Why you Must Deploy a Powerful Fulfillment Centre for your eCommerce Business
Did you know that companies that are driven to provide excellent customer experience are 60% more profitable than those who don’t focus on customers?
For an eCommerce business owner, it’s extremely important to provide your customers with the best kind of shopping experience.
Having a powerful fulfillment center has a lot to do with enhancing your customer experience. Wondering how? Here, we will talk about the importance of a tech-enabled fulfillment center to help you with a seamless order fulfillment process, which in turn will help you ship faster to your customers. If you’re opting for a third-party logistics provider, you must be well aware of the activities inside their fulfillment centers.
Receiving Inventory
Inventory receiving is the first step that takes place inside any fulfillment center. While it’s very common to make inventory errors, miscounting SKUs during the first time, a well-equipped fulfillment center will always have in hand a dedicated dock space to receive the inventory. A dock area is a spacious area inside a warehouse that is designed to sort out the inventory correctly and prepare them for storage inside the warehouse.
A real-time inventory tracking system is also a must in order to help avoid any miscalculations while receiving the inventory. Having a quality control manager is also extremely important to assist you if the technology fails, or the employees make any mistake. The job of a quality control manager is to guarantee inventory accuracy.
Order Picking
Did you know that order picking accounts for nearly 50% of the labor cost in a fulfillment center?
Yes, you heard that right! An active fulfillment center always has the right facilities to make the most out of the order picking process. With the rise of eCommerce, order picking has now become much more critical. This is because, while most of the activities inside a fulfillment center can be automated, order picking is majorly done manually.
The results of order picking directly affect your customer satisfaction levels. No customer would like to receive the wrong products or a lesser quantity of what they ordered.
Therefore, the best kind of fulfillment centers always follow these two processes-
- Minimize travel distance — A picker spends most of his time traveling from one item to the next. Advanced fulfillment centers use the right technology to create a picking path optimization route to improve the pickers’ walking path, which in turn increases the picker’s efficiency in order picking.
- Maximize space usage — The right kind of fulfillment center has an optimized layout design of the center, which improves the picking efficiency. The flow of the fulfillment center is usually specific throughout the space.
To make it easier for pickers, some 3PLs also place a map inside their fulfillment center with a detailed layout.
Efficient Packaging of Products
Once all the items are packed inside a fulfillment center, the next step is to pack them up securely. The best kind of fulfillment centers will always have high-quality eCommerce packaging materials handy to protect your products from damage and reduce your product’s dimensional weight. These materials can include corrugated cardboard boxes, courier bags, flyers, bubble wrap, packing tapes, air filters, etc.
When it comes to dimensional weight, product packaging plays a significant role in determining the final weight.
Therefore, the best fulfillment centers will always be extra careful about product packing. They ensure the packaging is done in a way that does not hamper the safety of the product being shipped while also saving up on costs. Also, each package has an exterior barcode or label, which is scanned for easy tracking. The label is always accessible and readable.
There are fulfillment centers that also provide custom packaging for businesses that will have your brand’s logo on top of the box and any other information you wish to offer your customers.
Shiprocket Packaging is an eCommerce packaging initiative by Shiprocket that allows sellers and brands to purchase high-quality packaging materials such as corrugated boxes and flyers directly from the website. The best part is the materials are biodegradable.
Seamless Shipping
Shipping is one of the most critical aspects of the entire order fulfillment process. The first and most important thing that makes a fulfillment center stand out from the rest is when it comes to shipping to the destination. A fulfillment center’s site is a critical factor that determines the shipping charges and the time of delivery to the end customer.
A fulfillment company typically ties up with multiple shipping carriers. Since a fulfillment center operates to fulfill direct-to-consumer orders as soon as they are placed, they need shipping carriers to pick up shipments daily. It ensures orders are delivered to consumers in time and faster, as promised.
The ideal kinds of fulfillment centers will always provide you with the best courier companies’ best options and wider coverage.
For example, Shiprocket Fulfillment gives you access to more than 17 courier companies to ship with, which includes FedEx, Delhivery, and many more. Moreover, you get to ship to nearly 27000 pin codes in the country if you plan to avail Shiprocket’s wide pin code reach.
Quick Returns Handling
Facing returned orders is an inevitable part of running an eCommerce business. But if you have tied up with the right kind of fulfillment partner that has a reverse logistics system in place, you are sorted. A well-equipped fulfillment center can handle returns, recall, and disposal much faster than a company doing in-house fulfillment.
In short, well-equipped fulfillment centers take care of returns handling quickly to don’t have to.
Conclusion
Now that we have told you about how a powerful fulfillment center can effectively handle your pre and post-shipping operations, it’s time for you to tie up with a 3PL that can provide you with all the benefits mentioned above.
