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Across Australia and New Zealand, many retailers still rely on manual processes to decide how and where customer orders should be fulfilled. Store managers send emails to reroute orders, spreadsheets are used to track stock movements, and support teams manually intervene to fix issues after the fact. While this approach may feel familiar and flexible, it’s increasingly becoming a liability. In 2025, with rising order volumes, increased competition, and heightened customer expectations, retailers can no longer afford to rely on guesswork. Manual decisions are quietly eroding margins, limiting scale, and putting unnecessary strain on frontline teams. 

At Viare, we work with retailers across the region to modernise their fulfilment operations. One consistent pattern we see is that businesses underestimate the true cost of relying on human logic and ad-hoc processes to manage fulfilment. Intelligent automation can drive significant improvements in efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profitability. 

Manual decision making often starts with good intentions. Store managers might hold back stock “just in case.” Support staff might reassign Click & Collect orders based on their instincts. Head office teams might override system allocations to account for staff capacity or perceived risks. These decisions are often made under pressure and feel pragmatic at the time but they introduce inconsistency, delay, and reduce overall fulfilment performance. 

A particularly common issue we see is reluctance from stores to fulfil online orders, especially when they don’t receive credit for the sale. In many retail environments, store KPIs are still based on walk-in revenue, with little to no attribution for online orders fulfilled from store stock. 

As a result, store staff prioritise in-store activity over online fulfilment. They may delay dispatching online orders, push back on allocation logic, or hold onto stock that could be used to fulfil eCommerce demand. This behaviour isn’t malicious, it’s a rational response to incentives that haven’t caught up with omnichannel operations. But it creates a cascade of issues resulting in slower delivery, increased cancellations, reduced customer satisfaction, and ultimately, a loss of revenue. 

To help solve this, retailers need to automate fulfilment allocation and align store performance metrics with total contribution, including online orders fulfilled from store, so the entire network is pulling in the same direction. 

The Direct Cost of Manual Fulfilment 

Manual fulfilment decisions often result in inefficient order routing. For example, orders might be dispatched from stores that are further away from the customer, increasing freight costs unnecessarily. Stock may be split across multiple shipments when a single dispatch location would have sufficed. These additional costs are not limited to shipping as they also include increased packaging, handling, and labour costs. 

Mistakes are also more common. When a staff member manually assigns an order to a store that doesn’t have accurate stock, the result is often a late order or a cancellation. These failures drive up customer service workload, increase refund volumes, and reduce customer trust. 

Labour costs increase too. When teams are constantly chasing stock, rerouting orders, or double handling fulfilment requests, they’re spending time on low value tasks that should be automated. This creates inefficiencies across departments and often leads to friction between them. These issues are rarely tracked in a single budget line, but they show up in missed targets, frustrated teams, and poor customer reviews. 

Beyond the visible inefficiencies, manual fulfilment decisions create hidden opportunity costs that hold retailers back from scaling effectively. Even a short delay in decision making can push an order out of its promised delivery window. In competitive categories, that’s all it takes for a customer to choose a faster competitor next time. Manual fulfilment processes don’t scale easily. What works for 20 orders a day doesn’t work for 200 and especially not 2000 orders. Teams eventually hit a ceiling and at that point, adding more people just adds cost, not capacity. 

What Good Looks Like: Automated, Rules Based Fulfilment 

Modern fulfilment doesn’t mean removing people from the process. It means supporting them with better tools and systems. Distributed Order Management (DOM) platforms like Viare provide the intelligence and automation retailers need to make fast, accurate, and scalable fulfilment decisions. 

Viare automatically evaluates available inventory across stores, warehouses, and third party suppliers. It considers dispatch costs, order priority, delivery windows, and proximity to the customer, ensuring each order is fulfilled from the optimal location. Fulfilment rules also reflect business priorities such as protecting store stock and reducing split shipments. 

This automation replaces inconsistent decisions with real time logic that is measurable, scalable, and optimised for both customer experience and business performance. Exceptions can still be managed manually when needed, but the vast majority of orders are handled without delay or intervention. 

When fulfilment logic is automated, people are freed up to focus on higher value work. Store teams can spend more time engaging with customers and less time processing orders. Support teams handle fewer fulfilment issues and can focus on proactive service. Operations leaders stop firefighting and start analysing, using data to refine business rules and improve performance over time. With a system like Viare in place, fulfilment becomes a strength, not a bottleneck. This scalability means that as order volumes grow, performance improves rather than degrades. 

The cost of manual fulfilment decisions is rarely obvious but it’s always real. In 2025, retailers need to move fast, deliver accurately, and adapt constantly. That’s not possible when fulfilment logic relies on human guesswork. 

Retailers using Viare gain the clarity, consistency, and control needed to scale confidently. Our intelligent order routing ensures that each order is fulfilled in the most efficient way possible, improving delivery speed, reducing freight costs, and lifting customer satisfaction. 

If your teams are still making fulfilment decisions manually or your stores are holding back because they don’t get credit for online sales, it’s time to rethink your operating model. The cost of inaction is too high, and the opportunity for improvement is too great to ignore.