What is E-Commerce Fulfilment?

Outsourced ecommerce fulfilment is the process of instructing a 3rd party company to handle all of your receiving, picking & packing and delivering of online orders to your customers. Businesses, such as ourselves, that handle your ecommerce fulfilment are often referred to as third-party logistics providers, fulfilment houses or fulfilment centres. Generally, the flow of outsourced order fulfilment will look like the following:

1. Storage of Goods

2. Integration

3. Picking & Packing

4. Shipping

5. Returns

Knowing what products to have in stock, and when, is one of the most vital aspects of a successful eCommerce store. On one hand, you want to have stock in to serve customers as quickly as possible, but on the other hand ordering in too much stock will only raise your storage costs. By utilising forecasting software (which surprisingly only 15% of small businesses use) you will already be heading in the right direction.  By outsourcing your eCommerce fulfilment, you will have access to a range of statistics that will keep your stock management efficient.

Ultimately good stock control will result in easier storage management, meaning that products can be located, picked and packed efficiently as delivered to customers as quickly as possible. In addition, a warehouse management system will sky-rocket your pick and pack accuracy to 99.999% (quite the improvement on 97% human accuracy!). By outsourcing order fulfilment, you will gain these benefits along with all of the above.