The Pick, Pack, and Ship process happens when a customer places an order on one of your sales channels. The process is important because it’s the main part of fulfilling a customer order properly and meeting and even exceeding your customers’ expectations. 

Streamline the order fulfillment process 

The pick, pack and ship process should be as seamless as possible, allowing your warehouse staff to manage and control the entire lifecycle of your orders. This will help you improve the customer experience for all of your orders while saving you and your staff time. 

All of your sales channels should be connected into one platform, like Linnworks. Linnworks is a Total Commerce solution that powers businesses to sell wherever their customers are and puts commerce control at the center of a business. As you grow, the Linnworks platform will grow with you. 

“In order for an ecommerce business to grow and thrive, businesses need to meet shoppers everywhere they spend time online. The right mix will depend on business goals, but many of my clients are pursuing a combination of their own Direct-to-Consumer website, selling through marketplaces and even trialling emerging channels like Buy on Google, which has proven to be an impactful additional revenue stream since launch.”
–Raul Garcia, Customer Success Manager, Linnworks

Let’s walk through how the pick, pack and ship process can work using Linnworks. With Linnworks, your staff sees all orders placed from all sales channels in one place, without having to be logged into multiple sales channels separately. 

Workflow process

First, connect all of your selling channels in Linnworks. An order is received on a selling channel and a record of that order is automatically synced in Linnworks. 

So let’s say you run an athletic apparel company. 

Your warehouse staff can see all new  orders in the Open Orders screen. Here, different views can be set up where you can apply specific sorting and filtering to categorize your orders into different stages. So you can separate orders by unpaid orders, out-of-stock, and ready to process, as an example. 

Print picking and packing lists

As an example, your warehouse manager can print order documentation from Linnworks such as a picking and packing list. Linnworks make sure the picking and packing list is arranged in the most efficient way. 

The picking list can be sent to the warehouse picker. They will use this information to know what items need to be picked from the storage section of the warehouse. 

The packing list tells your packer what items need to be shipped, grouped by order ID. Your warehouse manager can customize the packing list to call out important information.

Pick

To keep using this example of an athletic apparel company, a member of your warehouse staff, let’s call her Nicole, uses the pick list that your warehouse manager printed to go around the warehouse and pick the items for confirmed open orders. 

Depending on the size of your company, Nicole might pick one order at a time or multiple orders at a time. Or, you might have your warehouse set up by zones, for example, where Nicole picks all of the SKUs for all open orders in her zone. She puts the items on a cart to roll to where the packers are ready to pack orders. 

Pack 

This is where your warehouse staff member, let’s call him Tom, uses the packing list to pack all of the correct items for each order. A packing list details what items are in each order. So let’s say three orders consist of three athletic shirts and one pair of running pants from Nicole’s zone. Tom packs each order from the cart that Nicole wheeled over. 

The order is now ready to ship to buyers. 

Ship 

Tom can process orders individually or in bulk in Linnworks. When he clicks “process”, the order cannot be changed or unprocessed. Tom can send tracking information back to the selling channel where the order was placed in Linnworks. Tom can easily assign a shipping provider to the orders and the orders are shipped.

Different picking and packing methods

• Piece picking: This is where the warehouse employee picks and packs one order at a time. 
• Batch picking: The process of picking and packing multiple orders at a time. 
• Zone picking: This is where warehouse workers pick and pack partial orders. 
• Wave picking: A variation of batch or zone picking, warehouse workers use a picking list to collect a group of goods with a cart from their zone. They then send the items in their group (on their cart) to be packed and shipped. 

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Linnworks is a Total Commerce platform that puts commerce control at the center of your business. Linnworks integrates with more than 100 selling channels like Walmart, Buy on Google and Shopify to help make the Pick Pack Ship process easy and more efficient.