Fulfillment

In the world of business, the word “fulfillment” refers to the process of receiving, packaging, and shipping customer orders. This is something that’s mostly associated with ecommerce stores.

Once your online shop is up and running and you start receiving orders, you’ll have to consider how you’ll fulfill and ship those orders. This is a decision that needs to be made carefully.

For entrepreneurs handling their own fulfillment processes, you have two options:

• Outsourcing, or,
• Handling fulfillment in-house

If you decide to go down the outsourcing route, it’s worth noting that full-service fulfillment companies offer an end-to-end solution. By this, we mean that they’ll pick up your products from your warehouse, pack and ship them, and then send an automated email to customers telling them their package is on the way.

Some order fulfillment companies also offer additional services like:

• Credit-card processing
• Handling the inventory levels on your website
• Reordering products
• Call-center-type services
• Managing returns

There are hundreds of order fulfillment companies out there, so there’s plenty for you to choose from. Our best advice is to ask around your professional network—is there anyone in your industry who can recommend a decent service?

Needless to say, you don’t have to adopt all the services offered by the fulfillment company. Many entrepreneurs opt to use their ecommerce platform or web hosting company to handle some of these tasks. For instance, their online shopping cart, credit card processing, inventory management, etc. If you fall into this category, you can opt for just some of their services, like picking and packing products, and handling returns, etc.

When do you know it’s time to start outsourcing fulfillment?

In short, if you can make more money completing other tasks, consider outsourcing your fulfillment tasks.

Alternatively, if you’re only processing a few orders, it might be cheaper for you to fulfill your orders yourself. If that’s the road you’re going down, use one of the more renowned package delivery companies like FedEx, UPS, USPS so you can rely on their services.