Here are three strategies to optimize omnichannel fulfillment and overcome complexity.

Adapt to changing consumer shopping habits

3PLs have encountered ongoing challenges, including shifting consumer shipping trends that accelerated during the pandemic and continue to change today. Suddenly, your customers are asking you to handle not only B2B pallet shipments plus thousands of individual eCommerce orders. Continuing to meet your customers’ fulfillment expectations places immense strain on your resources.

To address this challenge, 3PLs should invest in scalable software and automation tools that optimize order processing. Automated systems will also maintain accurate stock levels and efficient inventory allocation between channels.

Meet varied fulfillment requirements

Your customers’ requirements can vary widely. Some may need special packaging, inserts or labeling. Others may work with various retailers, each with their own demands.

Keeping track of the requirements on your own can be daunting. Plus, these requirements frequently change, and non-compliance can result in chargebacks and strained relationships.

To ease this challenge, you can work with a third-party expert that tracks requirements and changes on your behalf. This partnership will boost your agility and responsiveness to your customers’ evolving needs.

Ensure your systems work together

Customizing processes and systems to meet diverse customer demands is part of your daily routine. But making all these customizations work together harmoniously is the real challenge.

For example, some customers may have straightforward Shopify integrations. Others demand point-to-point EDI connections for working with large retailers.

Building one-time connections to all your customers and systems creates a fragmented and unsustainable tech stack. To conquer this issue, it’s imperative to develop a comprehensive technology strategy. This strategy should encompass scalable systems and processes, a cohesive integration approach, and strategic partnerships to provide support in achieving your goals.

Avoid IT overload with SPS Commerce

Instead of taking on cumbersome IT projects to meet these needs, 3PLs can explore solutions that allow them to scale, optimize and connect their systems. This is where the SPS for 3PLs solution can play a vital role.

We understand the complexities logistics providers face daily. Our solution offers a single, standardized data feed into your system of record, whether that’s a custom-built system or an out-of-the-box WMS. This means you can focus your efforts on value-added activities that truly matter to your customers.

Connect with our expert team to explore how our tailored 3PL solution can help you stay in sync with your customers without straining your internal resources.

What is a packing slip?

A packing slip is a document, usually included inside a shipped package, that lists the items included inside that package. They usually contain information like the SKU numbers, dimensions, weights, and quantity of items – all the pertinent information a shipping department uses to determine how to fill an order. Instructions for returning an item are often included as part of the packing slip. The buyer can check the contents against a packing slip to make sure all the items are included in the shipment. 

Invoices may also be included with a shipment and seem similar to packing slips, even in how they’re formatted, but the function of each is quite different. A packing slip shows the physical objects that were included in a shipment, while an invoice details the financial information like totals, payments, payment date, etc. 

Branded packing slips contain the logo, colors, and font of the retailer or brand, and are of particular use in eCommerce shipments. They help tie the digital world where the order took place to the physical delivery of the items – a worthwhile connection to make when the customer is not visiting a brick-and-mortar location.

Why are packing slips important?

There’s more to branded packaging than just a logo on the packing slip. As retailers increase the number of orders they ship directly to consumers, packing slips can help enhance customer loyalty. Branded shipping materials remind consumers who they ordered from, and if they like how the brand or retailer performed, they’re more likely to become repeat customers. 

When online orders are delivered to a customer’s doorstep, they should include information about how to manage returns. While returns are a common occurrence, they’re often one of the last things retailers think about when they start drop shipping. Including return information in deliveries makes it easy for customers to return the items to the correct location, and when the return process is easy it reflects well on the retailer.

Aside from maintaining and building brand integrity, a branded packing slip is a useful paper trail when items are damaged or missing altogether. Sometimes SKUs from the same order are kept in different warehouses, necessitating that the order be split into separate shipments. In this instance, packing slips are a helpful way for the recipient to keep track of their ordered items. 

Providing correctly branded packing slips can also help suppliers and 3PLs avoid chargebacks. Retailers could potentially fine suppliers or 3PLs that aren’t following their packing slip requirements.

Creating packing slips at scale

Since many suppliers use a 3PL to handle their warehousing and shipping, it’s important for 3PLs and other logistics vendors to be able to create branded packing slips on a large scale, for each of their brands or retailers. This can be a huge undertaking for a logistics company.

