Our New Customizable Order Fulfillment Module for WooCommerce
Managing and fulfilling orders in WooCommerce can indeed pose certain challenges for business owners. Especially for those who have very limited resources, or new to e-Commerce and inexperienced in warehouse operations, the overall efficiency can hardly be satisfactory. It sounds simple though. The tasks involved to complete an order are indeed very tedious. From verifying customer payment, confirming stock availability, picking, preparing shipping documents, replenishing, packing and arranging couriers for delivery. Then during the process, let alone extra steps required for international shipments and sales returns, errors and mistakes are inevitable. Under those circumstances you will need much more extra time and resources to get the job done right. Without a proper system or procedure, the workload can easily become overwhelming even with a slightest order volume.
Everybody knows efficiency is paramount in today’s business environment. To help our clients alleviate their pain caused by a sluggish order handling process, we have worked with them, developed and launched a new Order Fulfillment Module for WooCommerce. The module is not just flexible. It is totally customizable to meet any needs.
In this article we’ll briefly introduce to you what additional functions and features our Order Fulfillment Module for WooCommerce is providing to streamline, standardize and satisfy all parties involved.
The number one WordPress’s e-Commerce choice
WooCommerce is apparently the most popular, if not the number one e-Commerce choice for WordPress. Needless to mention it is a very powerful and comprehensive e-Commerce platform. It enables users to transform their WordPress website into fully a functional online store, allowing them to sell literally any kind of products, be them physical, virtual/ downloadable, services, subscriptions or memberships. And with the help of some plugins and setup efforts, owners can take their store further to sell highly personalized and configurable items such as ‘web-to-print’ smart phone cases or retail paper bags. Customers can preview and play around with their own ideas using an interactive product designer before ordering. Its applications and usages are unprecedentedly versatile and multifaceted.
Openness and Customizability
For us as a software developer, WooCommerce has this biggest advantage of openness and customizability. Sometimes it is essential to add proprietary features in your own store in order to adapt to the ever changing business needs and market conditions. You might not just need to work on the storefront to create a unique brand identity and customer experience, improve mobile responsiveness and SEO, or boost conversion rates and sales turnover. While in the backend, perhaps you also need connect your store to other systems to streamline your operations, improve order fulfillment rate and inter-departmental communications to deliver exceptional customer service.
Throughout these years, we have received numerous requests from our clients and brought to them a wide variety of website customizations for WooCommerce. From what we see, one of the most sought-after areas for enhancements in WooCommerce goes to Shipping, Delivery and Order Fulfillment. We have to make it clear though. It does not mean this particular area is a weak link in WooCommerce. The truth is every business has some unique requirements in their fulfillment process due to their differences in product category, order volume, fulfillment cycle, warehouse resources, etc. Before we delve deeper, let’s do a quick walkthrough of how basic order fulfillment is done in WooCommerce.
The Standard Order Fulfillment Process in WooCommerce
When a customer places an order and completes the checkout process on a WooCommerce store, the system records the details of the purchase. In general order details include a unique order number, order date, products, quantities ordered, customer’s contact, billing, shipping and payment information.
Order Status
Each order is color-coded with a descriptive status for easy identification:
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- Orange — On Hold: The order is awaiting payment confirmation. If the option is enabled, stock is reduced, but you need to confirm payment.
- Green — Processing: Payment has been received (paid), and the stock has been reduced. The order is awaiting fulfillment.
- Blue — Completed: Order fulfilled and complete.
- Red — Failed: The customer’s payment failed or was declined, and no payment has been successfully made.
- Grey — Pending payment: The order has been received, but no payment has been made. Pending payment orders are generally awaiting customer action.
- Grey — Canceled: The order was canceled by an admin or the customer.
- Grey — Refunded: Orders are automatically put in the Refunded status when an admin or shop manager has fully refunded the order’s value after payment.
Depending on whether your WooCommerce store is accepting manual payment, an order moves through statuses from On Hold or Pending Payment to Failed or Processing then Completed, Canceled, or Refunded. See the following flow chart for an overview and brief explanation about the overall process:
Completed Orders
As soon as the order is packed and ready to go, you can then change its status to Completed. This simply means the order is either awaiting pickup from the courier or it has left your premises and on its way to the customer. By default the customer will receive an email notification about this change of order status. And when you set an order to Completed, nothing on it can be changed. The order processing cycle in the system is finished at this point.
We are not going to explain each order status in detail here. To learn more about the their standard usage and implication, please check the Managing Orders Documentation in WooCommerce.
What is missing between Processing and Completed
As we have seen, managing orders in WooCommerce is pretty simple and straightforward. What is missing though, is for us to do partial shipment (by entering a specific shipped quantities) and/ or complete an order at the line/ item level.
