Fulfillment services can bring a lot to your startup or small business. They can assume control of your logistics duties, your warehousing needs, and most especially your order fulfillment obligations. Fulfillment services can accomplish a lot to help make your business grow, and grow fast. But finding the right fulfillment service for your business is nevertheless an important, possibly crucial, decision. Many fulfillment service companies offer features and services that others do not. There may be a particular fulfillment service that can accommodate all your logistics and other needs together, streamlining your business model to its most efficient design.
When deciding on a fulfillment service provider, consider the following qualifications:
Warehousing and Storage Capabilities
You want a fulfillment service provider who can adequately accommodate all your inventory needs. But if you’re working with a particular type of product, one that needs specialized warehouse management or cold storage capacity, you should research your fulfillment service provider’s resources very closely.
Many fulfillment service companies offer warehouse services that include pallet storage, warehouse management, and a variety of logistics issues while still working to keep tracking and shipping logistics running at an incredibly high level of efficiency and accuracy.
Mail Order Fulfillment
If you’re running an ecommerce business, you’re probably dealing with some kind of mail order business platform. With third party logistics providers, mail order fulfillment takes an increasingly accurate and aggressive turn, with the fulfillment service company overseeing each step of the tracking and shipping process for each unit of product sold. In many cases the inventory can be sent directly to the fulfillment service company from the manufacturer, This removes the ecommerce client from the inventory’s chain of custody, eliminating transport time and expenses while expediting the time necessary to store and prepare the products for shipping to the ecommerce company’s customers.
Promotional Fulfillment
It’s an important but often overlooked part of helping your small or ecommerce startup business grow: promotion in the real brick and mortar world. Some studies show that ecommerce companies who go the extra step of advertising in other media, particularly print media, are much more likely to succeed than their competitors.
Some fulfillment service providers are also able to act in a distribution capacity for newsletters, brochures, and catalogues mailed on behalf of their client company. They arrange for postage and mailing of the various promotional materials, using creative content supplied by the client company.