The slogan promoting fulfilment services in Poland is Check how much you can save while outsourcing your store’s logistics services. And this is how friendly folks from Austin, Texas promote: You don’t have to hate your e-commerce fulfilment partner (https://saucedaindustries.com/). The way the promotional message is implemented depends on the level of fulfilment services to be rendered and on the market’s readiness for its reception. However, no matter how advanced the fulfilment services are, the essence of fulfilment remains the same: this service solves e-commerce problems with delivering goods to customers. It is worth learning more about it, because fulfilment offers great optimisation potential.
The interval between the payment for the goods ordered in the e-shop and their receipt by the customer has sharply decreased in recent years. When the customers can choose between two stores with the same or similar offer, they will choose the one ensuring faster delivery.
Traders who experience a quick and significant shift in the number of orders per month usually do not have a well-developed system for storing, packing and sending the ordered goods. When the problem is increasing exponentially, outsourcing logistics services may be the only solution.
Warehouse? Thank you, I don’t have one
The most important advantage of fulfilment is that a store doesn’t have to possess a warehouse. This service model means that the goods sold in the store will never physically reach the seller. The ordered goods are sent from the manufacturer to the warehouse of the company providing the fulfilment service, where they are packed and sent to the buyer.
This is a very attractive solution, especially for smaller stores or startup businesses that cannot afford to invest in real estate or machinery, or cannot manage to employ staff. Fulfilment is also a quick fix to the problem of a warehouse which is too small. Outsourcing is an interim way of dealing with the storage while expanding your own warehouse space. Obviously, it may turn out that whilst using this service, you give up on building your own logistics base.
There are plenty of arguments for such a decision. The most important is, of course, the lack of funds or unwillingness to invest them in warehouse facilities – an expensive and risky investment which may not pay off easily when the sales are down or not rising in line with your plans.
So that is why it is time to focus on the biggest advantages offered by fulfilment, i.e. an easily scalable service.
You pay only for parcels sent
Fulfilment allows you not only to avoid tying up your capital in investments. Instead of incurring different costs related to shipping (for example depreciation, leasing fees, cooperation with couriers, staff employment and management, payment of fixed costs and insurance), you have one precisely defined fee for delivering the package to the customer. This fee includes the costs of handling deliveries and returns, of storage and packaging of goods.
Such a service model allows you to plan your budget precisely. It helps also to reduce financial risk – when the numbers of orders and at the same time your turnover decreases, you reduce the number of packages sent, and freight forwarding fees consequently decrease. When the number of orders and your turnover increase, you increase the number of shipments smoothly. Such scaling is not feasible when you own a logistics base – fixed costs and warehouse costs are unavoidable.
Buy time for doing business
Fulfilment, like any form of outsourcing, is a way to buy yourself time that can be spent on business development. Sellers cannot focus entirely and only on current operations – they must keep developing marketing strategies, launching new products, creating plans for the future or optimising the sales platform.
When you conduct business with a small number of staff, fulfilment literally buys you the time that so far has been spent on the packing and sending of goods. In bigger companies, this allows you to shift money to objectives other than building and developing a logistics base.
You don’t have to take our word for the benefits of fulfilment: it’s best to test it for yourself without risk, as testing is free of charge and available to any company regardless of its size or range of products.
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