If you’re ready to take your customer base to the next level by branching out into a new market choosing an order fulfillment company will make that transition much easier. Normally to add an entirely new product to a successful business means investing a lot of money in additional infrastructure like more warehouse space to store the new products, more customer service reps to help customers, and increased warehouse staff to handle packing and shipping the new product orders. All of that additional infrastructure can add up to quite a large investment.
When you hire a fulfillment services company to take over those additional functions you can avoid paying a large up front amount to set up the new product infrastructure and pay as you go by paying a percentage of each sale in order to pay for the storage, order processing, packing and shipping of the additional products. Hiring a fulfillment company also gives you the flexibility to adjust the amount of new product you keep on hand based on the initial sales of the product without any space constraints. If you want to start off just ordering a half order of the new products to see how they sell you can get a small storage space from the fulfillment services company. If you want to take advantage of bulk pricing and order a huge run of the new products you can do that to, because the fulfillment center will have plenty of space to store your products no matter how many there are.
Expanding into a new market can be a risk, but it’s a risk that companies have to take in order to have sustainable growth. Signing up with a fulfillment services company lessens the risk of trying out new products because you don’t need to build a lot of infrastructure for a product that you may or may not end up adding permanently to your store. Using a fulfillment services company to process orders, store products, and ship items to customers gives you the financial breathing space to try out a product and see what the demand is before you commit to that product or that market as part of your growth plan. If the product doesn’t do well or you decide to go in a different direction you can change products easily, whereas if you are building your own infrastructure every time you change products you will need to invest in more infrastructure.