After dealing with lagging sales for over five years, it occurred to me that we needed to do something to improve the visibility of our business. We started focusing carefully on marketing, including making our web presence more prominent. We analyzed our demographics, and we worked with a marketing company to make our online content more relevant. The difference was amazing. Within about six months, our company was enjoying a higher customer count and more online traffic. The purpose of this blog is to help you to see how important marketing is, and why every business owner should invest in marketing materials and services.
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Taking Marketing More Seriously
Fulfillment Services Combine Savings With Efficiency
Jose Gomez
Fulfillment services do much more than simply hold and ship inventory. For small to medium-sized businesses, they can be a logistical powerhouse for providing inventory sorting and storage and all aspects of order fulfillment from packaging to shipping with built-in savings.
With all the options a fulfillment service can offer, it's important to approach selecting a provider who has knowledge of a few different areas in order to choose the best service possible for your business.
Inventory management
Growing small businesses, particularly in e-commerce, often look toward fulfillment services as a solution to inventory storage problems as the business expands. Warehousing costs can be steep and do not always address other issues and costs in the fulfillment stage. Instead, the business pays to store items and still handles the logistics of shipping.
Fulfillment services often provide both, as well as other front-end services, such as inventory management and sorting. Analytical data is also captured by many providers and can be used for future decision-making regarding fulfillment, product demand forecasting, and improving the customer service experience.
When your goods arrive at a fulfillment service center, they are separated, cataloged, and, based on your packaging needs and your provider, might be prepackaged in protective plastic and affixed with barcodes to streamline order preparation.
Order logistics
Fulfillment services remove the burden of touching an order for shipping purposes from your company. There is no need to individually or batch submit orders daily or forward shipping addresses or specifications for orders. Instead, the company often provides an in-house or third-party software solution tied into your e-commerce or other selling platforms.
As orders are received by your business, they are immediately on file in the fulfillment center and enter a queue for processing. In the center, a worker, a robot, or a combination of the two gathers the components of the order, logs the collection to reduce your physical inventory, and prepares a package for shipment or delivery.
Savings across divisions
Like warehousing, shipping costs are not low, particularly when an enterprise is too small to negotiate special rates with delivery service providers. Fulfillment services are typically in a more favorable bargaining position based on their shipping volume. They negotiate lower shipping rates and pass them on to businesses utilizing their services.
Savings across various areas often make contracting for fulfillment services a wise investment. It also frees up additional time and talent for other areas of business growth and development.
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