Our business requires a lot of passing of information back and forth. First our customer places the order via our website. Then our back end software passes the information needed to fulfill the order to our vendors. It’s not uncommon for one order to require 5 or more vendors to fulfill tees. Then our vendor needs to electronically give us the tracking, which we then need to let our customer know that the order has shipped.
There are lots of things that can go wrong. Here is an incomplete list:
the order information can be rejected by our supplier’s software for a number of reasons
the vendor can fail to ship the order in a timely manner
the tracking information from our vendor can fail to load into our system
some vendors don’t make the products “on demand” and can be out of stock even though we took an order
In our software we built a page we call “notifications”. This was essentially a long page of links that looked like this:
Because of these systems we know if things aren’t progressing as we’d like them to. We still have a few weak spots. For instance if an order is marked as shipped we don’t follow up on the tracking number to make sure it’s progressing all the way to delivered. The technology exists but we would have to pay extra for it unless we build it ourselves.
It has taken us a long time to get our notifications to not have too many false positives, and it’s a constant work in progress. Too many false positives led to nothing seeming urgent because the real urgent items were buried by too many non-urgent items. We are working on that now. We’ve also added a nice UI tweak to allow us to sort by the type of issue, and that is a really big deal too because an order that our vendor rejects electronically is more urgent than an order that they are a day late in fulfilling. This is because the fulfillment delays are often not actual delays but a failure in the tracking number to update properly.
Most ecommerce businesses have a ton of moving parts. But with the right systems in place the problems can “come to your employees” instead of your employees having to go find them.