For many e-commerce businesses, the focus is on driving your sales through an increased and diverse product range, creating a popular brand, providing lower prices, and raising the bar in terms of customer service.
All of these are great business aims to have, and they will improve your market position. However, if you want to be a market leader in terms of e-commerce, then you need to look at your fulfillment.
Fulfillment allows your e-commerce business to take more orders, provide improved customer service, lower your costs, and save you time. In short, if you have the right fulfillment, it can be a game-changer for your business.
One of the biggest questions that you will need to tackle in terms of your fulfillment will be, should you keep your fulfillment in-house, or outsource?
Why Is Great Fulfillment Essential?
Your fulfillment strategy should be at the heart of your business. It should be a fluid process that will allow you to scale up the level of orders based on your business’s fluctuating demand.
It is no longer just a case of buying stock and shipping it out. Every cog in your business machine is reliant on your ability to move quickly and adopt a flexible approach to your warehousing and distribution.
But the days of simply ordering stock in and sending it out are gone – customers, selling channels, and your profit rely on your fulfillment solution operating at full efficiency.
Fulfillment Will Benefit Your Stock Availability
Having the right information to hand will provide you the strategic agility to know when you should order more.
Having the right stock levels will mean that the customer experience that you offer will be better.
Fulfillment Allows For A Quick Turnaround On Products
By outsourcing your products to a company that provides fulfillment services such as Action Mailing (https://www.action-mailing.com/fulfillment-services ) it will be possible to get your products into your customer’s hands quicker.
Fulfillment Will Improve Your Profits
The quicker you can send out and replace your stock, the greater the capacity you will have for increased sales, and as a result, profits too.
In-house Vs. Outsourced Fulfillment
In in-house fulfillment, you are responsible for the entire process. This includes receiving orders, picking, packing, and shipping any orders. If anything goes wrong, you’ll need to track the order and resolve the situation.
Then there are warehouse management considerations. Organizing all of the stock that comes in and ensuring it is ready to be picked. The bigger your operations, the more challenging this role will be.
In outsourced fulfillment, all of this is handled for you. Your stock does not even need to enter your premises and you never have to handle it yourself.
Because an outsourced fulfillment center is large enough to take the stock of several companies, you will benefit from the savings associated with the combined scale of all of the operations as well as the existing training and operational excellence.
