Guide to fulfillment: grow your online sales channels

Does your business sell small parcels of new and used books? Or do you regularly package large orders of heavy equipment? The type of products you sell could determine what support you require from a fulfillment service.

This is especially true of shipping. Keep in mind not all types of shipping are available for all products.

In the U.S., certain products have transport limitations. Shipping for bulky or large items will typically cost more. Hazardous materials or dangerous goods, also known as hazmat items, must use ground shipping.

Order management is the process of tracking and fulfilling customer purchases across all sales channels.

If a fulfillment service cannot process orders from one or more of your sales sources, then it may not be the right match for your business. For simplicity, it might be ideal to work with one fulfillment service to cover all your fulfillment needs. If necessary, you may want to work with more than one fulfillment option to cover all your sales channels. Alternatively, you might want to reevaluate your sales channels and consider removing or consolidating some.

A central monitoring system on customer orders is a crucial part of order management. It will allow you to record all customer orders, shipments, and returns. Knowing the status of each customer order is especially helpful when dealing with customer service calls. Order tracking can also allow you to analyze customer purchasing behaviors.

Be sure to monitor how a fulfillment provider processes orders. Work closely with your fulfillment service to manage orders from all your sales channels. Above all, you must be able to immediately spot issues such as insufficient stock levels or delayed shipments.

Inventory management is the process of tracking stocked goods. Ordering, storing, and restocking any products running low are all part of inventory management. Use a fulfillment solution with the ability to track inventory levels to avoid accidentally selling an out-of-stock product.

Successfully managing inventory requires staying agile and stocking the right number of units your business needs. Too many, and you risk paying more than necessary in storage costs or overstock. Too few, and you can run out of stock and miss out on sales revenue.

If you sell perishable items with a limited shelf life, or seasonal items with demand that changes with consumer trends, be sure your inventory management plan takes these variables into account.

Your fulfillment solution should provide up-to-the-minute reporting on sales and inventory. It should also allow you to monitor inventory status on demand.

Every business needs a system for dealing with customer questions. Some fulfillment partners like FBA can take on customer service. Others don’t, so you’ll want to check into this when you evaluate fulfillment providers.

Do you want to outsource customer service or keep it in-house? Either method comes with a cost. A fulfillment service that also responds to order inquiries can free up you and your resources to focus on other matters. But some businesses prefer to build their own customer response team.

Shipping time is among the top factors ecommerce customers weigh when deciding whether to buy a product from you or one of your competitors. According to one study, nearly 84% of people regard shipping as an important part of their online shopping experience.

Shipping is an essential step in creating a good customer experience and staying profitable. A daily run to the post office may be feasible for smaller operations, but customer needs and expectations will likely change as your brand grows.

Order fulfillment services typically have fast and affordable shipping rates due to the large volume of shipments they process. But every fulfillment service will offer different rates, and those rates will fluctuate based on product type, order location, and other variables.

Also, if you use a fulfillment service, consider the cost and time to deliver inventory to a distribution center. Learn more about how businesses send and replenish inventory with Fulfillment by Amazon.

A sound storage system will ensure quick and easy access to products once customers place orders. The right solution likely involves a safe, temperature-controlled environment with well-labeled shelves and bins in your storage area for easy retrieval.

Proximity to customers is another factor when considering inventory storage. A distributed network of fulfillment centers can reduce shipping costs, if your customer base is geographically broad.

Ecommerce businesses see a higher rate of returns in part because customers buy products without seeing the items in person. Here are a few simple measures you can take to limit returns and exchanges:

To shorten shipping times, you will want to find a way to store products in a location as near as possible to both your store and the customers who will place orders with your business. For some sellers, this means using multiple fulfillment centers to ensure each order’s quickest delivery.

This fulfillment strategy is known as distributed inventory because you send merchandise to multiple locations. By dividing shipments and placing them with various distributors, you shorten the delivery routes to all customers who place orders.

The FBA Inventory Placement Service uses this method to get products to customers as quickly as possible.