How Leading Brands Are Processing Orders This Black Friday/Cyber Monday
Friday, November 9, 2018Lauren Macdonald
Busy online brands and merchants find themselves in a major bind on Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, when they’re forced to bring in staff and pay overtime to handle the spike in order volume. Each order made by a customer needs to be processed, picked, packaged, and shipped. And, many of these orders come back as returns.
The holiday season can be a logistical nightmare for the warehouse, the finance team, the IT team and operations.
Safari Ltd., seller of toys that teach, is one such brand that was in this bind a year ago. Every order that came into their online toy shop kicked off manual human intervention. Because of this painful experience – when everyone had to work over the holidays – they made the decision to join the ranks of leading brands who have a much easier and faster method of processing their orders – with an integration platform as a service (iPaaS).
eBridge Connections recently sat down with a few of the Safari team, in sunny Orlando for
the SAP Business One conference, and they walked us through their past processes (back when the busy season meant a lot of headaches for their staff). Here’s what we learned.
Everything was manual.
Their company was growing, fast. And when the busy season rolled around, Safari Ltd. had to have all hands-on deck in order to keep up with manual data entry as the orders flowed in.
“I can remember all of us sitting at our desks, working long hours over the Holidays, manually inputting data fast and furiously between our online store and our accounting application,” said Javier, IT Manager at Safari Ltd. “It was insane.”
Each time a new order was received, the sales order data had to be manually entered in their back-office, inventory levels had to be adjusted, and the shipping and tracking information had to be entered back into their online store. It was taking way too long for items to be picked, packaged and shipped and consumer expectations were not being met.
Safari Ltd. knew it was time to improve their efficiency and do what many smart retailers had done before them: Integrate their systems and automate data flow.
How top brands are processing orders:
Today, Safari Ltd. can’t imagine life without bi-directional ERP to eCommerce integration – it is the key to success when processing sales orders during the busy toy buying season.
After selecting Shopify Plus, ChannelAdvisor, and SAP Business One ERP as the platforms of choice for running their business, Safari Ltd. reached out to eBridge Connections for help getting all of these platforms to communicate with one another more effectively.
Below are just some of the many fields associated with Sales Orders that are automated back and forth across business systems for companies, like Safari Ltd.
With automation, processing sales orders is fast, and accurate. Items can be picked, packaged, and shipped to customers in record time. And, there’s no need for employees to tackle long hours of manual data entry.
Mistakes are avoided, and customers have a great shopping experience.
Fulfill orders faster by syncing and integrating your ERP and eCommerce