How much business do you think your ecommerce store does in a week? How about in a day? Do you know the exact numbers, or at least an average? Many new ecommerce entrepreneurs and business men and women keep meticulous track of every sale, trying to keep their attention on every little detail of their business. As the business grows, of course, such precision becomes impossible. A healthy business has dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of sales every day. Determining the fate of each product, how it manages to reach its destination, is also similarly impossible.
Yet it’s also important to remember that such growth and prosperity carries a certain danger, as well. As a business grows, so grows its need for effective and efficient order fulfillment. Though not as famous or glamorous as some other areas of the ecommerce entrepreneur experience, fulfillment is the lynchpin – the strong back and spine – of any online endeavor.
What is fulfillment? What does the term encompass?
Fulfillment is the act of successfully completing a business transaction. Mail order fulfillment refers to processing, shipping, and tracking a package from its storage warehouse to the customer’s desired delivery address. This effort or process is also sometimes referred to as distribution fulfillment.
Fulfillment service companies are able to provide a range of fulfillment obligations that would normally be handled and managed by the client company itself. In other words, they assume control of the fulfillment process on behalf of the client ecommerce or home based business.
These fulfillment service companies can offer their client businesses warehousing, cold storage, climate controlled inventory storage, order fulfillment processing, shipment tracking, and even customer service resources. Freed of having to manage those tasks on their own, the client company is able to work on developing its front end, including website development, social networking tools, and search engine optimization.
The Fulfillment Service Company – Client Business Relationship
Typically, the fulfillment service company enters into a contractual partnership with the client business whose fulfillment it manages. This agreement allows the fulfillment company to extract a percentage of each product managed. As the client company grows in size, so too does the fulfillment company’s profit margin expand. In other words, the fulfillment service company has a vested interest in seeing their client businesses grow their market presence as soon and as effectively as possible, in order to realize their own healthy profits.