E-commerce fulfilment
Your online orders, fulfilled from one system.
Most retailers keep their online store going with a stock sync app, a courier portal and a spreadsheet to tie the two together. We do it all in one system. An online order comes in and the system allocates the stock from your warehouse or your stores. It gets picked and checked on a handheld, your rules pick the courier, the label prints and your customer gets a tracking number. Nobody types anything in twice.
Order #10482 · paid online
| Step | Time | |
|---|---|---|
| Allocated: online warehouse | 3 | 09:14 |
| Allocated: store pick | 1 | 09:14 |
| Picked & QC passed | 4 | 09:41 |
| Checked & packed | 09:52 |
Courier rule
Gauteng · under 5 kg · door-to-door lane. Label printed, waybill = order number. Online store marked fulfilled, tracking sent.
The problem
Why does online fulfilment fall apart?
Because the online store is bolted on. The stock lives in your retail system, the orders live in your online store, the couriers live in a third portal, and someone spends the morning copying between them.
Selling stock you do not have
When stock syncs to the store on a timer and nobody holds back what is already being picked, the last unit sells twice. One customer gets a refund and an apology instead of a parcel.
Stock in the wrong building
The item the customer ordered is not in the online warehouse, but three of your branches have it. Without store-level allocation, that order is cancelled while the stock sits on a shelf.
Couriers booked by hand
Copying addresses into a courier portal, choosing a service from memory, pasting tracking numbers back into your online store. It is slow, it is error-prone, and it does not scale past a few dozen orders a day.
How it works
From checkout to the customer's door
Every order follows the same route through one system, and every step is logged along the way.
-
Step 1
The order comes in
Paid orders drop in from your online store on their own, with the customer and the delivery address.
Online store -
Step 2
Stock is allocated
From your warehouse, your stores or both. Units being picked are held back so nothing sells twice.
Warehouse or store -
Step 3
Picked and scanned
Pickers follow a route sorted by bin and scan every item, so a wrong one is caught on the spot.
Handheld -
Step 4
Checked and packed
A quality check at the pick, a photo of anything that fails, and a second check before the parcel is closed.
Pack station -
Step 5
The courier is booked
Your rules choose the courier and service. The waybill is booked and the label prints at the bench.
Courier rules -
Step 6
The customer is told
The order is marked fulfilled and your customer gets a tracking link under the order number they already know.
Tracking sent
Pick, pack & fulfilment
A fulfilment floor that checks its own work
Two versions of the same product can look identical in a box, so the system scans every unit and the customer gets exactly what they ordered.
- Ship from the online warehouse, from stores, or both
- Fewest-stores allocation, so one order means as few parcels as possible
- Stock being picked is reserved against new sales
- Short at a store? Reallocate to the next store with stock, from one screen
- Claim-next-order picking on Android handhelds
- Pick routes sorted by bin location
- Basket and item scanning, with mismatches flagged to a supervisor
- QC checks with a photo of every failed unit
- Second check and confirm at the pack station
- Paper picks can still run through check and pack
- Look up any order to see where it is and who has handled it
- A full audit trail of every fulfilment event
Courier rules
The right courier for every parcel, chosen automatically
You set the rules once. Every parcel is matched to the right courier and service on where it is going, what it weighs and what it is worth, and the booking happens as the order is packed. When rates or service areas change, you change a rule on a screen. No developer, no redeploy.
- Rules by delivery area and postcode range
- Rules by parcel weight, order value and number of units
- Rate tables and courier profiles you maintain yourself
- Door-to-door and pickup-point delivery
- Addresses checked on arrival, with suggested corrections
- Waybill booked at pack confirm, numbered as the order
- Labels printed to Zebra and Datamax thermal printers
- Reprints never book a second waybill
- Per-courier manifests for the driver to sign
- Tracking links built for every parcel
- Courier unavailable? The order is flagged to book by hand, not lost
- Failed labels retry without double booking
We work with South Africa's leading couriers, door-to-door and pickup-point, and connect new couriers as your business needs them.
Your online store and the back office
One version of the stock, online and in store
Your warehouse, your shops and your online store work off the same stock, held per variant, not as one number per product.
Online store sync
Orders and customers come in and stock levels go out, mapped variant by variant to your Shopify store. Fulfilment and tracking go back automatically, and any update that fails is retried automatically.
A live fulfilment board
Orders flowing through each stage, time spent per stage, throughput for the day, and picker and checker rates against a benchmark. You see the bottleneck while there is still time to fix it.
Part of the retail system
Online sales, store sales, transfers and stock takes share one stock ledger in incoDynamixRM. Your online store is another branch, not a separate business to reconcile.
Straight answers
What retailers ask us about online fulfilment
"What if a store is short?"
The picker confirms the shortfall, and a supervisor sees which other stores hold the stock and moves the units there from one screen. The customer's order keeps moving instead of being cancelled.
"What if the courier system is down?"
The stock is still confirmed and the order is flagged for the office to book by hand. When the courier is back, a retry books the label without creating a duplicate waybill.
"Do we have to run the warehouse ourselves?"
No. Our sister company Incomati Warehousing & Distribution runs e-commerce fulfilment from Germiston, on software we build. Use the system in your own operation, or hand the whole thing to us.
Show us your online orders
Tell us how many orders you ship a day, where your stock sits and how you book couriers now. We will show you what the same day looks like on one system.