Challenges in E-Commerce Fulfillment

How to protect your company online and win in the age of Amazon

Last year, e-commerce sales grew by over 15 percent , confirming how valuable e-commerce fulfillment can be to the success of your business. Problems in your fulfillment process — delayed, broken, or missing orders — result in poor customer experiences, churn, and the erosion of profits. Yet the combination of complexity, increasing customer demands, industry consolidation, and shifting market conditions are causing a perfect storm to threaten mid-sized e-commerce fulfillment companies, making it harder than ever to compete.

Here are the five biggest challenges that e-commerce fulfillment companies need to address:

1. Market evolution

We’ve seen the swift emergence of third-party e-commerce fulfillment vendors that handle orders for traditional e-commerce companies, online marketplaces, and brick-and-mortar stores. These companies simplify e-commerce management, reducing order-to-fulfillment cycle times.

They offer flexible capacity through either dedicated or shared-use networks, efficiently weathering the ebbs and flows of business activity. Most importantly, they accomplish this while reducing costs and supporting faster delivery times to most geographic…