A Guide To Warehouse Design For Ecommerce Businesses
Ecommerce is a bigger business than ever before, with fast-changing requirements to enhance productivity, adapt, and improve output for continued growth and profitability. The efficiency of your warehouse, and the measures put in place to enhance workflow and flexibility, can be vital to ensuring you meet demand and keep up with picking, packing and delivery requirements.
Whether you're looking to refurb a recently acquired warehouse, or your current premises no longer suit your needs, setting the right priorities for your warehouse design is vital for success and a key consideration for any ecommerce business.
Warehouse Priorities For Ecommerce
Efficiency
A high volume of orders is standard in ecommerce warehouses, requiring speed and efficiency for output and input to match pace. You may have quotas for the amount of time spent on each order, or you may be considering how to improve speed on the warehouse floor to meet an increase in demand. Design choices that enable faster picking and packing times are particularly valuable in ecommerce to deliver high customer service standards, enabling the warehouse to operate efficiently through smart design choices and processes.
Accessibility
Accessibility covers many areas of warehouse design, from the technology used to access and aid your workflows to the ability for staff to find specific products and materials quickly and easily in your warehouse. Taking accessibility into consideration can help ecommerce businesses to reduce wasted time in workflows. For example, the accessibility of packaging materials in purpose-built stations makes it easier for employees to package items swiftly with no confusion over the process or difficulty finding different items.
Storage
As your ecommerce business grows, the footprint taken up by stock will likely grow just as much. Storage is a concern for most ecommerce brands, both in terms of space and when considering the most appropriate way to store items. For example, storage for garments may be very different from storage for children's toys, requiring a tailored solution that saves space while also retaining quality control on all products that leave the warehouse.
Room For Growth
Rapid growth often happens in the ecommerce sector, leaving businesses struggling to find space to meet that increase in demand and custom. Providing room for growth is a crucial priority for warehouse design, especially in consideration of storage, day-to-day operations, and accommodating a larger staff. A warehouse design that is flexible to this growth is integral to preventing problems when your business grows and changes.
What's Important For Ecommerce Warehouse Design?
Prioritising the most important elements of warehouse design for an ecommerce business is an effective place to start. From there, you have the knowledge and insight to decide what's most important for the design or refurbishment of your facility. Some of the factors you may want to consider investing in include:
On-The-Floor Efficiency for Optimal Picking & Packing
Optimising the picking and packing workflow of every product line is vital for ecommerce businesses to reduce time wastage and ensure customers receive their products on time. Choosing warehouse redevelopment options that provide the resources and efficiency to improve that flow can support your business in meeting demand as it increases in busy periods. Focusing on this integral part of the business makes it easier to build optimisation that meets your needs and expectations.
Space for Staff Facilities & Offices
As staffing needs change, your warehouse needs to be flexible to those requirements. Warehouse design that considers staff needs, whether that's extra space for breaks or a larger footprint reserved for office space, can provide a foundation for a better working environment, leading to improved productivity. Offering ample space for staff requirements is also valuable from a health and safety standpoint to ensure you're meeting your legal responsibilities.
Inventory Management for Large Volumes of Stock
Stock levels can be challenging to handle as demand grows if you are using outdated or inefficient storage methods. Utilising a new warehouse design to improve inventory management can be a powerful way to reduce the time spent picking items. An added benefit of a more efficient design is how easy it is to implement different automation and carry out stock checks, ensuring a continual flow of stock in and out of your business.
Effective Flow From Order Placement to Delivery
Achieving an effective workflow from when an order is first placed to when it is sent out for delivery is a crucial concern for ecommerce businesses. Shortening the time spent picking and packing orders is invaluable to improving that flow. A warehouse design that helps to reduce the time spent searching for stock, sourcing materials, and helping products reach output is valuable to creating an effective, streamlined flow throughout the business.
Suitable Storage Solutions for a Wide Range of Products
Whether your business sells a wide range of products or simply different types of garments, appropriate storage can help to improve quality, prevent damage and ensure items are delivered in the best condition possible. Suitable storage solutions can help to save space while also improving efficiency. For example, implementing custom storage for particular products can make it easier to remove them, pack them and restock them as needed.
Facilities for Efficient Returns Handling
Handling returns is an important function of any ecommerce warehouse. Almost every business will be legally required to accept returns, and modern consumers expect returns to be processed quickly and efficiently. Returns also need to be handled correctly so that items can be tracked and resold in order to avoid costly loss or damage to stock. It’s therefore essential to plan and introduce the storage and processes for efficient handling of returns as part of any ecommerce warehouse development.
