5 Expert Ways to Build a Better Business With Fulfillment & Shipping Services

You understand the benefits of outsourcing fulfillment & shipping to an established and highly-rated third party. Your business can decrease processing times, which increases the number of orders sent out each day. With less to do onsite, you free up employees to provide better customer service. The number of order errors decreases, as a company such as Complete Mailing & Printing works with the latest technology to ensure order accuracy. Finally, a reduction in operating costs combined with generating more revenue improves your bottom line.

Understanding the benefits of outsourcing fulfillment & shipping is one thing. It is quite another thing to implement strategies to reap the financial rewards of those benefits. Let’s take a look at five expert ways to build a better business with fulfillment and shipping services.

Warehouse

The warehouse model for fulfillment and shipping has been around as long as motorized vehicles. However, Amazon defined the long-term warehousing model by handling orders that help customers avoid paying costly fees. Fulfillment and shipping services provided by a third party can include long-term warehousing, which saves your company money, especially if it sells high-end products such as furniture and appliances.

Retail

One of the most common ways to build a better business with fulfillment and shipping services involves going through traditional retail outlets like Target and Walmart. Even the COVID pandemic could not destroy the traditional sales channel for businesses operating across every niche. Retail giants also provide other services, such as digital printing services and custom mailing services. A company such as Complete & Printing enforces strict shipping guidelines to ensure your products arrive at retail outlets on time and in the correct quantity.

eCommerce

When a consumer orders a product online, the consumer receives an estimated date of arrival. The estimated date of arrival is often accurate down to the day and even the time. Due to the explosive growth of online sales, many businesses rely on fulfillment and shipping services to deliver products in a timely manner. A shopping cart created online immediately processes a customer’s order by engaging with a warehouse management system (WMS). The WMS then manages the distribution of the product through every delivery point.

Multi-Channel

By working with a fulfillment and shipping business, you can access every sales channel that is available to consumers. Your business meets product demand through traditional channels like retail, as well as more cutting-edge sales channels like a subscription service. The ability to broaden your sales options helps your company grow sales by reaching consumers that you otherwise would not attract.

Subscription

This sales strategy also goes by the name of auto shipping service. Subscription box fulfillment ships out products on a regular schedule. For example, the subscription fulfillment and shipping model is how the Dollar Shave Club sends razors to signed-up customers once a month. Businesses that handle this type of fulfillment and shipping model must be experts at processing batch shipping orders.

Reclaim Valuable Employee Time With Fulfillment & Shipping Services

Did you know that by outsourcing your fulfillment & shipping responsibilities, you help your employees reclaim valuable time? A business like Complete Mailing and Printing takes care of time-consuming fulfillment & shipping tasks, such as resolving shipping issues and confirming the accuracy of every product order. This allows your employees to work on other business-related tasks, which means you get more out of your team in less time. Higher productivity translates into an improved bottom line.

Reclaiming valuable employee time with fulfillment & shipping is just one of several benefits delivered when you partner with Complete Mailing & Printing. Here are a few other benefits of outsourcing your fulfillment & shipping responsibilities.

Increase Sales

What do you do with all the time reclaimed by your team? The first item on your to-do list should be to focus on increasing sales. Outsourcing fulfillment & shipping to a highly-rated business such as Complete Mailing & Printing gives your employees more time to implement sales growth initiatives like answering customer questions and running proven digital marketing campaigns. Your staff also can spend the time required explaining the benefits and features of your products to prospective customers.

Reduce Costs

Outsourcing fulfillment & shipping adds another expense to your profit and loss statement. However, by outsourcing fulfillment  & shipping, your business saves money in the long run. Your team does not have to address costly shipping delays. Your business is not on the financial hook for shipping mistakes and the costs associated with paying for damaged products. At Complete Mailing & Printing, we know where the closest warehouses are located to reduce shipping times, and thus, reduce the cost of shipping.

No More Errors

What typically happens when overwhelmed employees handle fulfillment & shipping responsibilities? The answer is your business has to deal with a growing number of errors, especially when it involves shipping the wrong products. At Complete Mailing & Printing, we have established a system that ensures every one of your customers receives the products that they ordered. Our multi-step product confirmation process checks and double-checks the accuracy of each order placed by your customers.

