4 Fulfillment Challenges Businesses Face in 2024

Amid ongoing economic concerns, consumers are reported to be cautiously optimistic in 2024. With the expectation that shoppers will be carefully monitoring their spending as global uncertainty persists, earning a shopper’s retail business now requires a new level of service delivery, with dedicated efforts throughout the customer journey, all the way to the doorstep.

As e-commerce and omnichannel brands compete for shoppers’ attention, affinity, and loyalty, the customer experience has become a top priority. Acquiring a new customer today costs five times more than retaining a current customer, and with that, brands must ask themselves not only how to acquire a customer, but how to make them a customer for life. This focus on retention puts an impetus on brands to improve their fulfillment capabilities, which can make or break the customer experience and serve as a differentiator in a highly competitive environment.

Here are four challenges e-commerce and omnichannel brands are bound to face in e-fulfillment in 2024, along with practical solutions to overcome them.

1. The call for control

In 2024, building a community of loyal, repeat shoppers means giving customers some control over their orders, namely with shipping and delivery. For years, fast online order delivery took top priority, but with porch piracy being a major concern for online shoppers, many consumers now prioritize being able to choose when their orders are delivered over getting their orders as fast as possible.

According to a 2023 Ryder e-commerce survey of 1,077 consumers across the U.S., 17 percent of respondents reported that being able to select a specific delivery date is more important to them than fast shipping. To appeal to this preference, brands are now offering scheduled delivery, a shipping method that enables customers to select a specific delivery date within a fixed window.

2. Lack of inventory visibility

Poor inventory management often leads to mishaps and unfavorable outcomes for both brands and their customers, such as markdowns or stockouts. Successful e-commerce and omnichannel retailing requires complete and accurate visibility into inventory availability and location.

To overcome this challenge, it is crucial to invest in e-commerce technology that enables real-time visibility or work with a fulfillment partner that provides visibility into your inventory. It’s important that your fulfillment partner’s warehouse management system can be integrated with your e-commerce platform to ensure a full, real-time view of inventory across all channels.

3. Consumer demand for sustainable packaging

As consumers become more conscious about the environmental impacts of e-commerce, they are growing more resolute in their attitudes toward e-commerce packaging materials. Sustainable packaging has played an increasingly influential role in consumers’ purchase intent, and recent research demonstrates the power earned by brands making mindful packaging choices. In Ryder’s 2023 e-commerce study, ecofriendly e-commerce packaging such as post-recycled consumer materials, and sustainable ink, was revealed as the environmental factor most likely to encourage consumers to shop with a brand.

There are so many more materials to choose from today than even just a few years ago, so this task isn’t nearly as challenging as it used to be. Work with your fulfillment provider to guide you in identifying and selecting packaging and shipping materials that meet your brand experience needs while satisfying customers’ desire to make more ecofriendly purchasing decisions.

4. Complex reverse logistics

Returns are an inevitable aspect of e-commerce that warrants as much strategy as any other part of your sales and marketing plan. A complex or inefficient reverse logistics process can drive away customers, usurp labor, and threaten your bottom line.

For a clear example of how to avoid negative outcomes from poor reverse logistics management, just look at return labels. While it may seem like a simple transaction, having to request a return label adds an extra, inconvenient step that requires administrative support, wasting time and energy for both your customers and employees. Offering self-service returns, where customers can initiate and track returns easily, streamlines the return process, improves customer satisfaction, and can reduce costs. And for brands that want to go a step further with returns, consider using one of the many returns management platforms that not only help with returns management but also help reduce refunds and retain revenue.

Proactively addressing these fulfillment challenges by investing in e-commerce technology, partnering with reliable fulfillment partners, optimizing processes, and leveraging advanced logistics solutions can help e-commerce and omnichannel brands stay relevant, revered, and profitable in the retail competitive landscape.