With e-commerce and online shopping now comes a new development in the form of online order fulfillment services. Because of lower pricing and shopping convenience, traditional brick and mortar stores are unable to compete with online stores. Online shopping is very convenient for shoppers because they don’t need any employees for assistance and that is why whatever time of day, they can shop. In ecommerce, there are no hours when business is closed so consumers can shop at their leisure. Charges for products are lower for online stores because they don’t pay for employees or rental for space. The same amount of profit can be seen on each sale but the end price that is paid by the consumer is significantly less.
Traditional retail locations can be a thing of the past because now prices can still be lowered by eliminating fulfillment warehouses and employees. Although an ecommerce business exists in virtual space, there is still the need of hiring and managing employees and running a warehouse space that is either owned or rented by the business. However, when online order fulfillment services were born, the physical aspects of shopping is no longer needed and can be removed altogether. The orders place by customers are routed to a third-party facility that houses the business inventory (along with other business’ inventory) and utilizes an employee base of its own to process those orders and arrange for shipping to the customer. The software program installed at the site communicates with the shopping car software.
When the fulfillment company receives the order through the software, they use their employees to process and ship the orders. When there is an order placed on the merchant’s website the merchant pays a fee per piece shipped and they have a certain amount of space in the fulfillment company’s warehouse. The orders can be processed for lower fees than if you had your own employee base and warehouses. There are warehouses close to the customers which allow savings on shipping charges. Shipping time then becomes only a fraction of the normal because the warehouses are nearer to their locations.
Sales – Getting Started & Next Steps
Online order fulfillment services is the way to go for ecommerce businesses. They allow for more strategic positioning of inventory nearer to customers. Because of this the prices they charge for shipping can be lowered. Businesses are run in a streamlined way that can expand and contract as necessary.
Getting Down To Basics with Sales
Despite the benefits of shipping fulfillment, not all online businesses will benefit from it. These are only for those ecommerce merchants who want the idea of being fully virtual, not manage employees or warehouse space, and save money all at the same time.