The warehouse is the heart of your business when buying and selling products. But it can also be a place where chaos reigns. To make as few mistakes as possible and to work as efficiently as possible, you need to optimize your warehouse. Imagine sending the wrong products! The customer will not be happy, and the chance of a negative review is high, but it doesn’t stop there. You have to pay return costs, and the warehouse worker will have to process the return, increasing labor costs. There are several ways to optimize your warehouse. In this blog, we discuss the importance of warehouse locations.
What are warehouse locations and why are they so important?
Warehouse locations help you organize the warehouse logically and quickly find products. How you organize the warehouse is entirely up to you, but it must follow a logical structure. You can use zones, aisles, shelves, product spots, etc.
Warehouse locations are crucial for quickly finding products. Imagine the following situation: a customer orders a product that you have stored in different places: A, B, and C. According to the inventory, you only have one product left. You check places A and B, but there are no products there. A mistake in the system? Always possible! You contact the customer to inform them that the product is out of stock. The chance of cancellation is high… However, you forgot that the last product is stored in place C. Unfortunately, you’ve already lost the order and missed out on revenue. Thanks to warehouse locations, you’ll always know where each product is stored and avoid such errors.
Are warehouse locations interesting for my webshop?
If you’ve just started your webshop, it’s likely that you’re managing the stock from your garage. Managing a small stock from the garage doesn’t mean you can’t use warehouse locations. On the contrary, the earlier you start with warehouse locations, the better! By creating warehouse locations, you can already plan space to accommodate future growth.
Let’s say your webshop suddenly experiences massive growth; you will spend more time unpacking deliveries and packing orders than you’d like. If you’re not using warehouse locations at that time, products will be placed randomly somewhere. This increases the chance that you will store the same SKU in different locations and eventually forget where you stored what. Chaos!
Link warehouse locations to a smart inventory management system
If you work with warehouse locations, it’s incredibly helpful to link them to your inventory management system. Why? A smart inventory management system like Webship Online uses warehouse locations to calculate the most efficient picking route. This way, you’ll travel the shortest distance possible, allowing you to process more orders in the same time. If you assign barcodes to your warehouse locations, you can pick with a barcode scanner. Thanks to barcodes, the number of incorrect pickings will decrease.
Need help?
We can conclude that warehouse locations are very interesting and almost indispensable in a well-organized warehouse. If you’d like to use warehouse locations but don’t know where to start, contact Webship at hallo@webship.online. We’ll be happy to help you develop a warehouse plan. Of course, you can also request information about our inventory management system Webship Online. You can try Webship Online for free and immediately experience the benefits of linking warehouse locations to an inventory management system. Request your free trial now!