The global ecommerce industry has experienced explosive growth over the past few years. Online sales—which hit a record of $6.42 trillion in 2025—are expected to make up 21.1% of total retail sales in 2026, and grow to 22.5% by 2028. For ecommerce businesses, this rise in sales volume also brings a rise in complexity and costs for ecommerce order fulfillment.
To consistently meet customer expectations for on-time delivery and increase profit margins and market share, ecommerce companies must overcome numerous order fulfillment challenges.
Tackling these challenges is no easy task, which is why so many ecommerce businesses turn to third-party logistics (3PL) providers to help them with various elements of their inventory management, and fulfillment operations. When a 3PL provider supports a business with ecommerce order fulfillment services, that business can better grow and scale across sales channels.
In this article, we will highlight the five biggest ecommerce order fulfillment challenges and discuss how a 3PL provider like Amazon Supply Chain Services can help overcome them.
Order fulfillment challenge #1: avoiding stockouts
Perhaps the most significant order fulfillment issue ecommerce companies deal with is preventing stockouts. Stockouts occur when a particular product is not available and can’t be sold or shipped to a customer.
Stockouts are every ecommerce company’s worst nightmare, as they not only lead to a drop in sales but can also damage customer trust and loyalty. Retailers lose an average of $1.1 million annually due to stockouts. And, when faced with an out-of-stock product, 70% of shoppers switch to a competitor
The causes of stockouts vary, ranging from sudden spikes in consumer demand, supply chain bottlenecks and disruptions, to cash flow management and supplier payment issues.
To avoid stockouts, many ecommerce companies employ inventory buffers (or safety stock), but this strategy often results in higher amounts of excess inventory and higher inventory costs.
A 3PL provider — like Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS) — can help prevent stockouts while reducing costs by driving improvements in two key areas:
Demand planning
Leading 3PLs have access to best-of-breed demand planning software tools. By partnering with these providers, a business can leverage tools that use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to accurately forecast demand and optimize inventory levels across a supply chain network during peak season and throughout the rest of the year.
Inventory distribution
3PL providers like ASCS, which gives access to Amazon’s world-class logistics network stretching across 27 countries with over 2,000 facilities (including more than 200 fulfillment centers) can help to:
- Position the right amount of the right products in the right locations at the right times, so a business is ready to meet demand and minimize storage and shipping costs.
- Consolidate inventory into a single global pool, which a business can utilize to fulfill orders across various sales channels.
- Enable auto-replenishment of products by automatically redistributing stock when inventory levels run low.
Order fulfillment challenge #2: minimizing order processing time
Delivering goods to customers rapidly and reliably is the cornerstone of successful ecommerce fulfillment.
To do this, ecommerce companies must be able to minimize the order processing time, or the amount of time it takes to receive an order. Then, a business has to pick and pack the order for shipment by a carrier.
Many ecommerce businesses put in place a two- to three-day processing time window, giving themselves enough padding to ensure they can meet their delivery promises to customers. But most customers hate to wait and would prefer to get their goods as quickly as possible.
Ecommerce companies have to constantly struggle to reduce the time between order received and order processed. It’s out of their control because many third-party carriers have rigid cut-off times for same-day order processing.
A best-in-class 3PL like ASCS can help decrease order processing times and improve delivery performance by:
- Operating around the clock, throughout the year, so that orders can be processed as soon as they are received—even on weekends or during holidays
- Extending order cut-off times so that items can be shipped throughout the day and night
- Offering shipping services to minimize reliance on third-party carriers
- Conducting pick, pack, and ship operations as seamlessly as possible to reduce the time between orders being received and processed
Order fulfillment challenge #3: integrating back-end systems
Another major challenge that ecommerce companies have to grapple with is difficulties in integrating the various back-end systems. Often, warehouse management systems (WMSs), or applications that help ecommerce firms manage their fulfillment operations, do not communicate well with other back-end systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and manufacturing execution systems (MESs).
This lack of integration and real-time data sharing between back-end systems can lead to a loss of visibility over order volumes and inventory levels and can ultimately result in poor inventory management and delivery performance.
A 3PL like ASCS can help drive integration and alignment across various back-end systems by:
- Deploying best-of-class WMSs with powerful APIs and apps
- Enabling real-time data feeds throughout various back-end systems
- Ensuring that a business’ WMS, ERP, and other systems are in sync and can communicate effectively with each other to provide an accurate, holistic view of current demand and supply conditions, monitor and manage inventory levels, and track orders across multiple sales channels
Order fulfillment challenge #4: managing multi-unit orders
Multi-unit orders—orders that contain two or more items—present a huge challenge for ecommerce companies.
Managing multi-unit orders is a highly complicated task. An ecommerce business has to coordinate the picking of multiple items that may be located in different places in the warehouse or in entirely different warehouses. Then, the business has to pack these items together into a single shipment that has to go out to a customer by a specific delivery date.
A 3PL like ASCS can help a business handle multi-unit orders more efficiently by:
- Automating and streamlining the process of picking, packing, and shipping multi-unit orders with sophisticated WMSs, cutting-edge warehouse robotics, and Internet of things (IoT) technologies
- Consolidating inventory into a single pool that can be drawn from to fulfill multi-unit orders
- Reducing the complexity of managing multi-unit orders as well as the shipping costs, with services like Multichannel Fulfillment (MCF) even offering discounts on multi-unit orders
Order fulfillment challenge #5: handling seasonal spikes and supply chain volatility
Ecommerce companies have to cope with volatile supply chains: seasonal spikes in demand, shortages and disruptions due to weather events or logistics, and other factors.
The key to managing this supply chain volatility is to be prepared with the necessary capacity, inventory, end-to-end visibility, and agility.
A 3PL like ASCS can help ensure a business is equipped to deal with seasonal spikes and constantly changing supply chain conditions by:
- Predicting surges in demand and shortages in supply before they happen using sophisticated demand planning and forecasting tools
- Providing enough logistics capacity—from storage space in the warehouse to order processing resources and delivery transportation—to handle fluctuations in demand and supply
- Automatically replenishing inventory and reallocating capacity to satisfy demand wherever and whenever it arises
Conquer challenges, capitalize on opportunities
The global ecommerce industry has registered breathtaking growth over the past few years, and this trend looks set to continue in the years to come.
This growth has opened up tremendous opportunities for ecommerce businesses, but it has also created significant obstacles in ecommerce order fulfillment and other areas.
Working with a 3PL like Amazon Supply Chain Services that provides comprehensive ecommerce order fulfillment services like multichannel fulfillment can help your business tackle the logistics challenges that come your way, so you can consistently deliver for your customers, decrease your operating costs, and drive bottom-line growth.
