Order Fulfillment is the process of fulfilling a customer’s order. Every business has a fulfillment center. The fulfillment center takes care of delivering a customer’s order to them in time. This process incorporates various tasks, like picking and packing orders, delivery, and customer service. Fulfillment centers are also responsible for returning and exchanging faulty products on a customer’s complaint.
What is fulfillment?
It is the total process of caring for the customer and delivering the product. However, the meaning of what is fulfillment for customers has changed with the globalization of clientele, and the emphasis on speed and adaption. Let’s explore how technology has changed product fulfillment, as well as how fulfillment houses can help your business.
What else is involved in answering what fulfillment is? It is dependent on the type of business you have. If you have an e-commerce outfit, your physical site is probably less developed. You need someone to handle customer order placement, warehouse to shipment, customer service, and customer returns.
You may need to relay data to sales teams or check to make sure you have enough inventory for the month. These are all needed functions once your business starts to expand. You need to ensure your business will grow unhindered by having the right infrastructure in place.
Why is a fulfillment center important?
For customers, it is important to have their orders delivered to them on or before time. Customers don’t like waiting for their deliveries. If a product reaches late or damaged, customers will feel let down and stop ordering from the company and move to substitute products or to the competitor’s products rather than continuing buying from the company that let them down.
In today’s competitive marketplace, a business cannot afford bad publicity or customer transference. This does not only reduce the business’ customer base, but it also affects the potential customers through existing customers’ references.
With each customer that is being lost, a business loses multiple potential reference customers. In all this, the company gains bad publicity, which affects the image of the company, and if this publicity spreads, many customers could be lost.
Why outsource fulfillment center?
Outsourcing fulfillment service means handing the complete order fulfillment responsibility to another company that is an expert in providing top quality order fulfillment service. This includes receiving the order through web-based software, which alerts the order fulfillment service provider about the customer’s order.
Upon receiving the order, they immediately pick, pack, and deliver the order to the customer.
This not only saves the business the costs of maintaining a fulfillment center, including warehouse costs, storage costs, fulfillment costs, and other heavy costs involved in this process.
Outsourcing fulfillment is best suited for a small business whose fulfillment needs do not meet the costs that they incur in order fulfillment. Bulk shipping discounts, courier discounts, and other discounts are not available to the company with relevant small-scale orders. Such a company can take advantage of these discounts and cost reductions by outsourcing their order fulfillment centers.
Outsourcing fulfillment Inc. is gaining popularity because it helps businesses focus on increasing their sales instead of worrying about getting the order delivered on time to the customer. For those businesses who feel their time and productivity is being wasted due to having to focus on order fulfillment, they should give outsourcing fulfillment a try.
Integration of IT With Order Fulfillment
These days, fulfillment houses have an integrated IT solution that allows them to keep track of everything in the warehouse, every order placed, and all deliveries scheduled with the click of a button. It is called management information systems, and this has helped many businesses to streamline. Many business models rely on this method of software to make sure fulfillment goes smoothly.
Some businesses take smooth running fulfillment to the next level. Some companies have fulfillment processes that are so smooth, a new business model for business-to-consumer can take place. Called Just-in-time manufacturing, retailers such as Dell can drastically reduce warehouse inventory, and products are made to order in the factory.
Because their system is so fine-tuned, they hardly have any inventory if they choose it. Made to order products are put together only when consumers place orders. While this type of fulfillment capability is not always available to small businesses or startups, we can use fulfillment houses to implement more efficient procedures in fulfillment.
Find the Best Service Provider
By using a fulfillment house, there is no need to recruit in house talent, set up a separate warehouse and distribution facility, or lose money with misplaced orders. You want to find the best outsourcing for what is fulfillment.
It is best to shop around and find the fulfillment house with the best management team. Check their track record. A consultant team often comes along with any fulfillment warehouse service. These are just some methods for knowing that the fulfillment house is good for your company.
