How Will You Know if You Need a Fulfilment Partner? Your Main Questions Answered
Having an e-commerce enterprise can take a lot of commitment and know-how, and you also have to keep abreast with the changes and trends in the industry to stay ahead. But focusing on your precise needs and requirements can also take up a lot of your time, which will often include your fulfilment needs. The most crucial aspect of running an e-commerce enterprise is fulfilment, which comes next only to shipping and warehousing.
If you have customer orders that are increasingly becoming more difficult to handle and fulfil, it may be time to seriously consider using a fulfilment service. But there are some clear advantages when you pack and ship your customers’ orders yourself, aren’t there? You can save time, and you can save money. In some cases, it’s more beneficial to fulfil your orders yourself, particularly if you are starting your e-commerce endeavour. But there are instances when it’s better to rely on a fulfilment service. So how will you know if you need a fulfilment partner? Here are the answers to your main questions.
- You have uneven or seasonal sales
If a significant portion of your customer orders come during specific times or seasons or you have uneven sales peaks, it wouldn’t make sense to have a business warehouse, not to mention be in charge of staffing and running it yourself. This is where a logistics and fulfilment provider may be better able to address your requirements. In the same vein, if you have habitual sales spikes, this can compromise your business’ promises on delivery. Again, a good fulfilment partner can better handle these spikes and fluctuations and help you become more efficient and consistent, which your customers will undoubtedly appreciate.
- Your fulfilment duties take up too much of your time
In some instances, e-commerce businesses find that their fulfilment duties and responsibilities are already taking up too much of their time. For example, fulfiling your customer orders may already make you too busy to deal with other crucial matters, and your staff may be neglecting their other tasks, too. As the owner of a business, you need to have time to focus on the growth of your enterprise, but if you’re too busy handling fulfilment to focus on this, it’s time to rely on an expert in fulfilment. A good fulfilment company allows you to devote your time and effort to other endeavours, be it sales and marketing, business expansion, sourcing out ideas and new products, and enhancing your business model, and your fulfilment company can take care of customer orders from picking and packing and shipping to returns, if necessary.
- You don’t have the proper infrastructure or equipment
If your business is growing in other parts of the globe, this is all well and good – but you may be outgrowing your existing infrastructure at the same time, making it difficult for your business to adapt. When you increasingly ship to more locations, you can face a logistical nightmare, including costlier shipping and shipping delays. But if you have a fulfilment partner, you can rest assured that they can deal with a growing base of customers across different locations. Along with this, they will have the necessary skill and equipment to optimise all your fulfilment needs.
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