Faster Product Processing Times

Does your business have to deal with long product processing times because your employees have too much on their plates? Instead of allocating labor resources to packing and shipping your product, you partner with the team at Complete Mailing & Printing to deliver much faster product processing times. We incorporate the most advanced product tracking system into our business model to speed up processing times dramatically.

Much Improved Customer Service

You understand one of the most important facts that determines the success of your business: Twenty percent of your customers generate 80 percent of your revenue. In other words, your loyal customers take up the largest slice of the revenue pie. How do you grow your loyal customer base, and in the process, also grow sales? The answer is to improve customer service by outsourcing fulfillment & shipping responsibilities.

Research shows that American businesses lose more than $60 billion in revenue each year due to poor customer service.

What is the Process for Outsourcing My Company’s Fulfillment & Shipping Needs?

One of the most critical steps in serving a customer is to ensure timely and accurate order fulfillment, which also involves shipping a product through the most efficient channels. Your business can execute each step of the customer engagement process and still fall short of meeting expectations by implementing an inferior fulfillment and shipping program.

Outsourcing fulfillment and shipping involves hiring a third-party logistics company such as Complete Mailing & Printing to handle this critical last step in the customer engagement process. Businesses benefit from outsourcing fulfillment and shipping for several reasons. First, your business quickly scales up or down operations based on customer demand. Second, you enjoy cost savings by implementing a much more efficient fulfillment model. Your business is no longer on the financial hook for expenses like labor, equipment, and warehousing. Third, your customers receive better service because of faster shipping times and enhanced product order accuracy. Other reasons to outsource fulfillment and shipping responsibilities include reducing legal liabilities and gaining access to the most advanced technology.

Now that you understand the benefits of outsourcing fulfillment and shipping responsibilities, what are the steps you should take to achieve optimal performance?

Choose the Right Partner

Many factors come into play when choosing the best partner to handle your company’s fulfillment and shipping needs. It starts with identifying your needs, such as knowing where your customers live and ensuring your new partner has warehouses close to where your customers live. Then, you should consider the technology used by a potential partner, such as the type of inventory management software that integrates flawlessly with your technology platform. The partner that handles your company’s fulfillment and shipping responsibilities also should possess expertise in moving the types of products sold to your customers.

Prepare for the Switch

Choosing the right partner to handle your company’s fulfillment and shipping responsibilities is just the first step to making the transition work. You also must prepare for the switch by factoring in order SKU counts, order volume, and storage requirements. Planning for the transfer of inventory represents one of the most important phases of the transition to outsourcing fulfillment and shipping. This includes closely coordinating shipping logistics, labeling requirements, and inventory management procedures. Training your team members to adapt to the new fulfillment and shipping model also represents an important step in the preparation process.

Monitor Your Partner’s Performance

Your business should set clear metrics for your partner to achieve fulfillment and shipping goals. Establish KPIs for order accuracies, shipping times, and customer feedback. You should assign one or more team members to track and report on the established KPIs to highlight where your fulfillment and shipping partner needs to improve services.

Communication represents the key factor for monitoring performance, such as daily check-ins and once-a-month live online meetings to address issues and/or discover better opportunities.

Improve Performance

It is one thing to stay on top of your fulfillment and shipping partner’s performance. It is quite another thing to take the metrics you have gathered and then devise strategies to enhance operations. Based on hard data and softer customer feedback, your business should be able to make quick changes to operations, such as improving technology and hiring more experienced team members.

You also want to implement measures that ensure your partner complies with industry best practices, as well as state and federal government regulations.

6 Popular Services That Define Fulfillment & Shipping

Businesses spend a considerable amount of money to bring a product to market. From conducting extensive consumer research to paying for expensive manufacturing costs, businesses ride the razor-thin line between making a profit and falling deep into the black. When the time comes to fulfill product orders and then ship the products thousands of miles away, the razor-thin product margin gets obliterated.

This is why working with a fulfillment and shipping company can help your business sit on the right side of the razor-thin profit margin line.

At Complete Mailing & Printing, we offer six popular services that define fulfillment and shipping for our customers.

eCommerce

Because of the tremendous growth of online sales, many fulfillment centers offer an eCommerce fulfillment service that allows your business to link directly to an online shopping cart. An online shopping cart automatically processes product orders via a warehouse management system (WMS), which ensures each order is processed according to a customer’s location information. A web store provides your company with a convenient virtual warehouse, along with access to other online sales portals such as eBay and Amazon.