Regardless of your IT capabilities, SPS Commerce can help you meet these requirements with three different options for creating branded packing slips. Customers who use SPS Fulfillment, our comprehensive order management program, can produce packing slips as part of their user experience. We have pre-built automation solutions for creating packing slips available either via our adapter or native within our system integrations. 

SPS Commerce also offers a service that allows vendors and 3PLs to accommodate the need for customized branded packing slips, inserts and more. Dev Center from SPS provides access to pre-made packing slip templates for any retailer. With these templates at hand, logistics providers can avoid custom builds for individual retailers, saving time and resources best spent elsewhere. 

The templated APIs from Dev Center incorporate the latest trading partner requirements for color, font size, logos and more. This helps ensure that 3PLs and vendors can easily stay in compliance with retailer requirements and avoid chargebacks. 

To connect to our Packing Slip API, check out Dev Center. Or if you aren’t a developer, look at our Fulfillment solution for additional packing slip options.

Need a faster way to create your drop ship labels?

Learn more about our API keys for Packing Slips and Shipping labels by checking out our API Developers Guide.

Check out the API Developers Guide

This holiday readiness guide features three seasonal challenges you can start mitigating now, along with a few ways SPS can help.

Challenge 1: Getting your team ready

Your employees are the backbone of your business, and they’ll be handling a big portion of the holiday challenges as they arise. With talent shortages and turnover at a high point, it’s more important than ever to ensure your team has everything they need to meet seasonal expectations and do their jobs efficiently.

Equipping your team with the tools and training they’ll need to streamline order processes, optimize channels and analyze critical data is the first step toward a successful holiday season. Leveraging solutions that improve automation, item data and sell-through metrics can help your employees handle the uptick in holiday demand.

How we help you accelerate team readiness

SPS Commerce offers a range of solutions and product features to help your teams prepare as orders start to ramp up. These solutions can work alongside the systems you already use to help your business keep up with demand.

• Our Fulfillment solution can increase the efficiency of your entire order process by making it faster and easier to manage. You can fulfill and invoice multiple orders at once with batch order processing, set up defaults to reduce manual keystrokes with auto-sourcing, and streamline the process of acknowledging orders with quick-send and auto-send acknowledgement capabilities. These standard features can help employees stay on top of increasing order volume while boosting accuracy and speed.
• SPS Assortment ensures you can seamlessly provide and update item data for your customers, so your team receives orders with accurate product information that will reduce order processing delays.
• SPS Analytics delivers the sell-through data your team needs to make smart supply adjustments and use prior-year performance to predict trends for the upcoming holiday season.

Combined, SPS Commerce offers everything your employees need to stay ahead of the seasonal rush.

Challenge 2: Preparing your partners

Your partners are essential to your holiday success, so keep the lines of communication clear and consistent. When your trading partners can’t get accurate data about your orders, it can lead to delays, shortages and a compromised customer experience.

Ensuring your partners get accurate information is key, but it’s also essential to consider their systems and best practices. Talking with all your partners (including retailers, 3PLs, warehouses, etc.) to understand their equipment and onboarding processes can help you determine the best ways to stay connected during the holidays.

How we help you keep partners prepared

With best-in-class solutions that keep data flowing between thousands of businesses, SPS Commerce can help your organization improve how it communicates with its entire partner network.

• Fulfillment features reporting and visibility capabilities to help you monitor transactions and track documents sent and received by your trading partners so you can manage and avoid any issues that may arise.
• Assortment makes it easier to transmit accurate product information to your retailers and gives consumers accurate details about the products they’re ordering.
• Analytics data uncovers holiday insights to help you set the right expectations with your partners for product volume, mix and more.

SPS Commerce offers the solutions that make the transfer of data smoother between partners, so holiday planning and execution can continue without roadblocks.

Challenge 3: Creating a Plan B

Let’s imagine a wonderful outcome for the holiday buying season: Your product is wildly popular and flying off the shelves across every channel. Now the downside: Your retail partners need more product to satisfy the remaining demand, and your preferred carrier is having issues meeting shipping expectations.

It’s impossible to plan for all the emerging contingencies that could come up over the holidays, but having a general backup plan in case something unexpected happens can keep your business moving forward despite unseen setbacks. To start, think about some of the pain points around shipping and supply, and whether you have alternate partners or practices that you can rely on if a key element breaks down.

