Fulfillment.com's What We Do

If you’re doing big things online – we’re here to help you do them even bigger and better. Our 2 day shipping and 99.7% success rate applies for all customers… Including those doing over 2,000 orders a DAY.

Addressing Fulfillment Challenges

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when reading the technical jargon of different ecommerce fulfillment provider websites, but we can assure you that while order fulfillment is complex, it can actually be explained pretty simply. Let’s break down what order fulfillment looks like at the different growth stages of your ecommerce business. Just to make sure we are all on the same page, let’s be sure we know exactly what we’re talking about here:

– Ecommerce Order Fulfillment is the process of receiving customer orders electronically, picking products from stored inventory, packing the order, and then shipping it directly to the customer.

eCommerce Order Fulfillment - New Store Owner

What does Order Fulfillment look like for a new ecommerce store business owner?

  • Customers place orders on your ecommerce website
  • Receive orders in Store admin portal (email notification? Check it constantly?)
  • Order fulfillment handled by you: (Remember this part?)
  1. Find a sticky note
  2. Jot down name and address
  3. Grab the products for the order
  4. Pack the box
  5. Weigh the box
  6. Purchase shipping label (Or pay at Post Office, ouch!)
  7. Fun run to the Post Office or shipping store to drop the packages off
  8. (Remember to pick up the dry cleaning and the kids!)

That’s not so complicated right? Well, it was a simple and effective way to ship a FEW orders a day when you are first starting out. We’re sure you’re past the nostalgia of making those fun runs to the post office or waiting around for a carrier to show up in their pickup window time.

It becomes essential to hire a trusted Third-Party Logistics (3PL) provider when:

  • Your order volume is increasing faster than you can pack orders
  • You’re overwhelmed with not enough hours in the day
  • The family vehicle starts looking like a Mail Truck
  • (The kids are complaining about being your ‘little helpers’)
  • You are exhausted from trying to
  1. Run the store
  2. Take Customer Service Calls
  3. Work all the orders
  4. Update your products
  5. Update your website
  • You’re spending all your time filling orders instead of selling, marketing, and growing

A 3PL takes the hassle of order fulfillment into their capable hands and allows you the time to focus on what you do best! And guess what? It just so happens that Fulfillment.com (FDC for short) is an award-winning fulfillment company serving high volume national and global ecommerce brands. We could be just the solution you’re looking for!

Ecommerce Order Fulfillment - Growing Ecommerce Brand

Once your order volume is getting higher and consistent with lots of orders every day, you quickly learn about new ways to improve your shipping operation. If you’re using Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or any of the popular ecommerce platforms, you may have come across software products like ShippingEasy, Shippo or ShipStation that help you handle postage purchasing and label printing as your orders come in. (MUCH better than holding up the line at the post office with all your packages!)

Depending on the consistency of your order volume, you can put together a pretty impressive shipping operation utilizing shipping software and an organized process for managing inventory. Maybe you’re right on the edge of still being able to fulfill your own orders, or you’ve crossed over the edge and NEED more efficient Order Fulfillment. You’ll soon find that as you continue down the path of handling your own ecommerce shipping in-house, the overhead creep is unavoidable.

Ecommerce Order Fulfillment – DIY

The Do It Yourself Shipping Dilemma: Overhead Creep

How do you know you have overhead creep in your ecommerce order fulfillment and shipping?

  • You are busting out orders daily
  • Your order volume is increasing
  • You have hired some help
  • You rented some space…
  • But you don’t feel like you are really making any more money than before… hmmmm.

More orders but less money? That sounds like creep to me and it’s a pretty lame combo if you ask us!

So, what could have happened to cause the overhead creep? Maybe you had a big sale on your website for a product you had no idea was sold out the week before the sale! (Way to go Purchasing for not informing Marketing the units they were running a BOGO on were already gone!)

Hey, maybe it wasn’t the best way to bring in a new hire, but you did the right thing and quickly hired an inventory manager because of that blunder.

But new hires aren’t cheap! (Facepalm) Or it could be that the complexity of high-volume order fulfillment just wasn’t apparent when you made the decision to go it alone.

More Hidden Costs in your Ecommerce Shipping

What do you do when you have multiple people in the same month ask for a new product?

You of course live to serve your customers, so you create that new product! Since your other products in that line come in 4 different options and 2 sizes, you then need to match the rest of your products and just like that you have added 12 new SKUs to your inventory. (SKU = Stock Keeping Unit = a unique item) BOOM… thousands of even MORE units to produce, stock, and track!

Then, as your products are really taking off, a wholesale customer requests some products uniquely bundled with the promise of repeat orders… and well, you can see where this is going: more SKU’s and more inventory means MORE overhead – and that’s just to make sure all your items are in stock.

The Added Costs of Complexity

So, you’ve moved from the garage to a warehouse space, you’ve hired more help, but what about:

  • Security and cameras in the facility
  • Inventory Management systems
  • Proper processes in place to track all the ever moving and changing inventory in this much larger space
  • Carrier postage contracts (if you can negotiate lower prices)
  • Coordinating the logistics of carrier pickups and drop-offs
  • Equipment maintenance
  • IT support
  • Employee turnover
  • Accounting and Payroll

What is your actual shrink? (Disappearing, damaged or lost inventory.) How much money are you losing to lost, broken, or even expired inventory due to the lack of good inventory management?

Hopefully you know about and use COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) in your business model – but when was the last time you updated those figures? Do you even have the data to support an accurate number?

The creep of the increasing costs in your shipping department is going to smack you right in the face sooner or later if you are not prepared to scale properly. Too much real talk?

Let’s see how some of the biggest ecommerce giants rule the internet from their tiki huts in Bora Bora without ever having to yell “Why the heck didn’t this go out yet?!?” (That’s the PG version of course).

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Read on so your employees can start sleeping at night again.