BEHIND THE SCENES OF E-COMMERCE ORDER FULFILLMENT

This is important for our team because Clutch reviews are a big factor of becoming included on company listings of the Manifest. But we wanted to take this opportunity to talk about an aspect of the e-commerce business cycle that doesn’t get a lot of attention – order fulfillment.

Many people think that all it takes to run an online store is to have a platform and in-demand items. We want to talk about what businesses, specifically SMEs that want to expand, need to have in order to guarantee a pleasant and seamless online experience.

Actual Physical Location

Even if everything is online, we’re all still dealing with actual items that need to be stored before they’re sent to the buyer. This is important to note because the location of that facility will dictate the demographics of people you can actually sell to.

The farther a facility is from a certain buyer the more they’ll have to pay for shipping and the less likely they’ll actually buy something.

The size of the facility will also determine how much inventory you can hold. Smaller sites won’t be able to house hundreds of items, making them less desirable to people planning to buy in bulk.

Technology Integration

This is where our team usually comes in. We specialize in strengthening in-house staff with specially built software to make their operations simpler and more intuitive.

For our partnership with the medical solutions company, we built a multilingual e-commerce solution that allowed them to fulfill and ship order across various platforms while maintaining product quality.

This aspect of the process is more bespoke and will vary on a case-to-case basis. But don’t platforms like Amazon handle all of that already? Yes, but while there are advantages to using third party companies, there are also disadvantages.

Third-Party Versus In-House

If a business decides to partner with a third-party service they can circumvent the limitations that small businesses often have – physical location being the biggest one. However, this option may be out of the question with some specialized industries because of one thing – quality control.

A third-party provider measures their success by the number of partners they have, the more companies use them the better. This can have a negative impact on diligence in quality.

We’re not saying that this is inevitable, but when your third-party partner is also handling a hundred other SMEs there’s an implied risk.

This was not an option for our client because of the nature of their product. They needed to do everything in-house, which is the biggest reason why they needed our help. If your business finds itself in a similar situation, contact us today.

Our team will give you the tools to let you get the best results possible.