Ron Duckett's latest article:
Taking the Friction out of E-Commerce Fulfillment
The old-school approach to order fulfillment doesn't fly for many Internet marketers like me. Warehousing, packing, shipping and return-order processing are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This has led to a growing trend among online sellers -- many of us are using web technologies to automate order fulfillment.
I'm writing this article because I think many Internet marketers could benefit from my experience. Inefficeint order fulfillment was jeopardizing my business. We couldn't concentrate on marketing and sales because we were bogged down packing boxes.
The solution I found isn't simple drop shipping or outsourcing to a typical warehouse. I'm talking about e-commerce fulfillment providers (EFPs). They take the "friction" out of order fulfillment. In a typical scenario, a merchant receives an online payment from a consumer. This triggers an order that is sent electronically to the EFP who processes the order. A shipper (e.g., FedEx) is then automatically notified. Upon shipment of the order, an automated notification is sent to both the consumer and the merchant. There is almost no human intervention. In other words, it's a true Internet fulfillment model.
In addition, EFPs provide automated inventory management. For instance, I receive an alert from my EFP when inventory levels drop below certain thresholds. Restocking can be done without an employee doing a physical count. This means online sellers like me, who don't want to deal with physical product, don't have to. My EFP holds the inventory but I still manage and monitor everything through a web-based dashboard. It provides historical reports and real-time visibility into order status, shipment tracking, inventory quantities, and item-level sales data.
I can tell you firsthand that EFPs work. My website, RecipeSecrets.net, sells cookbooks with recipes for popular restaurant dishes. My partner and I were handling order fulfillment ourselves before moving to an EFP. There are several EFPs. Ours is called Webgistix.
It was crazy. We had cookbooks everywhere -- in our homes and all over our offices. We were always running to the post office. There were times when we actually turned down customers because we couldn't handle all our orders. We had to really limit our marketing campaigns because we were afraid of getting overwhelmed.
Moving our fulfillment to an EFP made an enormous difference. We're extremely scalable now and we can focus on our business. We're far more aggressive with our marketing programs, and it's reflected in our bottom line. We're much more profitable. I think the factor that really convinced me to make the switch is that there's almost no cost because customers pay shipping and handling. It's been a great solution for us.
*This news post was submitted by Ron Duckett.
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