at the product description instead of the sku, it's 6 or a half dozen.

We process roughly 60-90 orders on a normal day, usually 200 on a Monday (we dont' shipping on weekends) and during Christmas we peaked at 600 orders on a Monday and around 300 for other weekdays.

We did that all with 2 people taking care of shipping.

Hope that was what your looking for.

Originally Posted by campbelt101

We carry many products that do not use UPC codes as well. We do use SKU's though, and we have another wrinkle that makes things complicated. We sell on our store and on ebay and on amazon.

To beat that, we have an internal database to track our skus/quantites and we run sync processes to update our store, ebay listings, and amazon listings. the sync'ers also take care of delisting or relisting (for the most part anyways) everything.

If you are only using the store and you're using AspDotNetStorefront it should be taking care of your inventory for you.

I don't see anything wrong with looking at the product description instead of the sku, it's 6 or a half dozen.

We process roughly 60-90 orders on a normal day, usually 200 on a Monday (we dont' shipping on weekends) and during Christmas we peaked at 600 orders on a Monday and around 300 for other weekdays.

We did that all with 2 people taking care of shipping.

Hope that was what your looking for.

Thanks for the response.

We don't have any employees, so 50 orders is hard to manage in a day. Sometimes it has taken one hour or more to process 15 orders. This is just to pick and pack, weight check, print label and put label.

In your case, I feel you need to automate the process. This can save you some manual hours. I'm surprised at the process of two people picking and packing 300 orders. This may lead to errors. If one person can process one order in 3 minutes that takes some 15 hours for 300 orders. If you ask me, how can your automate, I don't have any idea.

We tried to sell some of our products in the Amazon Marketplace. They require a UPC unless the product is already in the market place. Google is becoming very strict on UPC also.

Originally Posted by tabletennisstore

Thanks for the response.

We don't have any employees, so 50 orders is hard to manage in a day. Sometimes it has taken one hour or more to process 15 orders. This is just to pick and pack, weight check, print label and put label.

In your case, I feel you need to automate the process. This can save you some manual hours. I'm surprised at the process of two people picking and packing 300 orders. This may lead to errors. If one person can process one order in 3 minutes that takes some 15 hours for 300 orders. If you ask me, how can your automate, I don't have any idea.

We tried to sell some of our products in the Amazon Marketplace. They require a UPC unless the product is already in the market place. Google is becoming very strict on UPC also.

Our internal inventory management database has worked out pretty well for us. One product that we use that is very helpful is Endicia. I'm not sure if AspDotNetStorefront supports it or not, but that's how we do all our postage. It is tied into our database, so orders show up in the database automatically.

Then the shippers select orders to create a pick list, pick it, and then one by one pack, weigh, and print the shipping label. The process is pretty stream lined and it works fine with more than one person shipping.

As for Amazon... we have been selling on Amazon for 2 or 3 years, but it wasn't until last year when we became a Featured Merchant that business really picked up. I would say stick with it, keep your numbers up, and eventually, it will start to kick in.

A good IT person is worth their weight in gold. Automation is the key for a very small company.