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Understanding Your Options for E-Commerce Fulfillment

Posted by Leo Decker in Articles
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E-commerce fulfillment- when you’re just starting your own business, it can seem overwhelming. When it comes time to sell your business, e-commerce fulfillment must be organized and streamlined.

E-Commerce Fulfillment Basics

Whether you’re launching your own e-commerce business or planning to build on the Amazon FBA platform, fulfillment is one crucial aspect of your business that you must understand if you intend to be successful. Doing your research ahead of time can greatly amplify your success and profitability. You may already have learned from some of your mistakes early on in your brand-new e-commerce outlet.

Should You Manage E-Commerce Fulfillment on Your Own?

While fulfillment initially seems like something you’re able to handle yourself, it is possible and sometimes strongly recommended to outsource fulfillment, particularly as your business grows. There are many different companies that you can outsource your fulfillment process to. While managing your own fulfillment, you don’t have to pay any money to anyone, so it keeps your costs down.

However, this consumes a great deal of your time and can ultimately eat into your profitability and your ability to grow the company. While this is a great option early on for your small or new e-commerce outlet, since you’re giving up time rather than money, it likely won’t suit you as you begin to scale. FedEx is one fulfillment option for small business owners because you can benefit from their existing customer support, inventory platform and monitoring throughout the supply chain. They’d also have favorable shipping costs.

However, many people these days are choosing to use fulfillment by Amazon. Amazon has access to so many different consumers that may not originally have been in your reach, but Amazon is a perfect one stop shop for an e-retailer working at a small scale.

Amazon offers a marketplace that has a built-in audience ready and interested in your product line. It can also assist you with logistics, handling fulfillment and final delivery. The active number of sellers using Amazon’s fulfillment service increased by more than 70% in 2016 as just one example of how people are continuing to use this role. Another critical selling point for choosing Amazon FBA is their prime membership. Since around 82% of people who have a prime membership on Amazon will purchase a product through that site, even if they can find it at a better price from another retailer, this makes it easier for you to tap into an existing market.

Be aware that since Amazon collects a great deal of data about sales on their platform, they can see what is selling well in the marketplace, and they might try to improve their own individual product lines based on sales trends. Although your product might take off quickly at first, you might want to continue monitoring things and be sure that you have something in place to help protect you with regard to competition, even when it comes from Amazon directly. When it comes time to sell your Amazon FBA business and once you’ve mastered e-commerce fulfillment, you need to consider working directly with an experienced online business broker like the team working at Website Closers.  

 

 

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