Order Accuracy Rate

When the wrong order arrives, the customer does not grade on effort

Speed gets attention, but accuracy gets remembered. A customer might forgive a package that is a day late if the item is correct and the communication is clear. A customer rarely forgives the wrong item, the wrong quantity, or a box that arrives missing a key component. That is why order accuracy rate is one of the most searched fulfillment metrics. It is the KPI that decides whether customers reorder or quietly disappear.

Accuracy also has a cruel multiplier effect. One error can create a refund, a reship, a support ticket, a negative review, and a damaged internal forecast because inventory is now wrong in two directions. If you sell B2B, the penalty can be even sharper, because retailers treat mistakes as chargebacks, not learning opportunities. When order accuracy rate drops, the cost is not only the cost of fixing the mistake. The cost is the loss of confidence across the business.

What order accuracy rate actually measures

Order accuracy rate should answer a simple question: did the customer receive exactly what they ordered, in the correct condition, with the correct documentation and labels. The challenge is that there are multiple ways to measure accuracy, and some ways hide problems. If you measure only at the order level, one wrong unit inside a multi-line order can disappear inside a pass. If you measure only at the unit level, one wrong unit can make the operation look worse than it is for large basket sizes.

The practical approach is to track accuracy in layers: order accuracy, line accuracy, and unit accuracy. Those layers tell different stories, and you need all of them to diagnose root causes. Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described how accuracy shows up in the real world, especially on the retail side. "We have over 99.9% ship accuracy of these orders, which when you look at it on a unit level, such as unit shift versus unit errors, I almost couldn't believe it when I came here, how well we're doing on B2B shipping." That quote matters because it hints at the measurement detail that separates a confident operation from a hopeful one.

Why accuracy matters even more when you scale

At low volume, you can fix errors with hustle. At scale, hustle becomes expensive, slow, and inconsistent. The business becomes a machine that either produces correct orders or produces recurring exceptions that clog every team. That is why accuracy is not only a warehouse score. It is an operating model choice, because it depends on how work is designed and verified.

Accuracy problems also become harder to see as volume grows, because noise rises with throughput. A daily handful of mistakes can feel normal until you connect the dots across reship costs, carrier claims, support volume, and inventory reconciliation time. Order accuracy rate is the metric that forces clarity. When it drops, it tells you the operation is leaking money, even if shipping speed looks fine.

How poor visibility hides accuracy problems

Brands often leave a 3PL because they feel blind. They get a report that says things are fine while customers complain and inventory feels off. In that situation, accuracy becomes a debate, not a fact. Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described what brands report when they switch providers. "Most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and basically just meeting the committed requirements." When customers cannot access the underlying transaction detail, they cannot separate a one-off from a systemic problem.

Visibility changes the posture of the relationship. Instead of arguing about whether an error happened, the focus shifts to where it happened and how to prevent it. Milligan described what real-time access does for customers. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She also explained the practical experience of that visibility. "They can actually watch those progressions going on." Accuracy gets easier to protect when customers can see status, exceptions, and confirmations without waiting for email chains.

Scan-based processes are the foundation of accurate orders

In fulfillment, accuracy is built at the moment of touch. If the system does not record touches reliably, you end up relying on memory, paper, and manual updates, which is how errors multiply quietly. Scan-based workflows provide the most dependable proof that the right item was picked, the right quantity was confirmed, and the right label was applied.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, described what a strong WMS does differently. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He explained why this level of tracking changes reality on the floor. "At any point in time, I know that Bobby has this product on fork 10 right now, and if I needed to go find that product, I just got to go find Bobby on fork 10." The point is not the forklift. The point is that traceability is how you prevent errors from becoming mysteries.

Where most accuracy errors actually come from

Many people assume errors come from careless picking. Sometimes they do. More often, errors come from system and process gaps that set people up to fail. Poor slotting, lookalike SKUs stored too close together, missing barcode scans, weak item master data, and unclear pack verification rules can all turn good workers into accidental error generators.

