1. Home
  2. Goflow Blog
  3. Article
Jun 26, 2025

7 Proven Tips to Speed Up Ecommerce Order Fulfillment (and Keep Customers Coming Back)

When one of your top customers gets their order two days late, they might not complain - they may just stop buying. And worse? They’ll tell their friends.

Shoppers expect speed, precision, and transparency, and if they don’t get it they will go elsewhere. In fact, in a recent study, 69% of online shoppers say they’re much less or less likely to shop again with a retailer if their order isn’t delivered within two days of the promised date.¹ 

No matter how you fulfill, through a 3PL or DIY, your process needs to be airtight. In this post, we’ll break down 7 practical, easy-to-implement tips, from warehouse layout tweaks to automation and shipping optimization.

These strategies are especially powerful for finished goods and CPG brands looking to scale their operations with minimal delays and maximum customer satisfaction.

Why Speedy Order Fulfillment Matters

Let’s face it, Amazon has reset the bar. Two-day (or even same-day) delivery is no longer a luxury. It’s expected. And if your brand can’t keep up, customers will find one that can.

Here’s what slow fulfillment can cost you:

If you want to grow a lasting ecommerce brand, streamlining your order fulfillment is an absolute must.

Warehouse Optimization: Set the Stage for Speed

1. Organize Your Warehouse for Efficiency

A poorly organized warehouse slows everything down. Wasted time looking for products equals delayed shipping, lower productivity, and higher fulfillment costs.

Here’s how to optimize:

Goflow Insight: Brands using Goflow can gain real-time visibility into product movement across locations, making warehouse optimization decisions faster and more accurate.

2. Use Pick Lists Strategically

Pick lists tell your warehouse team what to grab for each order, and how well they’re designed has a big impact on speed.

Tactics to try:

Pro Tip: Track picking errors and revise your list format or picking strategy to minimize mistakes.

Smarter Inventory Placement & Routing

3. Leverage Inventory Warehouse Allocation

Not all of your inventory needs to be stored in one location. By strategically placing products in the warehouses closest to where they’re most in demand, you can shorten delivery times, reduce shipping costs, and improve overall fulfillment efficiency. 

To do this well, use your sales data to forecast regional demand, avoid overstocking in areas with low sales activity, and align your stock distribution with seasonal trends or upcoming campaigns. 

Tools like Goflow can simplify this process by automatically allocating inventory based on real-time demand signals and sales forecasts, helping you stay ahead without the guesswork.

4. Use Order Proximity Routing

Order proximity routing ensures that a customer’s order is fulfilled from the warehouse closest to them.

The result?

How to implement it:

As brands expand to multiple 3PLs or fulfillment centers, proximity routing becomes a game-changer for scaling without sacrificing speed.

Automation & Carrier Optimization

5. Automate What You Can

Manual processes can slow you down and lead to costly mistakes, especially as your order volume grows. That’s why it’s important to automate as much of your fulfillment workflow as possible. Key tasks like order routing, generating pick lists, syncing inventory, and creating shipping labels can all be streamlined with the right tools. 

Automation not only speeds things up, but also reduces bottlenecks and frees up your team to focus on more strategic work. Goflow handles all of these tasks for you, centralizing operations across channels and fulfillment partners so you can fulfill orders faster and more accurately.

6. Choose the Right Shipping Partners

The fastest internal process still falls apart if your shipping partner isn’t reliable.

What to look for:

Best practices:

The right partner mix can boost both delivery reliability and customer satisfaction.

Measurement & Continuous Improvement

7. Track These Fulfillment Metrics To Improve Performance

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Tracking fulfillment KPIs helps you identify problems before they impact your customer experience.

Key metrics to monitor:

Use dashboards to track trends, monitor warehouse or 3PL performance, and catch slowdowns early.

Want to learn more about how to choose your metrics? Check out our guide: How to Choose Which KPIs to Track: A Step-by-Step Guide for Ecommerce Sellers.

Speed Up Your Systems, Satisfy Your Customers

Faster fulfillment isn’t about rushing, it’s about refining your systems, optimizing your resources, and making data-backed decisions.

Here’s your 5-Minute Fulfillment Optimization Checklist to get started:

Even choosing just one or two areas to improve this month can lead to big gains in speed, accuracy, and customer satisfaction.

Looking for a smarter, more streamlined way to manage fulfillment across your business? Book a demo to see how Goflow can help.

¹ With Great Sales Comes Great Responsibility - To Deliver an Exceptional Customer Experience: https://www.voxware.com/with-great-sales-comes-great-responsibility-to-deliver-an-exceptional-customer-experience/