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If you have a small gift or retail business you need to start preparing for growth from the get go. At first your growth plans should be focused on achieving stability and self sufficiency. Once your small gift business has grown to the point of self-sufficiency how will you keep your business growing? Using order fulfillment services is the key to taking a small business to the next level of growth.
For small businesses the cost of investing in the infrastructure needed for growth, such as buying or leasing warehouse space, hiring customer service reps, and hiring people to pack and ship orders, is too great an expense to take on. Instead of going into more debt to expand your business sign up for order fulfillment services.
Hiring a fulfillment company will give you access to an already streamlined packing and shipping operation as well as give you the warehouse space that you need to store your gifts. Highly trained customer service reps employed by the fulfillment house will take orders from your customers and those orders are then packed and shipped from the same location. Paying a small fee per product is much better for your bottom line than spending huge amounts of money assembling your own order fulfillment operation. It will also give you the freedom to explore new product lines and new methods of operation without the costs of changing your entire fulfillment process.
Many fulfillment service companies also have negotiated substantial discounts with freight services and shipping companies that will get you discounted prices on shipping your items to the warehouse facility and shipping out orders to customers. Together the discounts along with the low fee per product result in the ability to expand your business without a lot of upfront investment costs. For many small gift business owners these benefits and lower costs mean that that can start to compete with bigger gift retailers and can move into new markets without risking the success the business has already achieved.
Using fulfillment services is the best way for home based gift business owners to take their businesses from small hobby or vanity businesses to serious income earning businesses. Taking advance of the logistics management tools offered by professional fulfillment companies can help gift business owners who know a lot about gifts but not a lot about business manage their inventory, expand their product line, and create a solid growth plan so that they can continue developing their business for years to come.
