Initial Order Placement

It should not be difficult for your customers to place orders. If you have an online store, the website should be user friendly, have a lot of pictures with the postings, and have a user friendly checkout process. Your clients should also have a variety of options to pay with, from a debit or credit card to a variety of electronic payments. If your products tend to be in a higher price range, you might want to consider payment plans as well.

If you only sell your products at a physical location, you might want to consider allowing customers to pay in cash, with a card, or with a check. You could also arrange for clients to pick up orders that they phone in, if you are comfortable doing so. With any orders, you will want to make sure that your clients have a deadline that they need to place orders by so you and your employees are not rushing around at the last minute to fill them.

Sales and Discounts

When it comes to reducing prices to get things sold faster, there is no better way than having special sales or discounts. However, there are a few things that must be taken into consideration when you are looking into having sales or giving discounts.

Before you do anything, you need to make sure that the sale or discount you want to have is good for your bottom line. If it will move more product at a faster rate, especially if the product would otherwise have to be counted as a loss, you are good to go. However, if such a sale will end up putting you close to or in the red, you might want to hold off until you can afford to have the sale or give the discounts that you want.

When it comes to sales, holidays are a given. Your business should ideally be set up to have sales during every holiday. If you want to advertise your sales, you will have to start at least a few months before the actual holiday, as you will have a lot of competitors. However, if you would prefer to just focus on attracting buyers who are already on your store or on your site, it is good to send out newsletters to your email subscribers, make posts on social media, and maybe offer a free gift to customers who order above a certain amount. As for other times to have a sale, most businesses have them at their discretion, usually when there is a product they need to get rid of in order to make more room for the next season's stock. If you have a lot of product that you need to sell quickly, having a sale will make that happen.

When it comes to discounts, things can get a bit more complex, especially in terms of orders. Discounts are also a great way to move product that has been sitting on the shelves for too long, but they should be more selective than sales. If you have a physical store location, it is much easier to offer discounts to first responders and military personnel, as you can be shown ID. However, you might be able to still give discounts to your rewards members by sending them a customized promo code or developing an app where they can keep track of offers and discounts.

Making Shipping Decisions

Shipping orders is one of the more difficult parts of the order management process, as there are even more factors that go into shipping an order out. If you have a lot of orders that you ship on a regular basis, you probably already know what you need in terms of shipping rates and what shipping service to use as well as what is parcel select for large orders. However, there is more to shipping than just those factors. For instance, you need to figure out what packing method and materials suit each client best, whether you will strictly use shipping services or deliver product yourself, and whether you will customize packing according to customer requests.

You will also need to look into whether you will need to keep track of your packages after they have been shipped out in addition to the customers keeping track of them. If you are shipping locally, things are easier and there should not be much you would need to worry about. However, if you ship internationally, you will need to make sure that every effort is made to get to the customer, especially since a lot of international packages need to be picked up personally if sent through the postal service.  You will also need to deal with a lot of customer complaints, especially when the packages get lost or damaged.

Resolving Customer Complaints

Nobody likes dealing with customer complaints, but they are something that cannot be ignored if you want to maintain a good reputation for your business. After all, the customers are the bread and butter of your success, and it is always a good idea to keep them happy.

One of the first things that you need to do is have someone whose designated job is taking those complaints and concerns from customers who get in contact with you. You cannot do it all by yourself, and if you have more than one person helping you run your small business, the odds are that all of your team members are exhausted already and do not need more work with orders piling in as it is. Designating someone to strictly handle complaints will take a load off of everyone else, as the rest of the team will only need to worry if something needs to be re-shipped.

Ideally, you should have already decided on whether you will provide refunds or not, but if you have not, you will want to do it now. You are well within your right to not issue refunds, but you need to make sure to have it in every listing somewhere so your customers know that it is your policy not to issue refunds. Another thing you can do is offer either free shipping with or a percentage off of the customer's next order.

The shipping department is the heart of any small business, and it takes everyone knowing proper order management in order to make sure that the shipping department thrives and that the orders get out on time. Keep this article in mind as you outline and perfect your order management process. Soon it will become second nature and you will know exactly what to tweak if part of the system needs a change or a complete overhaul.

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