Imagine you don’t have all the products/ quantities in stock to deliver to the customer. You can either wait until all of them are available for shipping. Or ship part of the order, i.e. to first ship whatever is there in stock. In the latter case, on one hand you need to keep track of the shipped and unfulfilled items. On the other hand, you couldn’t set the order to Completed. Or else both the system and the customer is assuming everything in the order has been delivered. You need to find somewhere to maintain records of which items in the order have been shipped and which ones haven’t.
3rd Party WooCommerce Plugins for Shipping and Order Management
You won’t be left alone in the WordPress world. WordPress and so WooCommerce are renowned for their colossal library of plugins that makes them extensible. Practically you can always change how your online store looks and functions with these plugins. When we were doing our research, we found a few of them that are actually quite useful for enhancing your order processing in regards to picking and handling partial shipment:
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- Partial Orders: This plugin allows you to set each individual item in the order as shipped.
- Split Orders: This extension allows you to split orders, moving line items into a new order to process separately.
- Printing Invoices and Packing Lists: This plugin allows you to easily print invoices, packing lists, and pick lists straight from the Orders page and allows customer to view invoices from the ‘My Account’ page.
- Automatic Order Printing: This plugin allows you to create, customize and print your invoices, packing slips automatically using PrintNode.
- Pick List: This plugin simplifies picking, packing, and tracking with integrated QR and barcode scanning.
The above list provides a handful of plugins as a reference. In many cases either one of them or them working in combination can elevate your order process by a big margin.
How is our Order Fulfillment Module for WooCommerce better?
Frankly we can’t say it’s better. We would rather say our approach to the resolution is different. It gives e-Commerce store owners and operators the following benefits:
#1. Total customizability
We have total control how the module works. So in case if it doesn’t fit into your operation the way you want it, we can do modifications to make it work. For example, if you are running a trading company, you might just a rather standard picking list for your warehouse. Yet the required format could be different for every business. However, if you are selling more personalized and customer-configurable products, your staff probably need a detail work order to prepare the items before they are made available to send to the customer.
There is one other case that we can share. A client of us is taking prepayments from their customers. With the money the store receives they have to send their freshly made pet foods to their customers on a weekly basis. Our system does not just provide with them all the basic required order documents. But also a delivery schedule that tells them what to prepare and deliver in the next few days.
#2. A centralized order management console
You can find all your order on a centralized Order Management Console. This is where you can find, review all of your orders, whether they are open or completed, generate picking list, enter and inquire on your shipping transactions.
#3. Pick and ship in 2 steps
We skipped Pack and split the (Pick, Pack, Ship) order fulfillment process into Pick and Ship before completing.
With this Pick function, warehouse staff can use it to record which items are picked and moved to the packing station. Picking List are available in different formats. User can choose to print it by Order or Item to suit their own picking pattern. Then once all items in an order are shipped, the order status in WooCommerce is set to Completed automatically.
#4. Automated Shipping Order
Shipping orders (or packing lists) are generated automatically for every shipment. Don’t think this document is unimportant. Both the warehouse staff and the customers can use it to cross-check what item(s) are supposed to be there in the box.
#5. Combine different orders into a single shipment
Apart from partial shipment, you can also put different orders together and send them to the customer in one single shipment. And of course, these orders must come from the same customer account and have the same shipping address. It is easy to understand. We do this to reduce costs and workloads.
#6. Minimize the use and installation of excessive plugins
We deliberately make it a standalone system. One of the ideas is to avoid any potential limitations imposed by the framework/ SDK of WordPress. We have more flexibility in terms of managing user roles, designing our own UIs and workflows. Besides, with this design we can eliminate any overheads added to your WooCommerce store.
We do not just stop here. From time to time we will be adding new features and eventually have it integrated with different couriers worldwide as per clients’ feedbacks.
Wrapping up
Lacking the capability to do partial, scheduled and combined shipment is a missing puzzle commonly seen in most e-Commerce platforms. When a customer posts a bad review about your online store. Most of the time it has nothing to do with your products. They are usually more about longer-than-promised delivery lead time, damaged packaging, poor order condition or customer service.
One of the signals is when you get more after-sales calls related to backend operations, the root cause is a loosen fulfillment process. Dealing with it can be frustrating. But we can fix it. All you need is a flexible fulfillment system that integrates seamlessly with your e-Commerce store; to provide with your staff the information, transparency and established workflows to do their jobs efficiently. The result is an unbeatable store reputation together with a great customer experience. To learn more about how we can help you to achieve it, contact our e-Commerce specialist to arrange a call or demo.
Email: [email protected]
WhatsApp: +852 6099 4407
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