Automated fulfillment keeps orders on track at web store with no inventory
A customized back-end system built onto a Yahoo storefront platform helped tiny DelightfulDeliveries.com, an online gift basket retailer, fulfill orders that spike to as many as 800 per day around the holidays, CEO Eric Lituchy tells Internet Retailer.
The Long Island, NY-based web store, with two full-time and one half-time employees, maintains no inventory and drop ships its 1,200 SKUs entirely from more than two dozen partners. Within a year of its launch in 1998, order volume had grown to the extent that manually forwarding orders to the partners as they came in was no longer practical, says Lituchy. At a cost of about $5,000, the company worked with a web development company to design a back-end system that would take orders and parse them out to different parts of the database for different partners.
The system generated an e-mail notification to partners as orders arrived at Delightful Deliveries.com and the partners then could check their password-protected area of DelightfulDeliveries’ database for order details to initiate fulfillment. As they fulfilled orders, the partners put tracking information back into the system, which generated an e-mail notification back to the customer from DelightfulDeliveries.com
As order volume has continued to grow–-Lituchy says the company hopes to take in $3 million this year–-DelighfulDeliveries has had to once again boost the functionality of its automated fulfillment system. In December, working with another web development company, it started moving its back-end system onto a Linux platform that affords some key upgrades. Among them, it offers a more streamlined process, and it automatically displays only real-time delivery options to the customer placing the order.
“Before, you could enter an order for next-day delivery, but if you were entering it at 9 p.m., for example, though the system would take the order, it would not go out for the next day because no one is shipping at 9 p.m.,” says Lituchy. In contrast, the new system has built-in rules that display only shipment options that are actually available, depending on the time of the order and the ship-to address, as cut-off times for next-day delivery vary throughout the country. “If you place an order on the site at 9 p.m.Thursday, it tells you the order could ship Friday for delivery Saturday, so it shows you time-accurate information,” he says.
Lituchy notes that nailing drop ship fulfillment has been critical to the company’s success. “It’s truly virtual,” he says. “We have a great store without having a single product in stock.”
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