Order Routing and Fulfilment Logic

Order routing is the logic that decides which of your locations fulfils each order. If you hold stock in one place it is not a decision at all. Once stock sits in a warehouse, several stores and possibly a third party logistics provider, something has to choose, and that choice sets your freight cost, your delivery time and the workload landing on each site. Most businesses run on a platform default such as a fixed location priority list, which works acceptably at low volume and becomes expensive as volume grows, because it ignores freight lanes, store capacity and whether an order could have been completed from one place instead of two.

Proximity is a useful factor but a poor sole criterion, particularly in Australia. A store that is geographically closer may sit on a worse freight lane, have a much earlier carrier cut off, or be a regional site with a single daily pickup, while a metropolitan location further away reaches the customer sooner and for less. The better approach is to score candidates on expected transit time to the destination postcode and actual freight cost for that lane, alongside how complete the order can be from that location and how much capacity it has left today. Distance then becomes one input rather than the answer.

Splitting gets the available items moving immediately at the cost of a second freight charge and a second parcel for the customer to track. As a general approach, tier the decision by order value and category: on higher value orders the extra freight is usually worth the faster delivery, on low value orders it frequently is not and holding briefly or backordering the outstanding line is better. Consider also whether the items belong together, since splitting a set or a matched pair creates its own problems. The important thing is that this is an explicit policy you have chosen rather than whatever the platform does by default.

Give each location a daily capacity cap and include remaining capacity in the routing score, so volume spreads as sites fill up rather than piling onto whichever store happens to rank first. Add the ability to pause a location for a day or reduce its cap temporarily, for stocktakes, sales and staff shortages, with automatic reinstatement. Crucially, keep pausing fulfilment separate from disabling the location, because disabling usually removes that stock from what the website can sell. Store fulfilment programmes fail far more often from unmanaged workload than from technical problems.

Make declining fast and blameless, with a short list of reason codes such as damaged, sold on floor, cannot locate or display unit only. The order should then reroute automatically to the next best candidate, with the customer notified only if the promised delivery date actually changes. Cap the number of reroute attempts so an order cannot loop, escalating to a default fulfilment location or to a person after the second or third failure. Then use the accumulated reason codes properly: persistent cannot locate results point at a stock accuracy problem, and the location should be scored down until it improves.

Many mainstream commerce platforms and order management systems include configurable routing covering location priority, simple splitting and basic capacity, and for a network of a warehouse and a handful of similar stores that is often genuinely sufficient. Configuring what you already own is cheaper to run and easier to hand over, and we will recommend it when it fits. A custom routing layer earns its cost when decisions depend on information the platform cannot see, such as live freight quotes across multiple carriers, capacity from a rostering system, or commercial rules about ageing stock, or when you are routing across systems that do not share a platform at all.

Track a small set of measures consistently: freight cost per order broken down by origin, time from order placement to dispatch, rejection rate and reason mix by location, split rate and the freight cost attributable to splitting, and delivery performance against the promise shown at checkout. Reviewing these together matters, because improving any one in isolation usually degrades another. Freight cost falling while dispatch times stretch is not a win. Set a regular review cycle and always revisit the weights before peak trading, since a rule set tuned in a quiet month will behave differently under load.