Ecommerce fulfilment: every step to the doorstep, and how to measure it
Everything between the customer paying and the parcel landing. It's an operations job, but the customer judges it in their inbox, one dispatch email at a time.
- Done by
- Your own team, a third-party logistics warehouse (3PL), or a supplier that dropships
- Measured by
- Fulfilment rate: orders that arrive complete, on time and undamaged
- Fulfilled, in Shopify
- Shipped, not delivered
- Emails should follow
- Dispatch and delivery, not payment
Every step between the order and the doorstep
- The order lands, and the payment and fraud checks clear
- Stock is allocated, so nobody else can buy the last one
- Someone picks it from the shelf and packs it
- A label is printed and the order is marked fulfilled
- The carrier collects it and the tracking starts moving
- It arrives complete and undamaged, or it doesn't
Each step can fail on its own. The customer only sees the last one, so a slow pick and a lost parcel feel exactly the same from the sofa.
How to work out your fulfilment rate
Take the orders that arrived complete, on time and undamaged in a month. Divide by every order you shipped that month, and multiply by a hundred. Some warehouses call the strict version the perfect order rate.
The headline hides the useful part. Log every failure against a reason, because each reason has a different owner.
- Late: a carrier problem, or a warehouse missing its cut-off
- Wrong item: a picking error, or a listing against the wrong SKU
- Damaged: the packaging, or a carrier that throws things
- Missing: stock that was counted but was never really there
Run post-purchase emails on dispatch, not on payment
Post-purchase flows usually start when the order is placed. That's fine for the thank-you. It's wrong for everything after it, because a how-to email that lands before the product is answering a question nobody has yet.
Klaviyo gets a separate event from Shopify when an order is fulfilled. Start the care and how-to emails from that, time the review request from delivery if your tracking allows it, and the post purchase flow stops talking to people who are still waiting.
Related terms
FAQs
What is a good fulfilment rate for an online shop?
There isn't a benchmark worth quoting, and anyone who gives you one is guessing about your carrier, your catalogue and your packaging. Aim for every order, log the failures by reason, and compare this month with last month, measured the same way. The trend and the reasons matter more than the headline.
What does fulfilled mean in Shopify?
It means the items have been marked as shipped, usually when a label is bought or your warehouse confirms dispatch. It doesn't mean delivered. That gap matters for email: anything timed from fulfilment is timed from the parcel leaving, so allow for the journey before you ask somebody what they think of it.
Why do customers get two shipping emails for one order?
Usually because the order was split. When part of it ships from one place and the rest follows later, each parcel gets its own confirmation. Say so in the first one: a single line telling the customer the rest is on its way saves a worried reply and a support ticket.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
Half an hour with Theo, our founder.
We're all about relationships built on trust, mutual respect and a shared vision for success. If that sounds like your vibe, let's make some waves together 🌊
