Logistics: 7 reasons to switch to a single e-commerce fulfillment provider

At the start of their activity, e-merchants are on all fronts: optimization of the merchant site, marketing, administrative, accounting or even commercial strategy. At the heart of this excitement, ensuring e-commerce logistics is an extremely time-consuming task.

In the course of the development of its activity, it therefore becomes natural for the e-merchant to entrust its logistics to a fulfillment provider in order to unload. By definition, the e-commerce fulfillment provider takes care of all logistics operations:

• reception and storage of products,

• picking, wrapping, packing,

• sending and delivery of orders,

• management of returns and disputes,

• provision of all logistical information in a digital dashboard.

However, some are still hesitant to take the step or keep several specialized partners on a channel or type of sending. Here are 7 reasons to entrust your e-commerce logistics to a single fulfillment partner.

1.

Many e-merchants sell their products on their own, but also through other channels such as marketplaces in addition to their website. But multiplying sales channels can quickly become a logistical headache. Rather than having multiple subcontractors, a single fulfillment partner can take care of all orders from different locations.

No more distributing your inventory to different warehouses, negotiating with multiple partners and using different interfaces. By unifying your fulfillment logistics, you can greatly simplify your daily e-commerce activities and more easily monitor trends and shortages: a single inventory, a single partner, and a single real-time dashboard for all your sales channels.

2. Benefit from total flexibility 🚀 

Many products have a more or less anticipated seasonality. While this is fairly easy to manage on the digital side, adapting internally to a variation in the number of physical shipments is much more complex. How much to recruit, how to keep flexibility when you can't exactly predict future sales?

Moreover, no one is safe from success, not even you. You may be able to think of a campaign or a product that can multiply your sales by 10, but how can you multiply your logistical capacity by 10 or 30 without any hitches?

By using an external partner, you benefit from their ability to place from 500 to 15,000 orders from one day to the next, without any investment. They can support your growth and maybe even give you volume-related discounts. And if this acceleration is only temporary, you can go back down, without risk or cost, to your cruising speed.

3. Reduce your delivery times ⏱

By using a e-commerce fulfillment partner, you no longer need to prepare the orders yourself and forward them to the carrier. Connected directly to your shops, as soon as an order is placed, your fulfillment partner takes care of everything instantly: collecting the products, packing the parcel, franking, handing over to the carrier and tracking the delivery.

In addition to being reduced by immediate reactivity, delivery times can be further shortened by a judicious choice of carrier for each parcel. It then becomes possible to envisage new offers, more in line with new expectations, such as next-day delivery.

4. Improve customer satisfaction 🤩

Receiving your parcel intact very quickly is exactly what your customers expect from a major brand. The post-purchase phase remains key in the e-commerce experience and satisfaction of your customers. In addition to radically speeding up the process, outsourcing the packing to a professional considerably reduces the risk of damage or breakage. A fulfillment partner will also allow you to better manage returns by facilitating, for example, the creation of return labels.

Your customers will thank you in their own way: you will have less customer service to provide, you will benefit from better reviews and ratings on social networks, Google, but also on marketplaces. And the higher your satisfaction rate, the more visibility you will gain!

5. Reduce your costs 💰

By unifying your e-commerce logistics, you also reduce your costs. If you previously handled logistics in-house, you save the cost of renting space to store your products, not to mention the resources and time spent managing logistics, or purchasing packing materials and supplies.

If you collaborate with multiple service providers, you save the cost of transporting to multiple warehouses or previously storing your products. Furthermore, by entrusting your entire logistics to a single partner, you can negotiate a better rate than by dividing its management to several companies. By choosing a partner that does not charge for incoming inventory, your migration will cost you almost nothing.

What's more, if your new e-commerce partner sends millions of parcels a year, you will benefit from carrier rates that bear no resemblance to yours. And if, in addition, he optimizes the choice of carrier for each individual parcel with an algorithm, you'll save even more, while gaining in efficiency.

6. Simplify your business 🙏

When you manage yourself or subcontract to several service providers, it also becomes extremely difficult to know exactly how much all the logistics operations cost in relation to a particular parcel. It is possible to identify major trends, but they are not really useful to predict the logistics impact in case of an activity shift.

If your new e-commerce partner practices a single price that includes everything (storage, picking, packing, supplies, postage and delivery to the carrier), he has done the most difficult for you. You can then know the exact share of logistics for each parcel and deduce your margin accurately. This also allows you to easily project yourself on scenarios of evolution of your activity.

7. Focus on the essentials 🔍

Delegating your entire logistics to a e-commerce fulfillment partner also means saving a lot of time. Especially if your partner also relieves you of the time-consuming relationship with the carriers with its own customer service. The extra time you free up can be focused on your core business: online sales.

You can then fully concentrate on developing your activity, eliminating the real and mental burden of logistics management.

In short 📦

Every e-merchant who develops his activity reaches, one day, a tipping point where the lack of time no longer allows handling in-house logistics and where budgetary logic forces to rationalize subcontracting. By unifying your logistics with a e-commerce fulfillment partner, you are opting for the most reliable way to improve your post-purchase quality, limit your costs and grow your business.

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