Since the pandemic started, many new e-commerce businesses have started, and the industry continues to grow. Online shopping has overtaken traditional shopping to make up a major chunk of all retail purchases–even dominating grocery stores in certain areas. It’s been noticed that most e-commerce businesses don’t like to invest their time and money in taking care of their logistics on their own. To facilitate them, many 3PL services and best ecommerce fulfillment services have started. Outsourcing logistics of delivering their orders saves businesses time and money. Their employees are able to focus more on getting orders and expanding the growth of their business. This blog post will highlight some technological trends in e-commerce fulfillment that we can see influencing the industry in the coming years.
The rise in e-Commerce Platforms
Gone are the days when only Amazon ruled the e-commerce market. Many new e-commerce platforms have entered the market, and the numbers continue to grow. These e-commerce platforms allow businesses to run online stores through a single website, mobile app, or even social media accounts. There are platforms for selling products online that are perfect for any business regardless of what they are selling. The prices are relatively low for all of these e-commerce platform services.
These platforms utilize a complete suite of software and services geared toward online shops. They feature APIs for Ecommerce Integration Services with numerous third-party products, such as social media platforms, payment processors, analytics tools, and analytics software. Merchant services include marketing tools and help with sales management and product security. Most platforms offer a wide range of templates that allow businesses to start selling almost immediately via their online shops.In the current scenario, many 3PL services are also investing in improving their technology to make order fulfillment easier. They are providing businesses with simple and easy solutions to look after and regulate their orders from the comfort of their offices or even homes. Let’s look at some of the trends in the industry.
Augmented Reality
We all know how time-consuming it can be to move goods around. Warehouses are full of boxes, and some products require extra storage space because they aren’t compact. This can lead to long distances between where the product is stored and where it’s needed. It also takes time to find and pick up the goods at the time of delivery.
To make their processes easier, warehouses have started benefitting from Augmented Reality (AR). By using overlaid computer graphics, AR makes it easy to locate and place everything in a warehouse. It can dramatically improve productivity and makes product placement easy.
Besides helping warehouses, AR is also benefitting the e-commerce businesses selling products that customers would like to see before buying. With the help of AR, you can look at the products from behind the screen as if you’re present at the store. You can also try different clothes and place them on your body to see how they look before making a purchase.
Automation and Robots
In today’s competitive market, sellers are forced to look for fast and cost-effective ways to maintain their edge over their competitors. We all know that Amazon continues to roll out automated solutions for sellers across all of its platforms, and now other e-commerce retailers are also investing in it. Many e-commerce stores are using automation technology to streamline several areas of their business. This includes warehouse and labor tasks, fraud detection, automated product recommendations for customers, and even marketing. 3PL services now also allow sellers to monitor and automate tasks such as cataloging, order management, and repricing across multiple marketplaces from a single dashboard.
Order Tracking
It’s such a hassle to keep track of your orders once they’ve been dispatched from the warehouse. E-commerce businesses are particularly worried about their international orders going across the seas to other countries. In case of any unfortunate event, e-commerce businesses can lose out on customers and suffer heavy losses.
To make the process easier and safer, order fulfillment companies are now investing more time and money in developing order tracking tools for businesses as well as customers. These easy-to-use tracking tools can allow businesses, as well as their clients, to keep track of their orders. There are mobile apps that automatically keep track of wherever the order goes. People can find its location with just a click. These apps automatically notify all the relevant parties when an order is dispatched, arrives at a warehouse, or is ready for delivery. A single dashboard allows all the relevant parties to communicate and keep track of things without having to exchange emails or call each other.
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