Business Efficiency: 5 Ways To Boost Your Company With Order Fulfilment
When running an online business, it’s easy to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of actually having to ship out your items every day. Nobody really likes packaging stock and dedicating the time to ensuring it gets sent to the right place by a set deadline in order to keep business efficiency primed.
As such, order fulfilment services have become an increasingly popular means for online sellers and companies to cut a huge chunk of time-consuming work out of their day. Today, we’re going to look at five ways the use of order fulfilment will increase business efficiency.
1. Expert services
If you’re an online seller, it’s likely you fancy yourself as more of a technological whizz than someone who’s had a vast experience with manual posting and packaging in the past. While that isn’t the case for everyone, generally speaking most people haven’t spent years honing the craft of shipping stock out.
There are people out there who have however, with order fulfilment services making use of a dedicated team of professionals who have forged a career out of this very skill. Shipping stock isn’t as simple as it might sound, with the following factors playing a huge part:
• Stock intake processing
• Order processing
• Picking and packing
• Distribution
If you want to ensure your business is staying on top of their orders, it stands to reason you should rely on outsourced companies who are experts at the art of order fulfilment.
By utilising organisations like this, you’re guaranteeing you get an elite service which crucially leaves your customers satisfied and your business efficiency heightened. Happy customers means repeat business, which in turn will see business efficiency and revenue boosted.
2. Saves you money
You’d be amazed how the cost of shipping can add up across a range of areas. While it might sound as simple as packing up your stock and sending it out, the reality sees several different steps in the process cost you cash.
Areas which could see the money slip away include:
• Storage space
• Moving equipment
• Utilities
• Staff payroll
• Packing supplies
• Insurance & taxes
• Maintenance
With order fulfilment these prices are all cut down into one easily affordable bundle. With third-party companies taking on orders from a number of different companies, it means they can level out the costs far more across the business – and can as such charge relatively cheap prices for their services. Business efficiency is perfected as a result.
Knowing exactly how much you’re going to be charged for every order that’s shipped out also makes it much easier to stay on top of your figures – something which certainly isn’t true when you’re dealing with your customers on an order-by-order basis.
3. Lets you stay flexible
It might sound like a wonderful thing on paper, but a sudden influx of orders can actually be something of a nightmare when you’re shipping stock out yourself. Sudden boosts to the number of items needing to be sent out can put an immense strain on your resources and time management.
It’s fairly common for online sellers to hire freelance staff to deal with the increase in orders during popular seasonal periods (most notably at Christmas time). While this helps to alleviate the pressure, it does again mean you’re going to need to dedicate time and money to:
• Hiring the staff
• Training them to pack according to your exact standards
• Purchasing even more equipment
• Finding and renting out the space needed to pack more
It’s also common to see the equipment you stocked up on for seasonal sales go to waste when the figures start to fade off and go back to normal again. This leaves you with excess materials which have cost you money for no positive gain.
By outsourcing order fulfilment to specialists, you’re ensuring your business will be able to cope with any sort of influx of orders that come your way. With that in mind, you won’t feel any sort of anxiety heading into sales seasons over your capabilities – meaning you won’t feel the need to put a cap on how much you can or can’t sell.
4. Allows for expansion
When you’re working out of a set base, there’s a very limited amount of global, or even national, expansion you can realistically undergo. While someone from Barnsley might love to ship something off to Peru, it’s going to be a nightmare for a non-professional packer.
Let’s be blunt – it costs a lot of money to start sending packages overseas, and this is again something which could serve to put a major strain on your finances. To increase your business efficiency and potential for growth as much as possible, order fulfilment is basically a must.
With a trained set of experts dealing with your overseas packages, you’ll be able to carefully monitor how well your business is doing internationally and make an assessment as to whether continuing to ship outside the nation is a sustainable means of making profit.
If it does turn out it isn’t a feasible or affordable route for the future, it’s far more cost-effective to bring the process to a close if you’ve been using an order fulfilment service partner.
5. Make the brand stand out
This might not sound like something which instantly springs to mind when you think of shipping out goods, but the reality is companies can actually use their packaging to promote awareness of their brand as a whole.
Once again, order fulfilment companies are trained professionals in this area, meaning they’ll be able to provide you with a service which will incorporate lots of different and aesthetically pleasing techniques to make your company look as classy as possible.
This includes:
• Adding personalised embroidery to packages or cards (such as the company logo)
• Specialty merchandise handling
• Gift wrapping services
• Promotional inserts (like flyers or promo codes)
• Product photography
Making yourself stand out from the crowd is pretty much the most basic, yet key, principal to a successful business. By making yourself memorable (for the right reasons) you’ll be able to leave a stronger imprint in people’s minds and help to encourage repeat business from them in the future.
These are just five reasons why making the most of order fulfilment services will help to boost your overall business efficiency. The current state of the online business sector has meant companies who choose not to outsource their shipment to third-party businesses are falling behind.
In order to keep up with the ever-evolving market, now is as good a time as any to seek out an expert company in this field and see how they can help you to make a lot more money in the coming years.