April 2, 2019
What Is Fulfilment And Why Use It?
Fulfilment covers one of the most important parts of any Ecommerce business. It is the process of preparing and delivering a customer’s order. By perfecting this process, your customer satisfaction and reputation will be of a high standard. You may also build up a loyal customer base as they will have confidence in your ability to meet their orders reliably.
The Process
The fulfilment process starts with the taking of an order. This will be done either on an online merchant’s website or on one of their selling platforms (Amazon, eBay etc.). Through using OnePatch’s order management system, all of your orders from the various different sources can be seen from the one place. This will improve your fulfilment actions as it will make it easier to manage your orders efficiently. The following execution process ensures that it is then ready to be delivered to the customer. This is where the fulfilment process technically ends, although it is responsible for choosing the delivery company and sending them the item.
Most large Ecommerce businesses do their own fulfilment. However, many smaller ones choose to outsource to fulfilment companies. There are a few good reasons behind this. For example it may be down to the time constraints of being a small organisation. Since there are less employees and resources available, these types of companies may struggle to consistently ship to meet order deadlines etc.
Outsourcing
If a small Ecommerce business received a large amount of orders, it may do more damage than the desired benefits. This is because the small size may limit how effectively the large orders could be dealt with. For example, the company may not have the space available to manage, store, prepare and distribute the orders. Renting space for storage can be expensive, so it might be more cost effective to outsource to fulfilment experts.
These fulfilment companies take care of everything needed in a fulfilment process. They can store the product and its components in their warehouse, they might go further and assemble, label and package it. The next step they take care of is the most important in fulfiling a customer’s orders. This is using a major courier to ship the products (Royal Mail, Hermes for example).
The whole point of fulfilment is to meet the orders and demands of customers. Therefore, if you are unable to ship the ordered items effectively, your customer’s orders will not be fulfiled. By outsourcing this part of your process to a logistics expert, you are minimising the risk of something going wrong which could damage your business’s reputation.
Overall, fulfilment only works if you make it work. This may be done yourself or outsourced to a fulfilment company. Whichever way you chose to go around your fulfilment, ensure its the best option for your company. The reliable reputation you can gain from consistent fulfilment can grow your business and build and an ideal customer base.