The last employee your product sees, the 3PL fulfillment solution
For e-commerce businesses, order fulfillment can become complex and labor-intensive as your operations grow. While you scale up, it’s impractical and inefficient to handle all fulfillment in-house. This is where a third-party logistics (3PL) provider can act as your last employee – skilled specialists who manage your entire supply chain.
A good 3PL fulfillment solutions partner lifts the fulfillment burden off your shoulders so you can focus on high-level strategic decisions to grow your e-commerce business. In effect, they function as an extra department or employee that you don’t need to manage.
Benefits of Outsourcing Fulfillment to a 3PL Company
Here are some of the key benefits of using 3PL fulfillment solutions:
Access to Warehouses and Advanced Technology
A fulfillment company has warehouses optimized for e-commerce order processing with advanced inventory management systems. They invest in the best warehouse management systems (WMS), warehouse automation, and inventory tracking software so you don’t have to.
Lower Operational Costs
By leveraging the economies of scale from the 3PL’s network and consolidating your orders, you can reduce freight and shipping costs significantly. Things like cross-docking, order splitting, shipment consolidation and bulk shipping rates become possible.
Expert Shipping and Delivery Management
Get access to discounted shipping rates from carriers and optimized last-mile delivery solutions. A good provider has strong relationships with carriers and logistics partners to negotiate the best shipping prices.
High Quality Order Processing
With rigorous SOPs and KPI monitoring, 3PLs ensure quick turnaround times and excellent order accuracy. This improves customer satisfaction and allows you to scale order volumes rapidly.
Seamless E-Commerce Integration
Your web store or marketplace can be directly integrated with the 3PL’s order management system via API. As you grow sales channels, they can provide multi-channel fulfillment.
Improved Supply Chain Visibility
With their TMS platforms and inventory tracking software, you gain real-time visibility into your supply chain. See inventory levels, shipments in transit and delivery status updates for better planning.
How a 3PL Fulfillment Company Operates as Your Employee
When you engage a 3PL partner, you essentially add a entire logistics department to your organization. 3PL fulfillment solutions manage complex logistics processes end-to-end so you can focus on high-level business growth. Just like an employee, the 3PL fulfillment provider takes over these key operations:
Receiving and Managing Inventory
As shipments from suppliers arrive at their warehouse, they receive goods into inventory. This involves unloading, counting, inspecting and moving goods to storage locations. Some even provide VMI (vendor managed inventory) solutions where they directly interface with your suppliers to replenish stock levels automatically based on demand forecasts or inventory thresholds.
Storage, Handling and Inventory Tracking
Their fulfillment center has the specialized infrastructure to safely store goods for however long you require – whether its short-term storage during peak seasons or long-term storage of slow moving items. Inventory is accurately tracked at all times across barcode scans and cycle counts. Custom reporting provides inventory status updates.
Kitting, Bundling, Assembly and Packaging
Based on your BOMs (bills of materials) and product specifications, they can bundle items into kits, gift sets or combo packs. This light manufacturing also includes product assembly, attachments, inserts, customized packaging etc.
Order Processing and Fulfillment
As e-commerce orders come in, they handle the entire fulfillment process – picking, sorting, packing and shipping of orders with high accuracy. This involves outbound logistics like obtaining discounted shipping rates, optimizing delivery routes, interfacing with carriers for pickup and drop-off and tracking shipments.
Customer Service and Returns Handling
They field customer queries on order status updates, expected delivery dates and more so you don’t have to. For product returns and RMAs, they inspect returned items, process refunds or replacements and manage reverse logistics back into inventory.
Analytics and Performance Reporting
With their technology stack, they provide complete visibility into all key fulfillment metrics and KPIs through custom reports and analytics dashboards covering costs, order processing times, accuracy, capacity utilization etc.
Beginner’s Guide to Third-Party Logistics (3PL)
The world of e-commerce is always changing, therefore understanding the roll of Third-Party Logistics is integral to keeping up. In light of this our beginner’s guide to third-party logistics (3PL) will delve into the essential aspects, offering insights into fulfillment services, warehousing, and much more.
Read More…
As you can see a 3PL that specializes in e-commerce fulfillment provides end-to-end services that function like a logistics and supply chain department minus the overheads of managing resources in-house. Leveraging external specialists lets you scale faster by optimizing fulfillment costs and quality. Focus your efforts on sales, marketing and product development – the core of growing an e-commerce business.
