• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.125-141
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• 2011

As the sales volume of online shops increases, the job burden in the back-offices of the online shops also increases. Order picking is the most labor-intensive operation among the jobs in a back-office and mid-size pure click online shops are experiencing the time delay and complexity in order picking nowadays while fulfilling their customers' orders. Those warehouses of the mid-size shops are based on manual systems, and as order pickings are repeated, the warehouses get a mess and lots of products in those warehouses are getting missing, which results in severe delay in order picking. To overcome this kind of problem in online clothing shops, we research a methodology to locate warehousing products. When products arrive at a warehouse, they are packed into a box and located on a rack in the warehouse. At this point, the operator should determine the box to be put in and the location on the rack for the box to be put on. This problem could be formulated as an Integer Programming model, but the branch-and bound algorithm to solve the IP model requires enormous computation, and sometimes it is even impossible to get a solution in a proper time. So, we relaxed the problem, developed a set of heuristics as a methodology to get a semi-optimum in an acceptable time, and proved by an experiment that the solutions by our methodology are satisfactory and acceptable by field managers.