Fulfillment services are a preferred choice by online merchants and are one of the leading eCommerce trends in 2022. They are suitable for any online merchant who sells and ships to international markets, as they are not tied to the volume of completed orders and processed shipments. This makes them suitable for both small online stores and industry leaders with thousands of shipments every day, as they save the online merchant a lot of trouble and commitment.
If you miss the moment to outsource warehouse processes by using fulfillment services, there is a huge possibility that you will encounter difficulties in managing your online stores, such as paying huge amounts of rent for a warehouse that is half empty for most of the year just so you can accommodate the increased shipment volumes during the Black Friday and Christmas holidays. Another common problem that online merchants face is laying off some of their staff or having a shortage of employees due to unforeseen circumstances and/or the strong seasonality of the products they sell.
But how to be sure that your online store needs fulfillment services? Today we’ll look at the most common signs that clearly indicate that your online store can be even more competitive when it comes to international shipping if you start using fulfillment services:
Read the article to learn how fulfillment services solve these problems and what advantages they give you over your overseas competitors.
The cost of delivering shipments to a neighbor of your country is in most cases not much different from the cost of a domestic courier service. However, if you are selling in a more distant destination and the shipment has to cross more than 3-4 countries, then the price jumps dramatically. At the same time, your competitor who is based in the shipping country can offer 2 or 3 times lower shipping prices to your potential customers. This would cause them to order from his online store instead of yours, even if your products are more interesting and at better prices.
In this case, if you use fulfillment services and store your goods near the countries where you want to position yourself, such differences in the cost of delivery are imperceptible. Additionally, by choosing a suitable warehouse or fulfillment location that is as close as possible to your target international markets, you can deliver your shipments with a local courier that is well-known and preferred by your recipients in that particular country.
Another benefit is that you can provide your customers with the most attractive delivery time possible, which leads us to the next signal that fulfillment services are for you.
For more remote shipping destinations, cross-border shipping technically takes much longer and your recipients are forced to wait a week, two, or even a month. Unfortunately, consumers who shop online are usually used to receiving their shipments in a much shorter period of time and hold to that when ordering online.
The most suitable solution here is to use a fulfillment warehouse, from which the delivery is made with the shortest possible transit times to all the countries where you sell online. This will not only make you more competitive with the local strong players but also save you a lot of costs in courier delivery, fees, and handling of returned goods.
For example, from our fulfillment warehouse in Ruse, Bulgaria, the shipments are delivered to:
And from our fulfillment center in Hungary, the transit times are as follows:
Over the past few years, we’ve seen both significant recessions in overall online consumption in some areas, as well as huge increases in online store shipments volumes in other specific categories. Some businesses were unable to meet their running costs as their revenues fell sharply, and others did not have the capacity to handle the growing number of online orders.
In both cases, enterprising online store owners resorted to our fulfillment services for several main reasons that give them the peace of mind that they won’t find themselves in the same situation again:
If you still don’t have enough staff to process online orders and prepare shipments for delivery, and you often have to step into these activities or have taken on this task yourself, then you’re missing out on a number of opportunities to work on optimizing your business, managing it and driving sales because you don’t have time for these more important things.
By outsourcing these logistics activities to professionals, you not only save time and commitments in the warehouse but also reduce the risk of human errors, as the free modules for integration with eCommerce platforms developed by us fully automate the online order processing process.
One of the underrated benefits of fulfillment services is having an address for reverse logistics that is close to the recipients of your shipments. At this address, returned goods are accepted or shipments that have not reached their recipients are stored. If you do not have such an address, you may often have to pay a huge amount, and in some cases, even more than the value of the product itself, to get it back when the recipient did not look for it.
Another advantage of a reverse logistics address is that you can offer your potential customers free returns or returns with minimal fees, which is an important benefit for them, and in many cases, it is decisive for placing an online order.
To summarize, we can highlight the main benefits for you and your online business as a result of our fulfillment services:
In our many years of experience, we have managed to integrate the services of 30+ premium courier companies and those of 10 fulfillment warehouses in Europe, taking over the entire logistics process related to your online store:
Send us an inquiry with information about your business and we will send you a personalized offer that best suits your business model, according to the countries you ship to, and the nature of your shipments.
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