Product Fulfillment Solutions: How to Choose the Right One
Quick answer: Product fulfillment solutions cover everything that happens after a customer orders: storing inventory, picking and packing, shipping, tracking and returns. The three main models are in-house fulfillment (you do it yourself, cheapest at low volume), dropshipping (a supplier ships for you, no inventory) and third-party logistics (3PL) (a fulfillment company stores and ships your stock). Small stores often start in-house or with dropshipping and move to a 3PL as order volume grows.
Product fulfillment solutions are a very important business process in cross-border e-commerce. This market is huge, but at the same time, there are also many problems, such as high prices, slow speed, difficulty in later tracking, and poor convenience. This article talks about product fulfillment, order fulfillment, and fulfillment solutions. By reading this article, you can gain information and tips on product fulfillment to move your business forward more smoothly.
What Are Product Fulfillment Solutions?
Product fulfillment is an important process in product fulfillment companies. As a product fulfillment company, it can warehouse, kit, pack, and ship customers’ orders, it will also handle the details for the product fulfillment to save customers’ time. In addition, it can continue to offer the best product fulfillment solutions to address customers’ order fulfillment needs.
Next, Let’s introduce the product fulfillment services, which include:
1
Store and Package Products
Packaging products with various packaging materials ensure safety in the transportation process, and at the same time helps enterprises to reduce storage space, which virtually reduces the cost of enterprises.
2
Ship Products
With the help of a well-planned logistics plan and appropriate transportation methods, the inventory expenses of enterprises can be reduced and the cash flow of enterprises can be improved.
3
Offer Order Tracking and Inventory Management
Enterprises can find out the current position and status of goods at any time through the professional order tracking system, and it also has a certain guiding role for the existing inventory management.
4
Provide Customer Service and Support
It will provide customer service similar to a telephone return visit, know customer satisfaction, and actively deal with and solve after-sales problems. Thus improving customer experience.
What is Order Fulfillment?
It refers to the collection of a series of processes, such as order receipt, optimization, item selection, order integration and packaging, and logistics and transportation, after customers place orders from Amazon, eBay, and other e-commerce platforms.
The process of order fulfillment can be roughly divided into four modules:
1
The First Journey
The whole process of transporting goods from domestic to overseas warehouses is called the first journey. If overseas warehouses want to deliver goods, then batch products must arrive at the warehouse ahead of time, which is what the first journey is to do.
2
Overseas Warehouse
Simply speaking, the functions of overseas warehouses can be divided into three modules: inbound, outbound, and in-warehouse operations.
The process of inbound is related to warehousing, and transporting goods from home to overseas warehouses. Outbound is to receive orders from an e-commerce platform or ERP system and then transfer the orders to overseas warehouses after a series of processing. In-warehouse operations are basic services related to warehousing, such as position management, warehouse transfer, inventory checking, inventory management, etc.
3
The Tail Journey
The whole process of transporting goods from overseas warehouses to consumers is called the tail journey.
Overseas warehouses have integrated some logistics channels and offered them to different shippers to choose from. Then, the system selects the appropriate logistics-related order according to the corresponding strategy.
4
After-sales/Value-added Services
After the order is issued, there will inevitably be some after-sales problems, so overseas warehouses will provide corresponding services for this business. The return of overseas warehouses is a difficult problem in the industry. On the one hand, it is caused by complicated business; on the other hand, it is related to the protection of consumers’ rights and interests by European and American laws.
In addition, overseas warehouses will also provide some services such as rebranding, labeling, secondary packaging, transfer, and allocation, which can be called value-added services.
What Are Fulfillment Solutions?
With the continuous growth of retail distribution, e-commerce, and express delivery industries, enterprises are facing increasing pressure in meeting customer needs and performance indicators. Therefore, enterprises need to find a good solution to expand and optimize operations and minimize manual rework and equipment downtime.
There are many models of fulfillment, but not everyone is suitable for all companies. We need to choose the best solution according to our own business needs, so as to help us realize the smooth development of our business.
Now let’s introduce the three common eCommerce fulfillment models:
In-house fulfillment is a self-sufficient mode, in which merchants package their own products and deliver them to customers. This method is generally suitable for smaller enterprises. At the same time, businesses need to be responsible for all aspects of their performance.
Advantages
The cost of this mode is relatively low, including storage fees, peak season fees, and other related expenses. It can use the saved funds for talent training, product updating, and packaging material upgrading.
Disadvantages
In the case of large order quantity, internal performance may take up a lot of time and resources of the enterprise. When you are looking for the most suitable packaging materials or get preferential discounts for transportation, you will not get the guidance of professionals in the industry.
Dropshipping is a mode of order fulfillment: the seller gets orders from customers, and then reliable third-party suppliers (usually product distributors or brokers) fulfill these orders. Sellers don’t need to store, process, or distribute their products. They earn profits by earning the difference between wholesale and retail prices.
Advantages
This model is easy to set up, and it can also reduce the management cost (because there is no storage cost). Because there are many products to choose from, the order quantity will be larger, and more products can be sold in a shorter time.
Disadvantages
Dropshipping requires the ability to process orders quickly. If you lack the ability to do product customization and quality control, it will adversely affect the fulfillment of orders. If there are any problems in the delivery process or the product itself, you may receive bad reviews from customers.
3PL(Third Party Logistics) is a service provided by middlemen in logistics channels, and middlemen undertake all or part of logistics services required by enterprises in a certain period of time in the form of contracts.
Advantages
After cooperating with third-party logistics, you can use more free time to focus on other businesses of the company. Your order fulfillment provider will take over all your inventory management and distribution. Some companies offer real-time inventory tracking, which can improve the efficiency of your order processing. If you are looking for a fulfillment company to work with, then Honest FulPhilment will be a very good choice.
Disadvantages
You will lose the right to package and distribute your products, and the outsourcing cost will increase.
Conclusion
Intelligentization, automation, digitalization, and informatization are the general trends of future development. At the same time, there will be various thorny problems in practical work, which requires a professional product fulfillment solution to use professional skills to help enterprises solve problems smoothly. Honest FulPhilment is an option you can consider. If you want to know more, please contact us!
FAQ
What is product fulfillment?
Product fulfillment is the process of receiving, storing, packing and shipping products to customers after they order, plus tracking and returns. It can be done in-house or outsourced to a fulfillment company.
What are the steps of order fulfillment?
Receiving inventory, storage, order processing, picking, packing, shipping and handling returns. Cross-border sellers often add first-mile shipping to an overseas warehouse and last-mile delivery from it.
What does a fulfillment service mean?
A fulfillment service is a company that stores your products and ships orders on your behalf. Store platforms such as Shopify can send orders to a fulfillment service automatically.
Which is better: in-house fulfillment, dropshipping or 3PL?
In-house suits very small volumes, dropshipping suits testing products without inventory and 3PL suits growing brands that want faster shipping and less operational work. Many sellers combine models.
When should I outsource fulfillment?
Consider outsourcing when packing and shipping take up too much of your time, when you run out of storage space or when you need faster delivery to customers in other regions.