Growth is exciting, but it often comes with challenges. When your eCommerce business starts gaining traction, a fulfilment operation that worked perfectly well at launch can quickly become a bottleneck. Orders pile up, mistakes creep in, and before you know it, you're spending more of your time firefighting than focussing on what drives your business forward.
Scaling fulfilment means building an operation that can grow with you whilst maintaining quality and efficiency. In this blog, the team at Hallmark Consumer Services highlights the key things to consider when you’re ready to take things to the next level.
How to scale your eCommerce fulfilment operations
1. Audit your current fulfilment process
Before making any changes, it’s important to understand what’s actually happening right now. If you walk through your entire fulfilment process, from the moment an order comes in to when it leaves your door, at which stage do you see the most delays? And where do errors happen most often?
The goal is to identify any weak points in your system, so you know what needs fixing first. Sometimes the issue is obvious, like running out of packing materials at peak times. Other times it might be more subtle, such as a picking process that worked fine early on but now struggles as your order volumes grow.
2. Invest in fulfilment technology early
Manual processes can only get you so far. The right technology will give you visibility across your entire operation, allowing you to see stock levels in real time, track orders as they move through the system, and spot problems before they escalate. It can also help reduce the risk of human error, which becomes increasingly important as order volumes climb.
At Hallmark Consumer Services, our Warehouse Management System features an easy-to-use online portal that lets us set minimum and maximum stock levels for each pick location, ensuring orders are fulfilled efficiently and inventory is automatically replenished when needed.
This portal has proved particularly useful for a client of ours that provides various products to monitor the health of cats and dogs, including DNA screening and healthcare information. We provide warehousing services as well as picking and packing the company’s products. Often the company experiences rapid sales increases, but our ability to quickly flex our services means we can easily accommodate these spikes in demand when they occur. Read the full case study here.
3. Standardise your warehouse operations
Consistency matters when you’re handling hundreds or even thousands of orders. Standardising your processes means everyone follows the same steps, which makes future training easier, reduces mistakes, and generally speeds everything up within your operation.
It’s important to think about how your products are stored, how picking routes are organised, and how items are packed. Small inefficiencies can add up quickly; for instance, a subtle layout tweak that saves your team just thirty seconds per order might not seem like much, but across thousands of orders, it becomes a significant time saver.
4. Expand storage and fulfilment capacity strategically
Running out of space is one of the most common growing pains for eCommerce businesses. Expanding capacity means thinking about location, accessibility, and how the space fits into your broader logistics strategy.
If you’re shipping nationally or internationally, having fulfilment capacity in multiple locations can help reduce shipping times and costs. It also ensures you’re not dependent on a single site if something goes wrong. The trick is expanding at the right pace, so you’re paying for what you need without struggling for room during busy periods.
5. Implement forecasting and demand planning
Retailers have always relied on past sales to spot buying trends, but with multichannel shopping now the norm, real-time data has become essential. To understand how much stock you’re likely to sell, you need to keep track of how current marketing campaigns are performing, pay attention to what’s happening in the wider world, and watch the conversations and trends unfolding online.
Hallmark’s advanced reporting system uses real-time data to analyse and forecast future sales with accuracy. This helps us and our clients plan ahead with confidence, whether we’re gearing up for a surge in demand or preparing for a quieter period. Read our blog on how to manage peaks in sales for more tips on preparing
6. Optimise your shipping strategy
Shipping costs can eat into your margins quickly. As you scale, you’ll have more negotiating power with carriers, but you also need to think strategically about which services you offer and how you structure shipping costs for customers.
You might want to consider multi-carrier strategies, zone-based shipping to balance cost and delivery speed, and whether you want to offer premium options like next-day delivery or later cut of times. The right approach depends on your products, your customers’ expectations, and your margins.
At Hallmark, we offer UK, EU and worldwide shipping services through a wide network of trusted carriers, where we are able to secure discounted shipping rates so your customers receive a better shipping experience and you save time and money. Find out more here.
7. Build a scalable returns process
Returns are part of eCommerce, and they become more complex as you grow. A smooth, efficient system for handling returns means customers get refunds or exchanges quickly, ensuring their experience remains positive, and returned items can be reworked into sellable stock where possible.
Consider how your returns are logged, inspected, and restocked. Automation can help here too, particularly with generating return labels and updating inventory systems when items come back.
8. Know when to outsource to a 3PL
Ultimately, there comes a point when managing fulfilment in-house stops making sense. Maybe you’re spending too much time on logistics instead of growing your business, or perhaps your operation has reached the limits of what you can reasonably manage.
Outsourcing to a third-party logistics provider gives you access to established infrastructure, technology, and expertise without the capital investment of building it yourself. It also offers flexibility, letting you scale up or down based on demand. The key is finding a partner who understands your business and can adapt to your specific needs. Companies like Hallmark Consumer Services offer tailored fulfilment solutions that grow with you, taking the operational headache away so you can focus on what you do best.
Lighten the load
From efficient order processing and fast shipping through to returns management and intelligent reporting, we’ve got your fulfilment requirements covered.
If your current setup is hindering business growth or you are looking for a 3PL provider that better supports you in scaling up to meet customer demand then Hallmark Consumer Services could be the partner you need. Please drop us a note or give us a call to find out.