Sooner or later – and recent forecasts say it’s going to happen sooner – the economy is going to turn around. With trillions in government assistance already spent and with businesses adapting a greater eagerness for recovery, the economic problems are likely to end.
The new year brings with it the opportunity for a fresh start and for a fresh change in your ecommerce business. It’s a time to embrace new possibilities and new chances for growth and prosperity. It’s also the time to look at what’s not working in your business, or to retool the parts of your business that could operate with greater efficiency and less time investment from yourself and your staff.
Streamline now, worry never.
Third party logistics providers have in recent years become in recent years possibly the most powerful means for a company to reorganize its logistics and business models for greater profitability and efficiency. For many small- and moderately-sized ecommerce businesses, adding a fulfillment service provider is like taking growth hormones: the business becomes free to bloom into a greater size unencumbered by the demands of providing itself additional warehousing, logistics, and customer service resources.
Fulfillment services actually provide those important business necessities off-site, at their own facilities, for just a small percentage of the product’s total price. This means as an ecommerce grows the fulfillment provider assumes control of controlling the inventory, leaving the ecommerce business owner free to grow the parts of the business that will expand the customer base.
Businesses that are unable to meet proper standards of customer service, or who cannot match their inventory management to their sales flow, often meet the same fate: they fail. Gettnig bogged down in warehousing and logistics, such as shipping and customer service order tracking, weighs down any business owner’s attention. Fulfillment services cut the chain holding that attention, letting the business owner’s attention run free.
Fulfillment providers are a partnership, not an obligation.
Some potential third-party fulfillment provider customers worry that the fulfillment service will limit them to the amount of inventory they can carry or to the amount of time they are required to carry or warehouse a certain product. In fact, the business partner controls the amount of inventory the fulfillment service provider warehouses, even having the inventory delivered to the provider’s facilities. The provider in turn is simply empowered to maintain and ship the products stored in its warehousing facilities.