As one of the latest features for brands selling on the Peeba marketplace, Fulfillment by Peeba provides the option to outsource their inventory to Peeba’s warehouse to reduce storage demands and ensure the fulfillment efficiency so brands can focus on selling their products.
I was part of this project and worked on designing the main user flow and the interface design on the brand portal. The main challenge of the project presents itself in the logic of the flow and the edge cases. The complication of the subject entails the various user scenarios for both the brand and retailer aspects such as split fulfillment orders, inventory errors, and order cancellations.
With logistics and shipping being a big part of an e-commerce site, it is critical to keep shipping cost as low as possible. By accomplishing that it helps retailers increase their profit margin, especially for smaller businesses. Fulfillment service helps save shipping cost and increase order efficiency since the products are shipped to a fulfillment center in advance and can be handled directly by Peeba. With new orders arriving, brands can simply accept the order and the rest can be taken care of by the fulfillment center.
Brand would deliver their inventory to our fulfillment center to reduce the shipping cost by retailers and reduce the lead time for orders.
With the inventory stored at our fulfillment center, orders can be directly fulfilled from there and avoid any hassle from long distance shipment.
The initial step is to introduce the new feature to brands, hence an email blast was sent out as part of our weekly updates campaign. Users are directed to a landing page on the brand portal where they can view the fulfillment service for its benefits and workings of it, then they can submit a request to be reviewed and processed.
Once all the onboarding work is done, brands are able to ship their products to our warehouse via the system. This integrates with our existing shipping flow but instead of shipping directly to retailers, it ships to us and stored at the inventory. While the shipment is still in progress, they can be tracked and viewed with all the inbounding shipments.
When products are shipped to our fulfillment center, users will be able to keep track of their inventory list within the warehouse. The inventory list includes all products and sku within storage, and with every incoming and committed product, the list will update accordingly.
The outbound flow is where brands can view and accept orders from retailers. With this flow, Accepting order with fulfillment service becomes the simplest part where brands can simply fulfill order with a click. However, what if not all the products can be fulfilled by the fulfillment center?
With only a partial order be fulfilled from the fulfillment center, several options were proposed:
1. The order will be adjusted to only provide the part available for fulfillment which in term retailers will not be able purchase everything they ordered.
2. The order will be split into two orders and presented as two completely different orders.
While both options are viable, they are not ideal because they affect the user's expectation and disrupt their purchase experience unnecessarily when this is not something they should be aware of. So a compromise was made to create a split shipment, instead of completely disrupting the retailer’s experience, the order will simply arrive in two packages at different times, while payment will still be within the same order.
The fulfillment feature is made complicated by the real world logistics. By automating the process, it accomplishes our work as a platform. By integrating fulfillment service, a usually manual procedure, into our brand portal, it helps optimise the entire flow through shipment tracking and inventory cataloguing. This in turn can be much more scalable, reduces the margin for human error, and increases the overall efficiency.
