Tuesday, January 17, 2023

What does a warehousing and fulfillment center do?

The obvious benefit to using a 3PL third-party logistics (3PL) like Selery is that it saves you from having to do the work yourself.

What does a fulfillment center do for e-commerce sellers on marketplaces like Shopify, Woo Commerce, Wix, Squarespace, Big Commerce, Wix and more? 

According to Shopify, A fulfillment service is a third-party warehouse that prepares and ships your orders for you. It does this from its fulfillment center. E-commerce fulfillment services are ideal for businesses that don’t want to deal with shipping or have outgrown existing warehousing capabilities to a point where they’re unable to ship orders themselves anymore.

In a previous article we discussed, what to ask for when choosing a fulfillment center, but, maybe you're not sure what exactly fulfillment center does, and if it will be helpful to your current business.

What does fulfillment center do? 

While each fulfillment center operates slightly differently, and we think Selery is the best : ) they all accomplish the same thing: they act as a command center for all your order prepping and shipping needs. Fulfillment centers also double as warehouse spaces for inventory storage, allowing you to hold onto product.

Some fulfillment service providers have multiple fulfillment centers, allowing them to serve different geographic locations more quickly than if they were to have just one. This allows e-commerce companies to deliver fast and affordable shipping to a diverse customer base. With Amazon dominating the world of shipping as we know it, fulfillment centers provide small-business owners the ability to compete on somewhat of the same level.

Ahh the benefits.

The obvious benefit to using a 3PL third-party logistics (3PL) like Selery is that it saves you from having to do the work yourself. But the benefits go deeper than that. Outsourcing warehousing and fulfillment can have a meaningful impact on your business’s growth and bottom line.

Having a logistics expert at your side can go a long way in helping you achieve your sales goals. They manage all of the labor needed for receiving, inventory management, and order processing and shipping—giving you a new level of agility you might not achieve so easily on your own, with the added benefit of reduced shipping costs.

When you hire an outsourced fulfillment services provider, not only do you get warehouse space (save BIG on rent), you also get people responsible for running the fulfillment center. When you fulfill and ship your own orders, you’ll likely need to hire staff as you scale. Managing staff takes time. If your business is still in flux, you may be wary of promising someone a job. Instead, you can outsource the work to a logistics company and let them be responsible for finding and hiring good people.

This then frees you and your team to test new strategies, inventory management techniques, and other initiatives to achieve rapid growth—without worrying about back-end logistics or hiring backlogs.

If you have any questions at all please feel free to reach out to us.

Why Selery?

  • Same day fulfillment
  • Offer 2-day shipping
  • Account rep