The Ultimate Guide to Top Benefits of Outsourcing Fulfillment

In today’s interconnected world, customers have maximum power in their hands. In just a blink of an eye, they can type, search, and swipe their products to receive them as early as possible. If you are an eCommerce business or planning to sell your merchandise through an eCommerce platform for the growth of your revenue then you must know some crucial things. This includes the characteristics of your products and the implementation of your eCommerce fulfillment services.

Packing orders in-house comes with some benefits like flexibility, economy, and a customized unpacking experience.

But, with the development of your business and increase in the orders of your products, managing fulfillment operations on your own may become tough.

Not just packaging, but you will be the one who is responsible for managing the whole inventory, processing the orders, as well as shipping them safely at accurate timing.

Fulfillment of orders is a crucial factor for the success of an online business. Unfortunately, there are many companies that don’t think much about the resources and time required for shipping and fulfillment procedures and thus it becomes a reason for their reduced revenue.

Now the question is how you can stay at par to provide an exceptional experience to your customers in this constantly challenging and changing eCommerce ecosystem. It has a very simple solution and that is outsourcing your eCommerce fulfillment services. If you are still not sure, then you may need to look at the stats.

Approximately 73% of eCommerce businesses agree that joining hands with third-party service providers provides them with innovative ways to improve the effectiveness of logistics.

Now before we move on towards the benefits of outsourcing eCommerce fulfillment services, let’s understand what fulfillment actually is.

What is fulfillment?

Ecommerce fulfillment is a process that involves various stages for providing orders to the end customers. This includes storing inventory, picking, packaging, shipping, and return of an order.

All these steps can be completed either in-house or by outsourcing to a third-party vendor. Fulfilling an order is much more than simply putting a product in the box and packing it for the courier pick up. The major tasks of order fulfillment companies are –

1. Warehousing the inventory
2. Assembling the product
3. Packaging of the order in much secure way
4. Adding labels on the orders for shipment
5. Sending the order through courier services.
6. Notify customers with the order updates
7. Managing the return of orders.

Benefits of Partnering with eCommerce Fulfillment Services

Now, as you know about the different tasks done by the order fulfillment company, you can think about the n numbers of benefits that you will gain with this service. Some of them are listed below, have a look –

1.Ready Infrastructure

If you have planned to manage the orders by yourself, then handling the storage part could be an agonizing task. Doesn’t matter whether you have a garage or warehouse to store the items, but you will require highly qualified staff and a big portion of your time to make things easy and smooth.

Also, if there is a need to take storage space for rent, then it will come with tons of management responsibilities. Hiring staff, buying equipment, and taking insurance each time would become important and you can’t skip any one of these. Along with gaining expertise, you need to invest a huge amount in infrastructure.

Also, in your pick seasons, you may notice a fluctuation in inventory levels. No matter how much money you have but without the expertise and required manpower, managing inventory is just impossible.

This is why you should opt for outsourcing eCommerce Fulfillment Services. With this, you will get access to a huge space and the best thing is you will be paying only for the used space.

With their unique resources, it is easy to manage the sales fluctuations during the pick seasons. So, you do not need to worry more about meeting your customers’ expectations during festive seasons and sales.

2.Effective order processing

If you have ever been involved in the work of order fulfillment, you must be aware of the activities involved in the shipment of orders. If not, here is a glimpse –

1. Finding products on the basis of picklist
2. Selecting the right-sized box as per the size of a particular product
3. Selecting the best packaging material that can keep the product safe
4. Packing the product in an organized and secured way
5. Printing, scaling and adding labels on the package
6. Scheduling the courier pickups

Think to yourself, how much labor and time you will need to perform these tasks daily for every single product.

When you see an increase in the volume of your orders and you would not be able to meet your customers’ expectations with limited resources, then you must start planning for outsourcing eCommerce fulfillment services. Why struggle more when you have an option to manage and simplify the work.

With outsourcing, you can get a lot of time to focus on your other business activities. Also, it helps you to save a lot of money and resources. Order fulfillment centers work with the latest technologies that automate the whole process. This minimizes the requirement for manual operations and streamlines the entire process.

3.Scale your business

Well, it is true that the fulfillment process is a key element of your business, but it is not the only task for which you have started your business. Initially, you may love to spend some time in fulfillment processes, but with the growth of your business, these tasks can take a lot of your time.

After some time, you will realize that you are wasting time on fulfillment. Instead, you should spend your valuable time in strategy building, lead generation, brand awareness, and other crucial tasks for your business. Make sure, fulfillment tasks are not becoming obstacles for scaling your business.

You need to understand that all the tasks cannot be done on your own, sometimes you need to make a smart decision by handing the major tasks to the professionals. Outsourcing eCommerce fulfillment services to the experts give you much time to focus on your different business needs.

You can use this time for product designing, planning better strategies for attracting more and more customers, branding, marketing, and several other business initiatives.

In the meantime, your order fulfillment service provider will take care of your customers’ orders. They will manage your inventory and shipping needs. After all, they are more experienced than you and it is part of their daily work.

Also, by joining hands with an order fulfillment company, you can free up a lot of your staff who were otherwise involved in inventory management and shipping activities. You can train them for your core business activities and prepare your own in-house team that focuses more on your core and high-priority business goals and not on the supplementary activities.

Renowned fulfillment companies better understand the ongoing requirements of a business. They are also aware of the future expectations for scaling up your business. These companies work to automate your commerce workflow and manage your major operations so that you can freely concentrate on your vital business aspects.

Along with the above, there are some more benefits such as –

1. Reduced shipping costs
2. Actionable insights
3. Access to the latest tools and technologies
4. Gain a geographic footprint