Ordoro, a new order management and fulfillment company, offers a web based service to ecommerce merchants to manage their orders and inventory. Ordoro integrates seamlessly with the ShopSite ® ecommerce platform.

I’ve been working closely with Ordoro’s team to fine tune their integration with ShopSite. We also have a number of ShopSite clients using their service right now to manage orders. I’ve been impressed with what Ordoro has to offer small and medium sized merchants. Jagath Narayan, who is one of the owners, took a few moments to answer three questions I had about order fulfillment. Here is the Q&A:

1. What problems do you see small and medium sized merchants running into when dealing with order fulfillment after the sale?

For many small and medium size merchants, generating sales is fun and exciting, but order fulfillment is tedious and boring. The main problems we see are –

Shipping label printing

Many merchants manually login into their Fedex.com or USPS.com accounts, and copy and paste the shipping address line by line to generate a shipping label. This process is not only time consuming but also extremely error prone. If you make a typo, then the shipments will not reach the customer. Automating this task is the first step towards streamlining the order fulfillment process.

Customer service

When a customer calls asking you about the status of an order, where do you go look? When was it shipped out? What is the tracking number? Did you fill the order completely? Or were any items backordered? For many merchants, there is no easy way to have all this information in one place so that they can quickly answer that customer service call.

One of the merchants that we spoke to would search through his email inbox every single time to find the order information to respond to the customer. If you want to grow your business and provide world-class customer service, this task needs to be streamlined too.

Inventory Management

Many merchants do not know how much of each product they have in stock. That can adversely affect customer satisfaction. Here is why. If you are running short on a product, you must let your webstore know, so that it can stop taking orders for that product. For some businesses, taking backorders may be acceptable. But for many businesses, particularly during holiday season, letting a customer buy a product that they cannot ship, will lead to poor customer satisfaction and poor brand image of the business. Therefore, knowing what you have in stock at all the time is absolutely essential for any serious ecommerce merchant.

Many merchants keep track of this information in excel spreadsheets. But the problem is that, with every sale you need to manually enter data into the spreadsheet. Manual processes are always error prone. The flip side of this, having too much inventory on hand can tie up the merchant’s cash, that they could have put to better use elsewhere.

And finally, if you are a multi-channel merchant, all these problems are amplified many fold.

2. In general, what shortcomings are there with the currently available popular order management and fulfillment tools available to merchants?

Desktop based means your responsibility

There are a few order management tools available in the market and some of them do the job fairly well. But they also burden the merchant with all the software (IT) maintenance overhead. If you look at some of the desktop based order management tools, the merchant is also responsible for tasks such as – install and configure, update with patches, back up data every day etc. These are not trivial tasks. And we see merchants lose productivity in dealing with all these IT issues. In simple words, online merchants should be spending their time on boosting their website traffic and increasing their sales – not on running data backups, and installing software patches.

Feature bloat causes complexity and difficulty in learning

Another shortcoming is the software complexity and the learning curve. Some of the software packages we reviewed have very complicated user interfaces. This not only makes daily tasks tedious, but also introduces a difficult learning curve for the users. If the merchant hires new warehouse employees, it takes them a while to get up to speed on using the order fulfillment software correctly. Along with IT maintenance costs, the learning curve costs are significant for many software packages.

Additional support, IT consultants, upgrades resulting in hidden costs

Given the complexity of software, many retailers seek the help of independent IT consultants which greatly increases the ownership cost of the software. In addition, many software vendors charge separately for additional support and upgrades to the software. So, even though some of these software packages look affordable at first, if you include all the hidden costs and the lost productivity, they can cost you a fortune.

3. How does Ordoro address these shortcomings and problems for the SMB ecommerce market?

Web based means our responsibility

Ordoro is a web-based order manager / inventory manager software for SMB ecommerce merchants. By being web-based we eliminate 100% of the IT overhead. For example, many ShopSite merchants can vouch for the convenience of having LexiConn as their host – you no longer worry about your servers or your IT. We provide the same benefits on order fulfillment. Since everything is running on our servers, you no longer have to worry about system upgrades. We backup your data every hour so that you don’t have to do it.

Well integrated solution makes shipping easy

Ordoro is well integrated with ShopSite and allows you to easily print shipping labels for Fedex, UPS and USPS. No more copying and pasting address lines. One of our customers had several store managers printing Fedex labels which would take them up to 10 minutes per order and now with Ordoro they print labels in LESS THAN 1 MINUTE.

Information in one place results in better customer service

The merchants who use Ordoro have all their order information available on one screen, thus drastically improving their customer service levels.  Ordoro allows you to enter notes within the order and tracks changes made by different users giving our customers a detailed audit trail on every order.  Combine that with our powerful search functionality and our users can now find orders quickly when their customers call, and then answer questions easily since all of the order information is in one place (tracking numbers, customer info, order info, etc).  Merchants with multiple web-stores and sales channels use Ordoro as the one stop system to aggregate and manage all of their orders and inventory.

Streamlined inventory means no more stockouts

Ordoro’s inventory management module is also tightly integrated to ShopSite. Since Ordoro keeps track of inventory based on what is being shipped out of your warehouse (not just what is being ordered), the Ordoro inventory information is highly accurate. Since Ordoro can upload inventory information into ShopSite with just one click, you can keep your webstore data accurate and up to date. Ordoro’s purchasing module solves your stockout headaches. Long before a stockout happens, the system will alert you on the situation, and will allow you to automatically create a purchase order to your suppliers. And best of all, you can access all that information from anywhere in the world, because Ordoro is completely web-based.

Our focus on usability eliminates your learning curve

Finally, Ordoro has been designed with usability as the most important criteria. There is no learning curve in starting with Ordoro. Our customers can vouch for it. Our design goal has been to build a system that someone can start using within minutes (not days or weeks), and based on the experience of our customers, we have succeeded in that goal.