Online shopping is becoming a massive part of our everyday lives, with more and more people choosing to select their products from the comfort of their own home, rather than face the high street. In the lead up to Christmas, especially, it is important that your eCommerce business has a strong and effective presence and system in place for online shoppers, to ensure customer satisfaction, success, and ultimately the growth of your business.
Ecommerce fulfilment
A huge factor in the success and the growth of your eCommerce business is how you ensure that your fulfilment is expertly handled. Fulfilment is the process of receiving orders from customers, selection of individual products, the careful and appropriate packaging of said products, and the shipping of these items to the customer. This process must be done quickly, cost-effectively and carefully to ensure customer satisfaction and returning business.
Many eCommerce businesses will choose, at least at the beginning of their enterprise, to simply fulfil orders themselves. This is by no means a bad option and is, in fact, appropriate for eCommerce businesses that are starting up and have not yet reached a size where it is viable to consider other options.
As time passes and your business begins to flourish, however, the natural next move will be to consider what steps can be taken to ensure your eCommerce business continues to grow. For many businesses, the answer is simple: outsourcing your fulfilment.
Outsourcing your fulfilment for the growth of your business
Whilst it may be tempting and seemingly more cost-effective to continue operating your fulfilment in-house, it’s important to recognise that the growth of a successful eCommerce business depends heavily on knowing its own limitations. By knowing what aspects need outsourced and when, a business owner can begin to take advantage of the expert knowledge and systems that fulfilment services providers can offer.
Here are a number of ways that outsourcing your fulfilment can help grow your eCommerce business:
1. Flexibility
By choosing to outsource your fulfilment, you give yourself and your business a lot more flexibility when it comes to how you operate fulfilment. A fulfilment service provider will work efficiently and effectively, exactly as is required for your orders. Often such providers are able to offer different types of services, which can be adapted and changed as your business grows and changes itself.
2. Money
Fulfilment service providers are experts at what they do, and as such, they are able to keep costs low for themselves. Your business, in turn, benefits from these discounts. As fulfilment service providers work with bulk orders of packaging, and large warehouse needs, the costs for storage and materials is lower than most eCommerce businesses could afford for themselves. With money saved on the fulfilment end, you have more financial freedom to help grow your business by investing in other aspects.
3. Satisfied Customers
Returning customers are a huge part of what helps to grow a business and make it so successful. In a world where fulfilment from major retailers is becoming speedier and more widely available, it has never been more important for smaller eCommerce businesses to ensure their fulfilment is operating as flawlessly as possible. Outsourcing your fulfilment means that you entrust the fulfilment process to the experts. With excellent software, efficient processes and speedy systems, customers receive their orders in expected timeframes and are satisfied with their experience.
4. Time
Your most precious resource, at the end of the day, is your time. Time is what you need to brainstorm, to collaborate, and to take your hopes for the future of your business out from fantasy and into reality. Outsourcing your fulfilment gives you back so much of this precious resource, as the mundane processes of fulfilment are handled speedily by professionals. With the time that you gain from outsourcing fulfilment, you can invest your energy back into growing your business.
If you want to find new ways to help your eCommerce business grow and thrive, consider outsourcing your fulfilment and reaping the benefits that such a simple change can make to your business.
