Reducing errors in your warehouse
The moment a customer receives their order can make or break their experience. Sending the wrong quantity, the incorrect size, or delivering later than promised increases pressure on your customer service team and might even prevent that customer from returning.
That’s why it’s essential to make as few mistakes as possible in your warehouse. Not only to meet your promises consistently, but also because fixing a mistake costs time and money.
But how do you improve when every day is already packed? Investigating the root cause of mistakes takes time. Still, if you take the time this week to fix one issue, you’ll likely benefit from it as soon as next week. And that improvement compounds over time.
Below are two real-world warehouse examples to inspire you. What problems did they encounter, how did they solve them, and what results did they see?
Example 1
Context: a webshop with a small collection of printed t-shirts, handling about 30 orders per day. They wanted to reduce mistakes but weren’t yet large enough to invest in warehouse software.
All sizes from a single collection were stored in the same rack. Since the shirts looked nearly identical across sizes, the wrong size was often picked and shipped.
Staff decided to reorganize the warehouse by grouping by size rather than collection. Now, all sizes are separated by rack, so it's easier to find the right shirt with the art print in rack M than to search among eight similar-looking sizes in one location.
Example 2
Context: a large webshop with a varied product range, about 1,000 orders per day, and 3 full-time receiving employees. Incoming products were piling up, making it hard to deliver on the promise: “Not in stock? Shipped within 5 days.”
The receiving team started tracking how long it took for products to become pickable after arriving. The result: an average of 5 days, with some taking as long as 20 days. Because of these outliers, the 5-day promise couldn’t be guaranteed. Customer service began prioritizing specific orders, which in turn delayed others.
Instead of disabling backorders or extending the 5-day promise, they held an improvement session to identify the real issue. They discovered that employees prioritized easy items, while bulkier products were left untouched longer due to the extra work required.
The solution: a whiteboard with three columns—“to do,” “busy,” and “done.” For each incoming delivery, a post-it was created with key info such as the delivery date. Notes were added in order of arrival. When a team member started processing a delivery, they moved the post-it to “busy” and added their name, so everyone knew who was working on what.
Three months later, they measured again. The average processing time dropped to 1.3 days, with a maximum of 2 days. A huge improvement, especially considering such a simple system created so much impact.
This new method didn’t just bring more structure to the warehouse, it also eased the pressure on customer service and made it possible to confidently promise a 5-day turnaround.
These examples show how small changes can lead to big improvements. Feeling inspired? Here are some tips to get into improvement mode:
- Schedule regular improvement sessions with your team. Discuss where most mistakes occur and investigate the root causes. Create a list of issues and pick two pain points to improve, so you’re already doing better next week.
- Look for ways to eliminate exceptions from your process. Don’t only consider the downsides—such as “we’ll lose 5 orders per week if customers can’t pick up”—but also the upsides: “fewer mistakes are made when we stick to a consistent process.”
- Don’t rely solely on external benchmarks. Use your own data to track weekly progress and see where you’re improving. Try things out. Which tweaks positively impact your performance?
- We regularly share tips and inspiration on our blog and in our Help Center. Take advantage of it!