Ecommerce Warehouse Solutions
If you are designing or refurbishing a warehouse to best fit your needs as an ecommerce business, implementing the correct solutions can make your job easier. Adjusting and customising the space available within your warehouse footprint can help streamline selling as an ecommerce business, which in turn helps to improve customer service and speed of output. Here are some of the solutions you may want to consider for ecommerce warehouse design:
Partition Solutions for Divided Workspaces
Steel partitions can be valuable in any warehouse to divide up and contain specific parts of workflows. In ecommerce businesses, partitions are useful in delivering separate workflows close to one another. For example, separating space for returns can help prevent confusion between items going in and out of your business, providing a cleaner workflow for each side. Partitions are also ideal for creating facility areas for staff and office space, while mesh partitioning is useful as a tool for securing high value stock or dangerous items. Contemporary demountable partitioning is quick to install and can be reconfigured to adapt to changes in requirements, which makes it a more efficient and cost effective solution than other more permanent partitioning solutions.
Organised, Tailored Storage to Improve Efficiency
Tailored storage is highly effective in creating an optimal warehouse environment for ecommerce businesses. Anything from warehouse garment-hanging systems to vertically stacked storage shelving can help support fast storage and speedy stock recovery. Proper storage for particular items or ranges can also help reduce breakage and damage, providing a higher standard of customer service and care for each product purchased.
Warehouse Shelving For Returns
A separate returns facility with numerous locations to house returned goods throughout the warehouse means that returned items can be conveniently stored ready for dispatch rather than having to go back into the general palletised or bulk stock. Each pick face within the returned goods shelving system has a barcode location that is scanned when the item has been returned. This links into a warehouse management system which enables the retailer to know that the item is back in stock and exactly where it is located to ensure accurate inventory management. The next time the item is ordered, the picker will select it from the returned stock in the shelving system rather than the bulk location, which means returned goods can be stored and reused more efficiently.
Rotational & Adjustable Storage Setups
Storage that is rotational or adjustable can save time for ecommerce businesses. Carton live storage, for example, allows stock to be brought forward to the front of the shelf on each picking, making it a far more convenient task to access the full extent of your inventory safely and quickly. Storage that does half of the work for you helps reduce time wasted on gathering items, enhancing efficiency while ensuring stock is stored safely.
Introducing a Mezzanine for Additional Space
A mezzanine level can be a powerful way to increase the floor space within your warehouse and offer a range of uses for ecommerce businesses. Whether you require extra room for storage or additional office space to account for a larger customer service or logistics team, mezzanines deliver a solution that suits your needs without detracting from existing space. A warehouse mezzanine can also provide the ideal separation between the warehouse floor itself and other staff areas, improving awareness of health and safety requirements.
Pallet Racking Systems for Effective Workflows
Whether you purchase stock in bulk or sell large or heavy items online, investing in an appropriate pallet racking design for your warehouse can effectively improve safety and storage efficiency in one. A high-quality, high density system such as high bay racking can help you make the most of your warehouse's unused, vertical space while providing easy access with suitable forklifts and technology. Standardised pallet racking systems make it easy to transport items across the site, with no need to change equipment or adjust storage methods.
Automation-Ready Storage for New Technology And Robotics
With many ecommerce businesses investing in automation and robotics for picking orders, redesigning your warehouse to suit these needs can be helpful both for current use and future innovation. Robotics-ready shelving and storage, plus smooth, hard-wearing flooring and surfaces, can support the use of robotics or heavier-duty equipment in the picking process. Mezzanine floors are one way to implement this solution effectively while separating robotics from staff-lead areas.
Custom Workstations for Optimal Packing Times
Tailored workstations are a quick, easy and invaluable addition to the workflows within a warehouse. If you plan on designing a warehouse with a practical packaging flow in mind, introducing dedicated stations and storage areas can be an optimal way to streamline the packing process. Packing benches designed for your products' specific tasks can help reduce packing material wastage and cut down on time spent sourcing different items.
Create The Optimum Warehouse For Your Ecommerce Business
Have plans to redevelop your ecommerce warehouse? Get in touch with our specialist team today to find out how we could help. With expertise in a wide range of innovative warehouse solutions for ecommerce businesses, we can help you make the most of your premises.