How we help you make a contingency plan

With products and services that give your business maximum flexibility and oversight, SPS Commerce can help you make a clear contingency plan for unexpected holiday challenges.

• Fulfillment’s actionable insights and workflow help you manage orders and understand which ones are ready to ship or invoice, so you can prioritize your time and create strategies to stop those problems before they start.
• Assortment delivers a way to share item data that can help you avoid errors and ensure your back-up plans are feasible.
• Analytics gives you a roadmap from prior years that can help you avoid pitfalls in supply and shipping while planning for what comes after the holidays.

By combining the capabilities of all the solutions from SPS Commerce, your business can stay ahead of holiday challenges. Together, our solutions form a purpose-built suite that can improve not only your holiday performance, but also your year-round efficiency.

A successful holiday season starts now. Contact SPS Commerce today.

As a leader in the retail industry, SPS Commerce is employing next generation technology to drive the cloud-based solutions of the future. Businesses are shifting to the cloud, where they expect a seamless experience and solutions that work together with minimal complexity. More than one million customers use QuickBooks Online globally, including 30,000 retailers in the United States.

Experience the benefits of QuickBooks EDI solutions

SPS Commerce can now address the needs of those suppliers, brands and retailers that rely on QuickBooks Online. With Integrated Fulfillment for QuickBooks Online, users will experience:

• Efficient collaboration between trading partners;
• Workflow automation;
• Turnkey EDI services;
• At-a-glance visibility into all orders;
• And so much more.

With QuickBooks EDI solutions from SPS Commerce, you can quickly and cost-effectively connect with your retail customers. Easily extend the order fulfillment capabilities in QuickBooks using our QuickBooks EDI integration. Scale your business by leveraging QB EDI and our network of 50,000 subscribing customers.

Learn more about how SPS can help you quickly connect to your retail partners with QuickBooks EDI. 

Ultimately, a company needs to address the following question:

How do you successfully manage your company’s inventory position to take full advantage of changing trends while being nimble enough to adapt to changing market demands?

Many companies are finding that the right balance is helped with two words: inventory information. The right information at the right time can actually replace the need for a certain layer of inventory, enabling organizations to become more flexible while continuing to meet the needs of the customer. I am not suggesting that you can put a stack of information on a truck instead of a box of products and send it to your customers. Instead, I am suggesting that the right information can be a replacement for inventory in your supply chain, whether it is in your warehouse, on the water or on your store shelves.

And that inventory information doesn’t have to be solely contained within one organization. Sharing the right information in the right manner with your supply chain partners enables them to make smarter decisions and recommendations for your business.

What types of data can help replace inventory with information?

With the right data, buying organizations can gain the confidence needed to operate with less inventory. Here are a couple of examples of how the right information can help:

• Order data: retailers often don’t have the information they need from their trading partners to know if orders will be fulfilled on time or in full. Because of the lack of data, retailers overcompensate by ordering excess safety stock. To improve visibility into order status, retailers should require suppliers to send updated order information via order acknowledgements in response to the initial order as well as any order updates as things change. For example, if a supplier determines 24 hours after they receive an order that they can ship complete, but realize later that they are short on inventory, they should share that information with the retailer. Acknowledgements allow suppliers to set expectations with buying organizations about exactly what will be delivered, and when. In addition, they allow the retailer to communicate potential corrections, such as price discrepancies.
• Shipping data: similarly, retailers often don’t have the insight they need to prepare for the arrival of the shipment, including knowing when the order will ship, how it was packed, what was packed and most importantly, what is not being delivered. This also causes the retailer to mitigate risks by ordering more inventory than they need. Implementing ship notices with trading partners is a key way to replace inventory with information. By doing so, the retailer can determine “plan B” for managing customer demand, as well as resources needed to receive the shipment and expedite the receiving process.

Reduce inventory & safety stock by having better trading partner data

The impact of a lack of inventory information runs deeper than many buying organizations realize, often tying up capital worth tens of millions of dollars each year. With better information, organizations can often reduce inventory by up to 5-20 percent by automating the exchange of critical data with their trading partner community. 

Want to learn more about how to trim inventory levels with better trading partner data? Visit our website or download our Inventory Management Playbook.

