If your order volumes doubled tomorrow, would your warehouse cope?

If your order volumes doubled tomorrow, would your warehouse cope for the next month?

I put that question to the room at the StoreFeeder Sessions event 2026. For most growing businesses, the honest answer is no – or at least not without a lot of pain, which is the reality when sales grow faster than the operations that support them. 

The actual challenge is that most businesses don’t realise they have a warehouse problem until it has already become one. Warehouses break gradually, usually one workaround at a time, and by the time it’s obvious, you’re in the middle of your busiest month of the year.

I’ve been on the wrong side of that question

Before StoreFeeder existed, Brian Williamson and I worked together at a third-party logistics business, and we lived through exactly this scenario.

There was no warehouse management system. We produced shipping labels manually on a PC, worked from endless pieces of paper, and held the whole thing together with our experience and memory of the products and customers. Looking back at those days, I’m amazed we got orders out at all, let alone accurately.

Then came a peak period where the sales had clearly outgrown the operation: paper everywhere, temporary staff wandering around because they didn’t know the products or where anything lived, and people queuing for printers. That’s when it became clear that we’d scaled one half of the business but not the other.

That daily frustration is a large part of why Brian went on to found StoreFeeder and why I built the warehouse processes into it. 

Four signs your warehouse is heading for trouble

Workarounds are multiplying. When volumes rise, teams compensate. People work harder and longer, and they invent manual fixes to keep orders moving. Each fix does its job but also adds complexity. Eventually, the compensation stops being enough because what works comfortably at 100 orders a day starts falling apart at 1000.

The operation depends on people rather than process. In immature operations, the knowledge lives in someone's head. There’s always one person who knows where the stock is, which order goes out first, and how to fix things when they go wrong. This arrangement works well until they’re off sick or on holiday. You can imagine the ensuing chaos: where is that stock? Which product goes with this order, and why is the stock not where it should be? 

Accuracy is slipping. Stock becomes unreliable, mispicks creep up, and your team spends more time searching for products than picking them. You can physically feel the operation slowing down before any report paints the picture. 

Throughput has capped out. Somebody is spending their day deciding what gets picked next, which channel to prioritise, and which carrier cut-off matters most. At this point, the team has become your system, and your throughput is limited by how much coordination one stressed person can manage.

None of these look like major issues on their own, which is a big part of the problem. 

Waiting is the expensive option

The dangerous thing about warehouse mistakes is that they never stay in the warehouse. Customers feel every single one of them, resulting in returns, support tickets, negative reviews, or worse, lost loyalty.

As Brian and I both said on stage, 76% of shoppers say delivery delays would make them consider switching retailers, and plenty of those delays are not a courier problem at all. They’re an operation that couldn’t get everything out of the door on time. One StoreFeeder customer worked out that before they had proper validation in place, carrier costs on incorrectly picked orders alone were running to more than £40,000 a year.

There’s a margin cost too, and it’s easy to miss because it doesn’t arrive as a single bill. Mispicks, inventory inaccuracies, and the time spent correcting them all reduce your profit, and these problems scale with you.

Then there’s the timing: every business I’ve worked with that left this too late ended up fixing it during peak season, which is the worst possible time to take it on. At that point you’re not fixing it with process. You’re fixing it with agency staff, overtime, and goodwill, and paying for all three at the least convenient time of the year. Doing the same work in a quiet month costs a fraction of that, and you get the benefit through the whole of the following peak rather than halfway through it.

What ready actually looks like

Scalable warehouses are built around repeatable processes, and the biggest shift a growing operation can make is moving from person-driven fulfilment to system-led fulfilment.

This means:

• Real-time visibility of stock rather than relying on memory.
• Validation that confirms the right item at the point of picking.
• Standardised steps that everyone follows in the same order.
• A system that organises the work instead of a manager doing it manually.

I go into more detail on these four points in my post about what operational maturity actually means.

There’s an additional step for businesses that run more than one warehouse to support international sales, cut shipping times, or hold more stock. It adds another level of complexity: stock must move between locations, inventory must stay accurate, you need to see what’s in transit, and every order must be fulfilled from the right site.

The key point is that there is no finish line. Businesses shipping thousands of orders a day still keep refining, because every stage of growth brings another new pressure or complexity. Maturity is about being ready for growth before it turns up.

Would your warehouse cope?

Growth is only valuable if your operation can support it. Every successful eCommerce business eventually reaches the point where that matters more than winning more orders, because growth without structure just creates chaos. The businesses that scale and last are the ones that fulfil best, not necessarily the ones that sell the most. 

If you aren’t sure where your operation is at, our free Warehouse Readiness Scorecard gives you an answer in minutes.

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