As your business grows, you expect that your product fulfillment needs will grow in proportion to your market share. It’s simple, but nevertheless worth keeping in mind that order fulfillment is the fuel on which your business runs. Without reliable and dependable logistics management, your business can quickly falter. Many businesses, both brick and mortar and online, choose to outsource their logistics management and order fulfillment needs to a highly specialized, third party provider company. By moving the back end of your business off-site and into the facilities of such expert companies, you reduce your own operating costs while boosting the efficiency of your company’s storage, processing, and shipping capabilities. Outsourced fulfillment brings a whole new level of versatility and range to your business, setting you free to aim at a whole new range of goals.
When It’s Time To Outsource
The most common identifier for outsourcing your logistics and order processing tasks come in the form of a sharp decline in customer satisfaction. As demand for yoru product inventory overcomes your ability to meet it, you’ll see a spike in customer complaints, requests for refunds, and confusion about delivery and shipment times. It happens to the biggest retailers all the time, including the online mega-stores, but if you’re operating a small or even medium-sized business such product order failures can begin to seriously erode your bottom line. Every successful transaction counts, especially in this economy. Missed opportunities and failed conversions, however, produce twice the negative impact. You may also experience problems within your business’ inventory infrastructure, including a rise in employee turnover, perpetual shortages in supplies, and increasingly cramped and clustered warehousing space.
Making The Change
Once you decide to employ the services of an independent fulfillment house, you need to carefully research and determine the best company to meet your needs. Perhaps there’s a fulfillment company that caters specifically to your kind of business. There may also be a company that’s located near your own business offices, allowing you the convenience and freedom of keeping your product inventory physically close at hand. Pricing, of course, will also play a factor. Most fulfillment service companies will charge a percentage of each product unit sold as their service fee, but the actual percentage varies among the different companies. Outsourcing your logistics is definitely a proposition that requires careful research and planning.