3PL customer participating in GMA “flash sale”, promoting small businesses

A newly established 3PL client participated in a Good Morning America flash sale.

The show focuses on promoting small businesses, new products, and up-and-coming designers producing a high volume of sales.

Participation requires stand-alone IT integration and a 72-hour shipping window.

In the past, our client used a warehouse referred by show organizers to process a high volume of orders.

Unfortunately, there were numerous challenges with some orders e.g.: wrong products sent, incorrect addressing, and unprocessed orders.  These challenges resulted in customer service issues jamming our client’s communications systems and led to complaints from show organizers.

Fortunately, our client had moved into a Future Forwarding facility two months earlier, notified us of the pending sale, and introduced us to the show’s IT consultant three and a half weeks before the show.

As the show date got closer, our in-house IT team configured the flash sale e-com site into our WMS for order fulfillment, shipping, and customer confirmation messaging.

All systems passed testing and were set to “go-live.”

In IT testing, the IT consultant forwarded standard orders which were received and processed without fail.

When the actual sale opened on a Saturday morning, some orders were made via electronic payment methods, populating a data field that was previously identified as “blank.”  The appearance of this data caused batched orders to fail.

Future Forwarding’s IT team was notified of the problem.  They gained remote access to the system, identified, and resolved the issue with less than an hour of downtime in the warehouse.

The IT team also discovered that the client’s “from” e-mail was restricted to 2500 outbound messages per day, so they replaced it with an address on the Future Forwarding domain to provide timely shipping and tracking information to consumers.

Order fulfillment and accuracy rate was and astounding 99.9001%!

Show hosts immediately asked our client to return for future participation.

Future Forwarding conducted a post-sale debrief with our client and agreed to future sale activities and sales activities with other third-party promoters.