
For many e-commerce businesses, ensuring that every order is packed, shipped, and safely delivered to your customers is a vital part of your operations. Keeping your customers happy and satisfied with your service is one of the factors in getting repeat buyers and attracting new customers. However, as a business owner, you already have several responsibilities to take on, and some may require more time than others.
Luckily, there are certain business operations that you can readily outsource to other companies to take care of. This will get some work off your shoulders and free up your schedule to focus on running other aspects of your business that need more of your attention. If you’re wondering what process you can outsource, consider your order fulfillment operations. What reasons would you have for doing so, you ask? Well, here are a few:
Fulfilling orders yourself is too expensive and time-consuming.
You might reason that this is a necessary and even therapeutic process, but the fact of the matter is, you can and should be doing something more important. It’s difficult enough to wrap your inventory, struggle to fit several items into a box in Tetris-like fashion, and run to and from the post office. Many order fulfillment companies USA business owners trust will gladly do all this and more for you.
Doing everything in-house stops being convenient and gets especially hard to do when your order volume increases. When you notice that it’s already too difficult to keep up, you have a pretty good reason to outsource your order fulfillment process. You can let them take care of all that for you.
Expanding your business requires resources that you don’t have just yet.
Even with the reach of your website and social media, you can’t really cater to as many customers as you’d like because you don’t have the means to get your products to them or vice versa. At least, not at this moment.
When you decide to outsource your order fulfillment operations, you can leverage on any infrastructure the third-party logistics (3PL) company has to help expand your business. With their facilities in different areas and technology capacity, you can easily enter new markets and reach more people without spending on your own assets.
Customers keep complaining about slow delivery times and high shipping rates.
While it may be more convenient for you to ship items from your business location, your customers may not feel the same way. Aside from less-than-ideal transit times, your customers may also be paying more for their orders to be delivered to them. This is especially true when shipping and delivery is also not your forte.
You can make things easier and less expensive for them by outsourcing your order fulfillment services. Many logistics companies offer bulk discounts to process large stocks of inventory so you can pay less, reducing or eliminating the shipping costs that your customers need to shoulder. Moreover, 3PL providers also have the facilities to ensure that orders are delivered faster and more efficiently.
You no longer have time for marketing and other business growth-related tasks.
If too much of your work hours are simply dedicated to order fulfillment, how will you be able to improve things in your business? You can easily get so caught up in keeping up with order volumes that you realize that you aren’t getting new customers or that you haven’t made any changes to your products in a while.
Surely, marketing strategies, product improvement, and quality control are more worthy of your time over fulfilling orders, right? Turn your efforts and focus back on the responsibilities that grow your business by outsourcing your order fulfillment tasks to a logistics company. Their teams are better trained and equipped to handle any kind of inventory volume, making it easy for them to grow with your business.
Refocus your business and get back to the more important tasks when you entrust your order fulfillment operations to the more experienced team of a logistics company. Not only will you save time and money, but you also get a number of competitive advantages from partnering with a 3PL provider!