If you are operating an eCommerce business, you’ll know that it’s important to take time to re-evaluate your processes. With even just a little reflection and consideration, you can re-organise your business and streamline it effectively in order to save money and time.
When it comes to streamlining your eCommerce business, few things are as effective as making the decision to outsource your fulfilment. By making this one change in the way that your business operates, you can end up affecting other areas of your business and making them far more streamlined as a result.
Here are four ways that outsourcing your eCommerce fulfilment can streamline your business.
1. You can save money on fulfilment and packaging
As with any outsourcing decision, initial investment is needed to get the process up and running. When you choose to outsource your fulfilment, however, you end up saving a lot of money in the long-run. A dedicated fulfilment service provider will have, themselves, streamlined their process, meaning that they get the best discounts on packaging, warehousing and shipping. When you partner with one of these providers through outsourcing your fulfilment, your business is able to benefit from these discounts, allowing for excellent savings.
2. You and your staff can save time
When orders are fulfilled by a dedicated service provider, you and your staff can save a lot of time. When you count up the hours that are spent completing tasks like shopping around for good packaging prices, physically packaging items, travel to post offices or collection points for shipping, you can easily start to see how much time is wasted through these ‘small’ tasks. When you outsource your fulfilment, you save a huge amount of time that can be better invested in other areas of your business.
3. You can gain so much more space
Many eCommerce businesses, as they’re starting up and growing, can find themselves surrounded by their products as demand becomes greater. Often small businesses don’t have the dedicated storage space for their products, and so you can quickly find that it has overflown into office space. As much as you may love and endorse your product, it’s unlikely you want stacks of it turning your workplace into a maze.
When you outsource your fulfilment, you not only gain a provider who will fulfil orders for you, you also gain warehouse space as result of this. This means that you no longer have to worry about where to store your products, and can instead boast a clean, clear and healthy work environment that Marie Kondo would be proud of.
4. You can work specifically on streamlining
Deciding where your money and time goes is an important choice. By outsourcing your fulfilment, you gain money and time as a result. What you then choose to do with these resources is entirely up to you. It’s highly possible that, having seen how streamlining your business through outsourcing can be beneficial, you will want to spend this saved money and time … investigating how you can save more money and time! Once you have these resources and freed up headspace from the mundane task of in-house fulfilment, you really can work on developing your business in the ways you find most beneficial.
As your business grows, it’s important to stay on top of things and make sure your processes are as streamlined as possible. Outsourcing your eCommerce fulfilment is one of the easiest initial ways to start streamlining your business.