Retail

If your company is looking to grow sales, one of the most effective strategies involves reaching out to big box stores like Walmart, Best Buy, and Home Depot to reach your sales goal. Big box brick-and-mortar retailers remain viable sales channels for most types of consumer products. Because of strict guidelines, a fulfillment and shipping company such as Complete Mailing and Printing ensures each of your products contains the correct routing guides and instructions for shipping

Multi-Channel

Multi-channel means a fulfillment and shipping company has the capability to meet product requests through a wide variety of different sales channels. Your company can meet product requests through traditional sales channels such as direct-to-consumer (D2C), as well as leverage the power of selling products to retail outlets through business-to-business (B2B) sales channels.

Subscription

Also referred to as auto shipping service, subscription box fulfillment relies on a company handling orders that occur on a regularly scheduled basis. One example of this type of fulfillment and shipping regards the Dollar Shave Club, which sends razors to customers every month. This type of fulfillment and shipping service requires a business to be experts at batch shipping, which includes handling rapidly changing orders each month.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing via sites like Kickstarter and IndieGogo has emerged as a popular way to ship products to consumers. Many of the products are gifts sent as a thank-you to customers for donating money to a charitable cause. Unlike most fulfillment and shipping orders, orders typically are large, one-time orders completed after a crowdsourcing campaign.

Long-Term Warehousing

Amazon has revolutionized the product chain management model by creating long-term warehousing. The result is fulfillment and shipping companies that specialize in handling orders that help customers avoid paying Amazon’s long-term storage fees. Also called FBA Prep Services, long-term warehousing is an especially important fulfillment and shipping service for companies that manufacture high-end products such as furniture.

4 Examples of Fulfillment & Shipping Benefiting Businesses of All Sizes

Business owners and managers must consider several factors when running their operations. Recruiting team members, promoting products and services, and maintaining a safe environment for customers to shop all play important roles in determining the success of your business. However, fulfillment and shipping represents an overlooked, but equally important factor for business owners and managers to consider. Shipping and fulfillment consist of receiving, processing, and delivering product orders to customers. Although it seems like a relatively straightforward process, fulfillment and shipping can turn into a logistical nightmare, especially during the current economic climate that is defined by frequent supply chain disruptions.

The answer to overcoming fulfillment and shipping challenges involves finding the right company to handle the critically important business function. At Complete Mailing & Printing, our team of fulfillment and shipping experts provides four important benefits for our customers.

Better Customer Service

You have heard the timeless saying: It is easier to maintain the loyalty of a customer than it is to attract a new customer to buy your products and services. Research reveals businesses lose as much as $62 billion in sales each year because of poor customer service. One of the most common types of poor customer service concerns product delivery delays. With intense competition, enhancing your customer service by outsourcing fulfillment and shipping can help your business maintain a loyal customer base.

You receive support around the clock via emails, phone calls, and text messages, as well as obtain guaranteed delivery dates to improve customer experiences.

Decrease Order Processing Times

Business owners and managers are like jugglers in that they must focus on several responsibilities at the same time. One of the first responsibilities to take a back seat to other responsibilities is fulfillment and shipping. You train your team members to deliver superior customer service, promote your product and services to attract new customers, and receive payment for sales to complete customer buying cycles. However, you forgot one important step.

You also have to pack and ship your products in a timely manner. Outsourcing fulfillment and shipping leads to much faster delivery times.

Eliminate Order Errors

What is just as frustrating for your customers as waiting too long to receive a product? The answer is receiving a product in a timely manner, but it is the wrong product. A fulfillment and shipping service keeps close track of every order to ensure your customers receive what they ordered. At Complete Mailing & Printing, we have established a system that includes a product confirmation process that verifies the accuracy of each order. Eliminating product errors is the direct result of a more efficient shipping and fulfillment system.

Increased Profitability

Let’s assume we have two businesses: Business A and Business B. Business A handles all fulfillment and shipping responsibilities in-house. Due to product errors and a slow delivery system, Business A experiences stagnant sales and a sharp increase in operating costs. Business A experiences stagnant sales because of losing customers because of shipping and fulfillment errors. A sharp increase in operating costs is mostly due to the high cost of replacing products that sustain damage during the shipping and fulfillment process.

A highly rated fulfillment and shipping service, such as the one provided by Complete Mailing

& Printing, helps your business boost its bottom line by increasing sales and lowering operating costs.