An email at quarter past two
A client's customer service team emails: please cancel order 55120, the customer ordered twice. The email goes to the client services inbox. It is read at three. By then the order has been picked, packed and labelled, and is sitting in a cage for the five o'clock collection. Nobody finds it. The customer gets two parcels, the client refunds one and pays for the return, and asks why you did not cancel it.
The same thing happens with address changes, with orders the client flagged as possibly fraudulent, and with 'please hold until the customer confirms'.
Why late changes miss
The change arrives in the wrong place and is acted on by searching. The WMS may allow cancellation, but only before picking. After that, stopping a parcel means finding it physically, and nobody has a list of where each order is on the floor.
| Order stage | What stopping it takes |
|---|---|
| Not yet released | Cancel or edit in the WMS |
| Picking in progress | Remove from the batch, return stock to location |
| Packed, not labelled | Find it at the bench, unpack |
| Labelled, in the cage | Find it by label, void the label with the carrier |
| Collected | Ask the carrier to intercept, if the service allows |
Client platforms also handle it differently. Some send a cancellation through the connector, some only update their own order and assume the warehouse sees it.
What shipping anyway costs
Return postage, repacking and restocking, which clients expect you to absorb if they told you in time. Customers receiving parcels they did not want, or at the wrong address, which reflects on the client's brand. And a steady trickle of tense emails asking whether the warehouse reads its inbox.
The fraud case is the worst: an order the client flagged goes out, and the goods are gone.
Address changes have a sting of their own. A parcel delivered to the old address is often a lost parcel in practice, and whether the carrier, the client or the warehouse pays for it depends on who can show when the change was received and what was done with it.
The change route we build
- Capture from every route clients use: cancellation events from their platform through the API, a dedicated change address for emails, and a form in the client portal.
- Order lookup in your WMS to find the current stage, the batch, the bench and the label if one exists.
- Automatic action where the WMS allows it: cancel or hold unreleased orders, update addresses before labelling.
- An alert to the floor for picked or packed orders, on the pack station screen or the supervisor's handheld, with the location to look.
- Carrier label voiding through the carrier's API when a labelled parcel is pulled, and an intercept request where the service offers one.
- A reply to the client with what happened: stopped, stopped after picking, or already collected.
A client-facing cut-off for changes can also be shown, so their team knows when a change is still likely to be caught.
What changes on the floor
Changes stop depending on who reads an inbox. The packing team knows to pull a parcel before it goes in the cage. Clients get a clear answer about each request. And the number of 'we told you' conversations drops because the answer is on record.
Signs your change process is failing
- Cancellations and address changes arrive by email.
- Orders cancelled by the client still ship.
- Pulling a packed parcel means searching the cages.
- Labels for pulled parcels are not voided with the carrier.
- Clients are not told whether a change was made in time.