Running an e-commerce business can be a handful. You have to get the right products, or if you are producing from scratch, you have to source for the best raw materials. After that, you have to think of how to best present your products and on which platform. Then you have handled your advertising and marketing, manage your customer orders, get orders to them, and handle after-sales support to your customers. Phew! It really is a whole lot; you need a proper shipping fulfillment platform to handle all of these tasks.
What is fulfillment?
If you are new to e-commerce or just getting around it, you may or may not heard about fulfillment. So what is fulfillment? Big companies handle their own fulfillment internally, while small e-commerce companies can run it themselves or give the job to a company. Fulfillment simply entails all the aspects of handling a customer’s order, from receiving the order to after-sales support.
Process of Fulfillment
The process of fulfillment starts with obtaining the orders from the customers. Once that is done, you send the required products to the fulfillment company, store the products in their warehouse, or do it yourself. Products are packaged and then labelled in the warehouse, ready to be sent out to the customers. If it was a product that needed additional assembling, like a machine, it would also be assembled in the warehouse. Ultimately, the orders are then sent to the customers through shipping. Any issue that comes up, like the return of a product or after-sales support, is also handled under fulfillment.
Typical case study
Now think about this. Let us say you have spent a lot of time coming up with a great, fresh product. You do all the advertising for it, launched and it starts selling out like a hot cake. This is what you have always wished for! You have so many orders, and scrambling to attend to all these orders in the shortest time possible. You are not meeting up with your delivery dates; customers are all over social media telling people never to order from you. These customers are also leaving negative reviews anywhere your company is mentioned. Terrible, right?
Why outsourcing is a great choice.
In such a booming industry such as e-commerce, you can not afford to lose your customers and damage your brand’s reputation because of bad fulfillment. Outsourcing your fulfillment to a fulfillment company helps you handle all aspects of fulfillment. You can then focus on your business’s sales, marketing, advertising, and customer service, beat the competition, and make a lot of cash!
What can you do this?
How about letting a company help you handle the fulfillment and shipping? NextSmartShip gets the stress of fulfillment, with a 2 day delivery to any part of the world, 24 hours customer service, and a wide warehousing network that spans across continents.
Final Thought
NextSmartShip can help you reduce costs up to 40%, allowing you to enjoy your business, the happy reviews of your customers, and stand out. They offer fast, flexible, and efficient shipping that attracts no hidden costs.