To create the optimal shopping experience, eCommerce retailers (and their drop-ship suppliers) have found that it all comes down to the three F’s:

• Fast Delivery
• Flexible Orders & Returns
• Free Shipping

The secret to the success of each of these steps is automated trading partner relationships. Only when a retailer and a supplier (and their systems) work together can these processes can become deliver the speed and visibility necessary for eCommerce order fulfillment.

Fast: eCommerce order delivery times get shorter

Speed is essential, but can you consistently deliver…especially with drop-ship orders that are out of your direct control?

The key is to automate your trading partner relationships. eCommerce orders should flow directly into an ERP, OMS or WMS solution so fulfillment can start the second it’s received, routing orders to the supplier for drop-ship fulfillment if necessary. Any stops along the way for keying in orders translate into delays that are no longer an option. Orders simply cannot sit on a desk for data entry at your site or your suppliers. Why does fast shipping matter? Does your customer really need their purchase tomorrow? It doesn’t matter, it is expected. And, if an eCommerce order is slow to reach its destination, delayed shipments can drastically influence a consumer’s decision to purchase from you again.

Flexible: order and return options required

Retailers are no longer an online store or a brick-and-mortar store. Shoppers think of you as one entity and want to interact with your website, stores and staff as a single brand. You no longer get to choose how a shopper can order and return their items, and if you make it difficult, they won’t be around for long.

BOPIS and BORIS are an important part of a retailer’s operations. BOPIS can influence repeat purchases just as much as free returns or exchanges. Shoppers are embracing this channel as a means to skip the line and save time. Not only does BOPIS make eCommerce orders easy and faster to pick up, but retailers are also finding that shoppers make additional purchases in-store when picking up an order. The same can likely be said of shoppers coming in-store for a return. If you aren’t offering this service today, you are missing sales opportunities.

The bottom line is that customers like choices. With automated trading partnerships, retailers can better manage inventory at all of their stores, DCs and suppliers. You can place items where they are most likely to be purchased and/or shipped for fast delivery.

Free: eCommerce order fulfillment at no cost to consumers

Lastly, shoppers do not want to pay for shipping. This continues to be one of the biggest turnoffs to online consumers who have grown accustomed to free shipping, thanks to Amazon Prime. Retailers and suppliers must streamline their operations to cut costs if they want to maintain their margins on eCommerce orders.

We’ve seen retailers and drop-ship suppliers tackle new efficiencies from a number of avenues:

• Automate with EDI or APIs to improve trading partner compliance, thus avoiding any chargebacks or other fees
• Integrate their orders with a shipping solution to make the picking, packing and labeling process faster and less error-prone
• Receive inventory updates more often to ensure access to more items if sales take off. In the case of drop shipping, inventory details to ensure they can fulfill every SKU listed on the retailer’s website

All three foundations of digital order excellence rely on fulfillment and strong vendor partnerships. To learn how your omnichannel retail relationships can provide more profits and better customer service, visit our omnichannel retail page for more information.

Order fulfillment is more complex in an omnichannel environment.

Enlist the help of your trading partners to profitably satisfy today’s consumer. Download our white paper to help you strategize your action plan.

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But Millennials are also not the only age group disrupting the status quo. Now you have to contend with the growing influence and spending power of their kids, Generation Z.

Ten years ago, the Millennials were the largest group that was influencing family purchasing. Parents of Millennials wanted their kids to eat healthily, so they bought organic food. Parents had to drive their Millennial athletes to soccer and hockey, so they bought minivans and SUVs. Parents wanted to be able to reach their kids easily, so they bought them mobile phones.

Now Generation Z, born from 2000 on (or 1998, depending on who you ask), is in the influential stage. Also known as the iGeneration, the oldest ones are just now leaving home, entering college and earning their own money, but the younger ones are still influencing the purchasing of their Millennial parents. As more and more of them enter into adulthood, there are a few things you need to consider before Generation Z starts disrupting your industry. Basically, it’s going to be an intensified version of the Millennial tidal wave of change.

For one thing, Generation Z will become the largest generation of consumers by the year 2020. And they already account for $29 – $143 billion in direct spending. Figure out early what it is they want, and how they want it, and you can avoid those disruptions and get ahead of the game.