Another common source is incomplete retailer compliance logic. A shipment can be perfectly picked and still be wrong if the label is incorrect, the label is placed incorrectly, or the ASN timing is wrong. In B2B, accuracy includes compliance correctness, not just item correctness. Wright explained why B2B is a different muscle. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He described what the retailers demand. "They have routing guides that make you specific labels on and put them in a specific place on the box, and you have to send EDI, ASN, electronic information in a timely fashion." If you ship B2B, your order accuracy rate needs to reflect those requirements, because chargebacks do not care that the item inside the carton was correct.

How to measure order accuracy without creating a false comfort

A clean definition is the first defense. You want to define a correct order as one that matches the order record, matches compliance requirements, and leaves the facility with the correct label and documentation. Then you need to decide where your truth comes from. Scan-based confirmation is stronger than a manual checkmark, and customer complaint data should be treated as a signal that triggers a deeper look, not as the only source of truth.

You also want to track error types separately. Wrong SKU, wrong quantity, damaged item, missing insert, wrong label, and missed compliance step are different classes of error with different fixes. A single blended accuracy number is useful, but it will not tell you what to change. The best operations use the accuracy rate as the headline, then use error-type breakdowns to drive continuous improvement, coaching, slotting changes, and system adjustments.

Why cycle counts and inventory accuracy support order accuracy

Order accuracy does not live only in outbound. If your inventory is wrong, your pickers can do everything right and still ship the wrong thing, because the system told them to pick from a location that was already depleted or mislabeled. Inventory accuracy is the quiet partner KPI that supports order accuracy.

Milligan linked these issues directly to what customers complain about most when they come from other providers. "Most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and basically just meeting the committed requirements." When the operation has disciplined scanning, cycle counting, and inventory control, order accuracy is easier to achieve, because the pick instructions are correct more often.

Why accuracy should be discussed alongside service levels

Some teams treat speed and accuracy as a tradeoff. In reality, they are both symptoms of process health. A chaotic operation tends to be both slow and inaccurate, because work is constantly being redone. A disciplined operation can be fast and accurate, because verification is built into the workflow instead of bolted on at the end.

Malmquist described how SLAs span multiple parts of the operation. "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." That is relevant because an SLA conversation that ignores accuracy can feel hollow. A same-day shipment that is wrong is not a service win. It is a fast mistake, and fast mistakes are the most expensive kind.

Visibility and support structure determine how quickly errors get resolved

Even strong operations have exceptions. The difference is how quickly errors get detected, diagnosed, and corrected. That is where visibility and support structure matter, because an error that takes days to investigate often turns into multiple errors due to repeated process gaps.

Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described why a dedicated point of contact changes how issues get handled. "One of the benefits that you get with us would be having a dedicated account manager who is human. You're not put into a ticketing system with people coming in and out every day and working on your problem." When a customer can surface an accuracy issue and get a consistent owner on the 3PL side, the feedback loop tightens, and the root cause gets fixed faster.

What good looks like when you manage order accuracy rate actively

High accuracy is not a one-time achievement. It is the result of consistent process discipline, scan compliance, item master hygiene, slotting strategy, pack verification, and clear compliance rules for B2B. The metric should be visible daily, and it should be backed by transaction-level detail so teams can learn, adjust, and prevent repeats.

When accuracy is managed well, customers feel it in small moments. They stop emailing support. They start trusting delivery dates and product consistency. Retailers stop treating you like an ATM, because the avoidable compliance errors disappear. The brand gets to spend time on growth instead of damage control, and that is the real point of tracking order accuracy rate in the first place.

Where G10 fits if accuracy is a non-negotiable requirement

If you are trying to grow D2C while expanding into retail, accuracy is what protects the brand from the hidden costs of scale. G10 focuses on scan-based execution, B2B-aware workflows, and customer-facing visibility designed to make accuracy measurable and actionable. As Wright described, "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." That kind of traceability supports both investigation and prevention.

If you want to see how an operation manages accuracy day to day, ask for a walkthrough of the accuracy view and an example exception workflow. You should be able to trace a single order from pick to pack to label, see the scans that confirm it, and understand how errors are categorized and corrected, so you can spend less time fixing mistakes and more time building the business.