Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes when you order wholesale sunglasses? If so, then you are in luck as I am about to give you the breakdown of the steps that happen from the time you make your order online until your sunglasses arrive on your front porch.
I have been involved with the sunglass industry both as a retailer as well as a wholesaler, and I know full well the steps that are involved in this market. Everything that I state from this point on is based on my experiences and may not be the same for every wholesale company. To enhance the understanding of this process I will relate how this happens from my own personal standpoint.
After you enter in your credit card info online and click on “Submit”, your order is then filed with any other orders that may have been placed. Most online distributors of wholesale sunglasses run websites with some form of e-commerce software so this is a pretty streamlined process.
Your order will stay in queue until it is imported into our business accounting software (Quickbooks) and printed out. Usually these orders are imported during the first hour of the business day unless business is slow. If orders are slow then they will be imported as often as the warehouse workers need something to do.
Often times there are orders placed where further clarification is needed. This is usually the case where the billing information of the credit card is wrong or when special instructions have been added to the order. These orders are set aside to where someone can contact banks, credit card companies or the customer directly while the rest of the orders are sent out for fulfillment.
The orders that are free and clear are then placed in one of three bins in the warehouse: Air, International or Domestic, depending on the shipping method and priority. All orders that are to be shipped via Air or International are filled first followed by the orders that are to be shipped domestically.
The warehouse workers will take the orders from the bins and then wander around the warehouse with shopping carts to fill those orders. The dozen packages of sunglasses are added to their cart until the order is finished. Then the worker will head to their packaging table and stage the individual dozen boxes on the table along with the printed order form. Once this is done, a supervisor is called over to inspect the staged order for completeness and accuracy.
Once the order is signed off by someone else, the warehouse worker will select the appropriate sized shipping box and then fill that container with the customer’s order. After adding any necessary packing material, the box is then taped up, weighed, and then sent to the person responsible for shipping the order out.
When the person who does the shipping receives the completed package, he or she will take the weight and dimensions of the package and input them into the computer and print out a shipping label. After the shipping label and receipt is attached to the outside of the package, it is then staged in an area awaiting the arrival of the shipping company.
When I worked for a certain wholesale company we were visited by our shipping company twice a day: once for packages meant for air shipping, and another for all other shipments. Our air shipments would always pick up an hour or two before our ground shipments and these ground shipments always happened at the end of the working day.
Hopefully this sheds a little light on what happens behind the scenes when you order wholesale sunglasses from an internet company. I know this description is brief, but if you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask and I will answer them to my best ability.