According to Forbes Magazine, the older Generation Z segment (ages 16 to 21) is spending the most of their money on cars (including gas, insurance, and taxes), groceries, entertainment, school (textbooks, tuition), mobile phone, restaurants, and debt payments. The younger Generation Zers (6 – 11) are spending their allowances on toys, candy, video games, movies, board games, magazines and comics and restaurants.

The iGeneration also believes in research. As many as 46% of them research items on their mobile devices before buying items in a store. So what does that mean for retailers? For one thing, if you’re not part of the omnichannel now, you’d better start soon. This means that not only does the online experience have to match the in-store experience — which has to be fun and enjoyable on its own — but you want to make sure your website is filled with product photos, inventory information, and as many product details and customer testimonials as you can stick on a single website.

This also means you can try to take advantage of both free two-day shipping to compete against the bigger stores and chains, as well as offering buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS or BOPUS) for people who can’t wait but can find a way to get to the store to pick up the same item in a few hours.

Malls may be primed for a comeback too. According to a Pricewaterhouse Cooper survey, 81% of young Gen Z said they prefer to shop in stores, while 40% will only shop in stores. In addition, 60% of young Gen Z prefer the mall for shopping, and malls are three times more popular than other types of stores. They also said they prefer “fun experiences” and “live events” in their favorites stores. Remember what we said about engaging in-store experiences? 

Of course, if things are going to start changing on the retail front because of the influence of the iGeneration, you’ll want to be ready for it. More mobile accessibility, better product information and inventory transparency, and even being able to analyze point of sales data and translate that into new sales and sourcing opportunities are all keys to success with Generation Z.

SPS Commerce can show you how to do all of that. Ask to speak to one of our retail experts to answer all of your questions.

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We’re starting to see more retailers use it with their suppliers for the same purpose: an advanced warning of an incoming shipment of returned merchandise from the retailer to the supplier.

Just like the ASN tells the retailer what products are being shipped — a confirmation and/or amendment to an originating PO — the reverse ASN tells the supplier what’s in their incoming shipment, and they can receive against that.

The reverse ASN lets the supplier see if the products are resellable and can be put into inventory again and what has to be trashed.

I especially see this happening in situations where the supplier has drop shipped orders on behalf of the retailer, and as per their returns policy, the end user brought the item back to the retailer. The retailer usually has a return center or a space in the distribution center where they accumulate products there, usually in a bin or on a pallet.

They store it by supplier, and at some point when they get enough goods, they request a return authorization (EDI 180). The RGA will capture the reason why the items are returned, which gives the supplier a little more information to make their trash-or-return decision. The retailer will dispose of the disposables, pack everything else up, and call a carrier or deliver it on their own trucks. Those items going back are packed and shipped, and the reverse ASN is transmitted back to the vendor.

The vendor will then receive the file and make the decision about what they’ll have the retailer do with the items. Some suppliers may have them destroy the defective items, and they’ll give allowances back. Another possibility is that the supplier may want the items back, regardless of condition.

In other cases, the supplier will receive the reverse ASN, reference all the items and quantities, and then go through the goods themselves to decide if the items can go back into inventory, if they’ll be trashed, or put them in a “quarantine” to decide later.

Without EDI, someone on the retailer side probably filled in a hand-created spreadsheet where they’ve accumulated the various items and wrote them down. When they got received return authorization, they would print out the spreadsheet as a packing slip, and send it back. But the supplier wouldn’t necessarily know the goods were on their way back unless someone told them. This is another benefit of the reverse ASN in an EDI system: suppliers can plan on receiving the goods and have the appropriate staff on hand to deal with them.

Using the reverse ASN is a fairly new and evolving use for retailers and suppliers, and they’re starting to realize they need to keep better track of their returns, especially as more suppliers are managing drop shipping. This means retailers and suppliers need to work out a standard returns policy, which may see more drop-shipped returns being brought back to retail stores. And that means we’re going to see a lot more Reverse ASNs as those goods are shipped back to the individual suppliers from retailer distribution centers.

(We’ll have a more in-depth look at how returns are done in a future blog post shortly.)

If you would like to learn how to use the Reverse ASN, to develop your new returns policy, or even to learn more about the EDI process in general, please visit the SPS Commerce website for additional information. You can also request a free demonstration or to speak with one of our EDI experts to answer all of your questions.