Most small business owners who’ve been around the block a time or two can tell you that fulfillment management is a lot like a circus act: you’ve got to keep several things going at once, juggling several different details while keeping your eye on the goal and the destination in front of you.
You juggle resources, you try to pedal your way through the marketplace, and you want to keep up with what the audience – your customers – demand. The economy is a tightrope, and every now and then you feel as if you’re working without a net. Growing your ecommerce business is tough, but there are ways to make it easier.
Fulfillment Management Combines Several Factors
Besides order fulfillment, the most important aspect of fulfillment management lies in the ability to effectively police and manage your inventory, and to store it in safe, dependable climate controlled warehousing facilities. Unfortunately, all those tasks are relatively cost prohibitive.
As a business grows, ecommerce business owners can find themselves more and more liable to increasingly expensive cost outlays necessary to accommodate inventory, climate controlled storage, and other expenses. These costs can eat away at a business’ ability to grow, which in turn can swallow the ecommerce or home-based business’ chances to thrive.
Successful fulfillment management helps to alleviate the stress that order fulfillment and logistics management can place on a growing business. Many small business, home based business and ecommerce business owners choose to outsource their logistics management and fulfillment management needs to a third party service provider, as a way of circumventing these very issues.
Fulfillment Management Companies Are a Trade-Off
Fulfillment service companies share in the profits of your ecommerce business, yet they provide a wide range of services that might otherwise impair an ecommerce business’ development and growth. For example, by providing a fulfillment warehousing facility and staff, the fulfillment management company can save its client ecommerce business potentially hundreds of thousands in rental costs and overhead, as well as staffing and training costs and taxes and licensing regulations.
The profit sharing typically involves the fulfillment management company receiving a percentage of each product processed and shipped on behalf of the ecommerce or home based client business. In some instances this percentage starts small but then increases over time as the amount of product processed and shipped grows along with the client business’ market presence.