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2024 Holiday Prep Guide Part 2: Outbound Order Best Practices for a Smoother Peak Season

Lillian Urspruch
Lillian Urspruch
  • Updated

Welcome to Part 2 of our 2024 Holiday Prep Guide.

Our focus for this installment is Order Best Practices.

It is critical to follow outbound order best practices, especially during the busy peak season. Due to the high volume of orders during this time, our goal and priority at the warehouse will be outbound shipping. Any address problems, changes to orders, etc. will slow down the packing and shipping process.

 

Forecasting

As mentioned in Part 1, we recommend you include inbound inventory, outbound orders, and expected project work when sharing your projections.

Specifically for outbound orders:

  • Include both retail and wholesale orders on your forecast.
  • Keep your forecast updated and share it with us whenever there are changes.
  • For more info on forecasting, check out this Help Center article:

 

Address and Contact Info Verification/Formatting

Save time in the warehouse, and for your Customer Service team, with the following tips:

  • Review your address formatting on your e-Commerce site to ensure it is acceptable to carriers. It is likely that an order with an address that is not verified in the Rydership application will be delayed.
  • Ensure your e-Commerce site is providing the recipient’s valid email and phone number on every order in case carriers need to contact them in the event of issues with delivery.
  • Create notifications in the Rydership application that will alert you to an order with issues. This gives you quick visibility to the issue so it can be corrected as soon as possible.
  • Military address format, military addresses can only ship USPS, FedEx SmartPost, and UPS SurePost
  • Certain non-English language characters are not recognized by the label provider and must be removed. Examples of this would be quotation marks, asterisks, foreign language/text, etc.
  • For more info on Address Verification, check out these Help Center articles:

 

Gift Notes on Packing Slip

  • Adding customized gift notes or messaging can be a complicated process. Please partner with your Customer Support representative prior to October 1st to get this set up.
  • For more info on Gift Messaging, check out this Help Center article:

 

When can you change an order? 

  • Items can be changed and updated until the moment the order is batched. If you want to change something after that, you would need to cancel the order.
  • The address can be changed up until the moment the label is purchased.
  • If you change an address after the packing slip has been printed, the address on the packing slip will be different than the address it is shipped to, but it should not affect delivery.
    • Note, we are unable to retrieve a package once it has been marked as shipped.
  • Gestation time periods provide a window of time prior to the order becoming live for the facility to work on. You can update the length of gestation time in your preferences if you’d like it to be longer or shorter. The order will not go into “processing” until the gestation time has passed.

 

Wholesale Orders (aka Large Orders)

  • Ensure all wholesale orders are accounted for in advance on your forecast.

  • Prepare for any large order appropriately. Please review the Manage Large Orders article in the Help Center.

  • Large orders will take more time. Orders are processed in chronological order at the facility, so as such, facilities are unable to prioritize one order over another.

 

COMING UP: In Parts 3, 4 and 5 of the 2024 Holiday Prep Guide:

  • Carrier Guidelines during peak holiday times
  • Ryder e-Commerce Facilities (formerly known as Whiplash Facilities) and Partner Facilities Holiday Schedules
  • Customer Support Holiday Schedule