How to Automate Dropshipping Order Fulfillment: Best Tips and Solution

If you are embarking on a dropshipping business, you can avoid the workload of managing and delivering products. However, you need to be aware that there are issues about dropshipping order fulfillment such as the quality of goods, inventory levels, order tracking and other fulfillment issues. This could also be a big amount of work which requires some time, efforts and even money to tackle.

In the content below, you can learn what dropshipping order fulfillment is, how it works, its challenges, tips for it and our best solution.

What Is Dropshipping Order Fulfillment

Dropshipping order fulfillment refers to the process of managing and delivering customer orders in a dropshipping business model. In this model, you don’t need to keep any products in stock. When a customer places an order from your store, the third-party supplier will help you ship the product directly to your customer.

What Is Dropshipping Order Fulfillment Process

To have a good understanding of how dropshipping order fulfillment works, you can refer to the steps below.

Step 1: Your customer submits an order in your store.

Step 2: You receive the order and place it to your supplier or the supplier platform.

Step 3: You verify the order details and pay for the order.

Step 4: Your supplier ships the order to your customer on your behalf.

Challenges in Fulfilling Dropshipping Orders

Though there is no need to hold any inventory for your dropshipping business, you are likely to encounter some potential challenges in fulfilling orders as a dropshipper. Let’s have a close look at them.

Little Product Quality Control

Since you dropship with online suppliers, you don’t have direct control over the products. For example, because you can only check the product details like images on the web pages but not in person, you may find it hard to verify the quality of products. In this case, your customer may receive counterfeit goods and cause them unhappy with the shopping experience.

To avoid the risk, you can purchase product samples from your desirable suppliers to conduct order tests before you go into a formal partnership. Reading customer reviews for the supplier could also be a good way to test the product's quality.  

Difficult Inventory Management

As you rely on suppliers to store products and deliver them to end customers, you can not have an idea of how many products they may have in their warehouses in real-time and which countries they target, which may cause your supply chain disruptions such as online overstocking, stockouts and shipping unavailability.

Inefficient Communication with Suppliers

Your dropshipping business is usually an international one and has interactions with other eCommerce parties around the world. For this point, your suppliers may base in different countries and regions throughout the globe. This means they will not respond to your queries in time due to their different time zones. This can be tiresome especially when you have multiple suppliers.

Besides, if you are dealing with off-platform suppliers, you may need to chat with them repeatedly to confirm order details, which may be time-consuming.

Challenging Order Processing and Tracking

When it comes to dropshipping order fulfillment, dropshippers often face challenges in processing and tracking orders while they have multiple orders from multiple stores.

What you will need to care about is how to process orders from multiple sales channels quickly and track the order status because customers expect real-time updates on their orders. If this information is not readily available, it can create frustration and confusion.

Exhausting After-sale Service

Let’s say your customer doesn’t receive their orders or has other shipping issues. The customer may ask for solutions to product defects, shipping delays, or returns. For those requests, you must spend time and money coordinating with the supplier to address any concerns, such as exchanges or refunds.

Tips for Fulfilling Dropshipping Orders

No matter what difficulties you may have with dropshipping order fulfillment, there are some tips that you can follow to optimize your order fulfillment process. You can take advantage of those that you think may work for your dropshipping business management.

Partner with Reliable Suppliers

One good practice for fulfilling dropshipping orders is to cooperate with reliable suppliers. You can choose suppliers that are suitable for your business plan and connect with them at the right time. Such suppliers can be those who respond promptly, accept returns or have enough stock in case of emergencies.

So how to find trustworthy suppliers? Well, you can check the supplier store performance directly on their website which can indicate their reliability to some degree. Take AliExpress for example, you can investigate their years in business, the ratings and the types of products they sell.

Set Realistic Shipping Expectations

Being transparent with customers about shipping times can help build customer trust. Before you publish products to your online store, be sure to figure out shipping details including shipping method, shipping timeframes, shipping cost, etc. and clearly communicate them on your website to manage customer expectations.

Implement A Return Policy

When you dropship goods to customers, it’s a good idea to implement a return policy. If you have an existing return policy for your online items, customers are more likely to purchase your products because they can get added protection for their purchases in case there are any quality or shipping issues.

Automate Order Processing and Tracking

This is definitely an excellent way to streamline the whole order fulfillment process. By automating fulfillment order processing, you can save your time to focus on more important work such as brand building and marketing campaigns as well as reduce errors that may exist in manual operations.

Pro tip: To automate order processing and tracking for AliExpress dropshipping, DSers is a great option you can take into consideration.

Best Solution to Automating Dropshipping Order Fulfillment

As mentioned above, integrating with advanced software or app is one top option when you want to incorporate high technology into your dropshipping order fulfillment. As a top-notch dropshipping tool, DSers allows you to enjoy a wide range of automation features that will contribute a lot to your dropshipping business. In the following part, let’s focus on how it helps you with order fulfillment in dropshipping field.

Manage Multiple Orders From Multiple Stores in One Place

As your business expands, you may receive multiple orders from multiple stores. This requires you to switch between platforms to check order details and it could be a big project. To improve the efficiency, you can take advantage of DSers to manage orders from different stores with a single account.

As you can see below, once you have landed on the Open Orders page, choose your wanted stores from the Store Selector at the Top Bar and DSers will display orders from your selected stores all in one place.

Place Dropshipping Orders in Batches within Seconds

Have you been buried yourself in managing orders all day? If this is the case, you are likely to find it hard to balance your work. Luckily, with the DSers Bulk Order feature, you can process orders with little manual work.

The steps are as simple as shown below.

Step 1: Go to DSers Open Orders menu and access the Awaiting order tab.

Step 2: Click on the Checkbox to select all orders and click on the Place order to AliExpress button.

Automatically Synchronize Order Status and Tracking Numbers

For dropshippers, it is essential to track the status flow of orders to ensure that they are going on well throughout the fulfillment process. However, it is difficult to monitor the dynamics of every order and update them to customers in real time. As a result, it may lead to customer frustration and damage customer trust.

To solve the problem, you can leverage DSers to update the order status and tracking numbers between platforms automatically without any CSV files. That means that after you have placed and paid for orders, you can leave the rest work to DSers.

You can check the order status synchronization diagram between DSers, your store and AliExpress below.

Conclusion

As dropshipping order fulfillment involves supply-chain management, product selection, and order managing and processing, after-sale service and so on, it is a must-have to devote your time to it.

Thanks to the ever-growing automation technology, you are able to have access to dedicated tools like DSers for streamlined dropshipping order fulfillment process so that you can concentrate on your core businesses.
Want to learn more dropshipping tips? Check our DSers Blog for free!