A brief history of an order : From the customer cart to door (Lifecycle Part I)

#order lifecycle management #fake orders #RTO #OMS #SLA breach #order history report #life of an order #order life-cycle

Hi,

Hope you are having a great Sunday😎🍰🍹 :)

If you are new to this newsletter, I would implore you to first check the history of this newsletter. I started this with this one idea and went on to a journey of 30+ posts and with 2000+ subscribers.

This one was the last post I posted here before going in to a vacation mode (not really a vacation though!):

Scarcity, life of a product, and lightening deal

OMG, I just checked the date of my last post, it was 3 months back and that too in 2021. In that case, welcome to the first post of year 2022 🎊🎉.

And now off to the history of an order,

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In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning?

In the brief history of time, Stephen Hawking, undoubtedly the most loved physicist of the century, wondered whether universe had a beginning, like many other fellow scientists.

I, living the life of a category manager, currently don’t have the luxury of seeking profound Q&A. I am just content wondering the beginning and fulfillment of orders.

There are generally 3 lifecycles that any business keep the track of :

1. Product life-cycle (Invention, Introduction, growth, maturity, end of life-cycle)

2. Customer life-cycle (Realization of need or want, awareness that something is out there that can fulfill her needs, Stage of wondering, Opening the wallet and making the transaction, Conversion as a happy customer or returning the product, persuasion, stay forever or leaving for good……)

3. Order life cycle

From marketplace point of view, we will add another lifecycle important to the platform business:

4. Seller / marketplace vendor lifecycle (Lead generation, persuasion and negotiation, on-boarding, listing the product online, engagement, day to day activity, cross-sell and upsell in other categories…)

Now, coming back to the order life-cycle:

Order life-cycle begins post few steps in the customer life-cycle. This is how order journey looks like:

1. Customer shopping

• Addition to cart - Order begins as a cart 🛒created by the customer . It has a timestamp that encodes the time and the date when the order was created and updated.

• Abandoned Carts - Customer might not complete the transaction. Order not placed within the configurable time period can be considered in abandoned order. Abandoned cart had to analyzed by category and marketing team to understand what all could be done to reduce the no. of abandoned cart since customer was so close to place an order.

2. Order is placed (Payment journey) - Checkout is the process from moving an order from cart to placed order.

3. Order is processed 👌or flagged for review 👎

4. Fulfillment logic - The rules to be configured from which location, which 3PL to deliver the product in the most cost efficient way and Cx point of view.

5. Order fulfillment (Forward logistics)

6. Customer return (Return credit to be issues, Reverse logistics)

There are so many changing hands in one order life-cycle : Warehouse or storage, 3PL, customers (customer return, 3PL, back to warehouse)

How a typical order life-cycle report looks like or what all parameter you should be adding if you are building the report first time in a marketplace setting:

At category level, this report will give these input / output metrics that you can improve by identifying what drives which metrics :

For example - if you are days since delivery are more than 30 days and sellers payment are still due for these orders, that means you need to work with the finance team to figure out why delays and what all processes you need to place so that payments are released on time.

Let’s take a case study :

You are the category manager of smart glasses. <this smart-glass is pretty cool, check it out> Smart glasses comes under High ASP products with price ranging from 5000 to 10000. You have launched the category but since then, you are seeing lot of return or cancelled orders. You want to analyze what is happening and what could be done in the short-term and in the long run.

Here is how the cross-section of data looks like:

When you develop your order summary, and consider status - customer cancelled, refund, returned, rejected by customer, you would see a pattern that all the orders are coming from a particular pin-code. You can further deep-dive into if it is a customer-side problem or LSP problem.

Let’s assume that all the orders that are being cancelled from a particular seller, if you can check if seller is selling any defected product online.

1. Using order life-cycle report, you can calculate DRR (Daily run rate => Total order placed - all the return/cancelled order) business as usual. And based on your growth lever, you can create your category projection in coming week.

2. What is distribution of sales across days in a week and across hours in a day? Is there any particular time or day of week when order placed no. are steep.

3. Is there a correlation between order value and payment mode used? How strong/weak is this correlation? Is there any correlation between payment mode and cancelled order? If yes, what all you can do at the platform level to reduce the cancelled / damage / return order?

4. At What pin-code, state the product is quite popular? Based on the data, what marketing activity would you do at geographic level?

Imagine that you know these many carts have been abandoned with your products and you can trigger reminders to your customers in a particular timeframe, that can result in checkout. With order lifecycle report, you are influencing your customer life-cycle.

As a next step, take these two reports and find growth levers in your order history and check the correlation in your customer life-cycle report. Let me know what you see.

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Side note - Key metrics to be monitored from inventory perspective (No. of orders will change your inventory level):

1. Stock positions : (on-hand quantity, inventory value, frequency of occurrence, % contribution )

   -Over stock position (Stock surplus)

   -At-stock position

   -Under stock position

   -Out of stock position

2. Missing stock and value

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References -

1. Check out these Amazon how to link : Create an order history report

2. you can download report from amazon seller central

3. Or check here what all is there in the order history report in Amazon.

4. You can check order processing steps of order lifecycle from seller POV.

Do subscribe, if you find this interesting. Have a great week 😃.

This time, See you sooner than later :)