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What are the advantages of outsourcing my online order fulfilment?

One of the greatest challenges business owners and e-commerce companies encounter is scalability. Hence, the primary reason that many online retailers outsource their order fulfilment is to allow them to respond quickly to changes in business circumstances. This could be a requirement to de-stock a particular line or stock-up in response to a planned marketing campaign or unplanned sales opportunity.

There comes a time when many small e-commerce businesses outgrow their current fulfilment strategy. For example, if you and your office staff are picking, packing and shipping orders, once those volumes increase it will be hard to continue to manage that in-house. Even a business with a small warehouse will one day need to upscale. This can entail spending more on warehousing, staff and perhaps even vehicles.

A solution that is often attractive for these types of organisations is to outsource order fulfilment. Your business solely focuses on buying the products and marketing to potential customers, while the most arduous process of picking, packing and shipping customer orders is entrusted to a company such as ours. We can leverage our experience and buying power to make it much more efficient and cost-effective than managing fulfilment internally.

You also don’t have the headache of managing warehouse employees with an outsourced solution. You can leave the training, motivation, sick pay, holiday management and salary to us.

It is also worth noting that testing new markets and product lines become much more of an attractive proposition when you move order fulfilment externally. If you transfer your current operation to an outsourced solution, it becomes a very simple task of adding new SKUs and testing their demand. When it comes to exploiting the demand you have proven, just ship more products to us.

If you choose a fulfilment solution that incorporates discounted shipping rates, then obviously there are cost advantages over trying to negotiate these yourself. At Cloud Fulfilment, we work closely with the industry’s leading couriers and benefit from significantly reduced rates which we pass on to our fulfilment customers.