When your focus is on selling merchandise directly to your shoppers, you’re providing consumer goods to the general public.
Following that same thought, when you hire a 3rd party fulfillment company to help you move those products to the homes where they belong, you’ve contracted with a consumer goods fulfillment service. But there’s a lot more to modern-day consumer goods fulfillment services than tossing your items into a box and dropping it at the post office.
Why Do I Need Consumer Goods Fulfillment?
If your business is selling any variety of goods, from bicycles to tea, to customers, it doesn’t take long to find yourself floating in a sea of boxes, labels and merchandise that could use a lot more sorting. Going it alone can be a major challenge, and a massive investment of time that will result in the slowed growth of your business.
That’s why partnering with a 3rd party logistics company to help with both warehousing and distribution services can be such a boon. They can improve your order fulfillment processes in a variety of ways, including:
- Shortening transit times. Working with a fulfillment house that’s centrally located or one with multiple distribution centers can score you big points with your customer base.Not only will highly trained fulfillment experts pick, pack and ship your order quickly, moving the warehouse closer to your customer base can cut days off of shipping transit times. The time savings on both ends of the fulfillment process means happier customers, days sooner.
- Managing inventory. Keeping track of lots of SKUs can be challenging, especially if you’re not able to invest in the equipment you really need. Don’t worry!Your 3PL not only has lots of space for as many items as you want to offer, it can track them easily with the help of bar code scanning and carefully managed databases. They’ll know exactly when your inventory is running low, too, so they can reorder products you intend to continue to carry so that nothing ever ends up in backordered status.
- Lowering costs. You might not think much about it, but every box and roll of packing tape cuts a little deeper into your bottom line. There’s only so much you can do to affect this number, but an eCommerce fulfillment service has huge sway over the costs of packing supplies.Since they order these items in larger quantities, they can score some huge discounts that will be passed along to you. In addition, because of the number of packages they send out, 3PLs typically have great relationships with shippers, further lowering your per-package pricing.
As your eCommerce shop expands, you’ll find that you can focus better on the business of doing business if you delegate some tasks to others. A 3rd party logistics firm is a great place to start, they have the expertise to help you navigate the sometimes-choppy seas of expansive growth with confidence.
