E-COMMERCE FULFILLMENT
Ecommerce businesses are booming. In 2020, global eCommerce sales reached $4.2 trillion and are expected to grow to $7.4 trillion by 2025. With this rapid growth comes increased pressure on businesses to meet the rising demands of consumers.
Order fulfillment is an integral part of every business, whether self-managed or outsourced. Fulfillment services facilitate the storage, packaging, and shipping of products to customers.
Without fulfillment services, businesses would have to shoulder all the associated costs and responsibilities alone. This is where outsourcing fulfillment services like Codirect comes in.
What is Fulfillment?
Fulfillment is the process of receiving, processing, and delivering orders to customers. It includes everything from taking an order from a customer to packaging and shipping the product to its correct destination.
Every business is responsible for processing and fulfilling orders placed by its customers. However, most businesses don’t want to undergo the hassle of fulfilling orders alone, and they therefore, hire third-party fulfillment services.
Businesses that commonly utilize fulfillment services include:
- Manufacturers
- Wholesalers
- Exporters
- Importers
However, courier and fulfillment centers have made their services flexible enough to accommodate even small business owners like retailers and small online store owners.
Why Outsource Fulfillment?
There are many reasons why eCommerce businesses outsource their fulfillment needs to a third-party fulfillment service.
Why outsource fulfillment while you can do it all alone? Some of the benefits of outsourcing fulfillment services as a business owner include:
- Saves Time
As an eCommerce business owner, perhaps the most profound reason you should outsource fulfillment is to save time. Order fulfillment can be long and time-consuming, leaving you barely any time to handle other aspects of your business.
By outsourcing fulfillment, you can free up time to focus on other important aspects of operations like marketing, product development, and product improvement.
- Saves Money
Another key reason to outsource fulfillment services is to cut overhead costs for your business.
Fulfillment services save you money by shielding you from the high costs associated with:
- Product shipping: Fulfillment services enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, so they can ship products at a lower cost than individual businesses.
- Maintaining your own warehouse and hiring warehouse staff
- Hiring more staff to pick, pack, and ship orders for you.
- Inventory storage (e.g Renting warehouse space)
The cost you incur in doing all these activities alone is nothing compared to what you’ll pay at the fulfillment center to have everything done for you.
- Increases Efficiency
In addition to saving time and money, hiring fulfillment services helps to increase the efficiency of operations in your business.
This is because they work with modern systems that streamline and organize your warehouse back office operations. For instance, fulfillment services have workflow systems that facilitate order tracking, product security, carrier selection, inventory management, and payment processing.
These systems eliminate chaos and confusion, increase productivity and make your fulfillment operations more efficient.
- Facilitates Business Growth
Receiving orders from all over the world can be intimidating if your business can only handle local deliveries. This is because it can be hard to figure out the shipping rates, expected shipping times, and mode of shipping. Focusing on local deliveries alone can prevent your business from growing.
However, with a third-party order fulfillment provider, you can easily extend your reach and unlock a broader market base for your products. This will help your business to grow fast without straining your financial resources.
- Improves Customer Satisfaction
Finally, fulfillment services help businesses improve customer satisfaction.
When you use a fulfillment service, your orders will be shipped and delivered faster and more accurately. This means that your customers will receive their orders on time, leading to many happier customers.
In addition, using a fulfillment service will lead to fewer customer complaints and product returns which often occur due to:
- Shipment of the wrong product
- Wrong product specifications
- Wrong product quantities
- Damaged products
Fulfillment services often have a competent team that ensures none of these mistakes occur. Therefore, outsourcing fulfillment saves your business the associated costs and leads to higher customer satisfaction.
Enhance Your Order Fulfillment with Codirect Courier
As an eCommerce business owner, order fulfillment is one part of your business you should never turn a blind eye to. If your business is growing fast and you’re finding it hard to fulfill orders on time, your best option is to hire fulfillment services.
By doing so, you’ll free up precious time, money, and other resources that you can redirect elsewhere. Outsourcing fulfillment will also make your business operations more efficient and improve customer satisfaction. All these benefits convert to fast business growth, more sales, and more revenue for your business.
If you’d like to take your fulfillment operations to the next level, contact Codirect courier now, and we’ll fulfill all your orders in the most efficient and budget-friendly way.
