If you’re not currently using a fulfillment center to ship orders for your online business, you may be asking yourself “When should I start using a fulfillment center?”
If one or more of the following situations applies to you, then it may be time to start using an ecommerce fulfillment center:
- I am sick of shipping orders out of my basement or garage.
- Business is booming and I don’t have the manpower to fulfill orders as fast as they are coming in.
- I want cheaper shipping rates
- I do not want a Building, Employee’s & Operation overhead
- I want more time to focus on growing my business.
- All of the Above
An ecommerce fulfillment center could resolve many of your headaches in addition to saving you time & money.
A big question entrepreneurs should ask themselves is:
“How much time am I spending on packaging and shipping products?”
And “What could I do to grow my business if I had that time back?”
Using a Fulfillment Center Means No More Trips to the Post Office
eCommerce Fulfillment centers have daily scheduled pickups from carriers like USPS, UPS, Fedex, DHL, & more. As an added bonus, they can handle your LTL (less than a truckload) & FTL (full truckload) shipments. Using a fulfillment center means no more last minute runs to the post office trying to catch the door before they lock it shut.
Fulfillment centers often offer additional customer service issues around shipping incidents, saving you the headache. At Fulex eCommerce Fulfillment, their customer service team will directly reach out to carriers like UPS or USPS if a tracking number is not updating for a client. They work hard to help locate your customer’s package and will request refunds on your behalf if a package is lost. The time that you don’t have to waste sitting on the phone could be used to grow your business. Since your fulfillment representative is working on the ground floor of your ecommerce operations, they can quickly ship out a replacement to your customer so your customers will rave about your five star service!
My business doesn’t have the manpower to fulfill orders
Using an ecommerce fulfillment center means that you can utilize the entire warehouse workforce and only pay on a pick & pack fee. You won’t have to deal with the recruiting, hiring and managing of a warehouse staff. There is the added advantage of not being locked into a long-term warehouse lease. You have the ability to expand and contract your inventory and thus your storage costs throughout the busy and slow seasons.
Take advantage of cheaper shipping Rates
An ecommerce fulfillment center’s shipping rates are based on the total volume of all of their clients. If you’re only shipping 10-20 orders a day, you can benefit from bulk discount shipping rates generated by higher volumes of other orders shipping out of the same warehouse. Fulfillment centers like Fulex often have multiple locations allowing you to spread your inventory across warehouses to lower your shipping cost and delivery times to customers.
Fulex’s Chattanooga Warehouse
Fulex’s Detroit Warehouse
Fulex’s San Diego Warehouse
Using a fulfillment center allows you to focus on your business
Doing everything in house from picking, packing and shipping can cause a drain on your resources, especially time. You can focus on marketing to improve sales, find additional manufacturers to cut costs, or even dream up a new product line.
You can leave it up to the fulfillment experts, who understand the most efficient ways to process inventory and manage your orders. Fulfillment centers provide precise order tracking, shipping information, data reports, and intelligent analytics. Warehouse Management systems (WMS) and Order Management systems (OMS) create a transparency so that you can see the order as it moves through your fulfillment warehouse.
Fundamentally, a fulfillment center becomes the right choice for your business when you become burdened with the process of fulfilling orders on your own. If it is preventing you from improving, growing, or scaling your organization, you should start looking for a strategic partner and tap into their expertise.
What services does a Fulfillment center provide?
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Receive inventory
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Warehouse Storage for inventory
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Manage Inventory
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Pick, Pack, Ship
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Customer Service
Fulex eCommerce Fulfillment can help with:
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Ecommerce Fulfillment for Multiple Channels
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Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) prep
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Kitting & Assembly
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Monthly Subscription Boxes
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EDI requirements from Big Box Retailers
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Kickstarter or Groupon Campaigns
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Cross-docking
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Returns & Exchanges
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Container Shipments from Manufacturers
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Customized Packing Lists & Labeling
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Custom Projects
Interested in a quote? Contact us below:
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