6 Popular Services That Define Fulfillment & Shipping
Businesses spend a considerable amount of money to bring a product to market. From conducting extensive consumer research to paying for expensive manufacturing costs, businesses ride the razor-thin line between making a profit and falling deep into the black. When the time comes to fulfill product orders and then ship the products thousands of miles away, the razor-thin product margin gets obliterated.
This is why working with a fulfillment and shipping company can help your business sit on the right side of the razor-thin profit margin line.
At Complete Mailing & Printing, we offer six popular services that define fulfillment and shipping for our customers.
eCommerce
Because of the tremendous growth of online sales, many fulfillment centers offer an eCommerce fulfillment service that allows your business to link directly to an online shopping cart. An online shopping cart automatically processes product orders via a warehouse management system (WMS), which ensures each order is processed according to a customer’s location information. A web store provides your company with a convenient virtual warehouse, along with access to other online sales portals such as eBay and Amazon.
Retail
If your company is looking to grow sales, one of the most effective strategies involves reaching out to big box stores like Walmart, Best Buy, and Home Depot to reach your sales goal. Big box brick-and-mortar retailers remain viable sales channels for most types of consumer products. Because of strict guidelines, a fulfillment and shipping company such as Complete Mailing and Printing ensures each of your products contains the correct routing guides and instructions for shipping
Multi-Channel
Multi-channel means a fulfillment and shipping company has the capability to meet product requests through a wide variety of different sales channels. Your company can meet product requests through traditional sales channels such as direct-to-consumer (D2C), as well as leverage the power of selling products to retail outlets through business-to-business (B2B) sales channels.
Subscription
Also referred to as auto shipping service, subscription box fulfillment relies on a company handling orders that occur on a regularly scheduled basis. One example of this type of fulfillment and shipping regards the Dollar Shave Club, which sends razors to customers every month. This type of fulfillment and shipping service requires a business to be experts at batch shipping, which includes handling rapidly changing orders each month.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing via sites like Kickstarter and IndieGogo has emerged as a popular way to ship products to consumers. Many of the products are gifts sent as a thank-you to customers for donating money to a charitable cause. Unlike most fulfillment and shipping orders, orders typically are large, one-time orders completed after a crowdsourcing campaign.
Long-Term Warehousing
Amazon has revolutionized the product chain management model by creating long-term warehousing. The result is fulfillment and shipping companies that specialize in handling orders that help customers avoid paying Amazon’s long-term storage fees. Also called FBA Prep Services, long-term warehousing is an especially important fulfillment and shipping service for companies that manufacture high-end products such as furniture.