It’s a good problem to have: you’re a small business, and times are good. You’ve had a boom in sales, but you don’t know if it’s sustainable, and upgrading your warehouse will involve hiring staff, purchasing more equipment, and possibly leasing new premises. Or, if you’re a mid-sized business that is struggling to see growth, you need to shake things up and get a leg up on the competition. In both of these cases, it’s time to consider using a fulfillment center to help shoulder the load of meeting your customer’s demands. Fulfillment centers provide a variety of benefits for their clients.
What is a Fulfillment Center?
A fulfillment center is a company that processes and ships products to customers—and that’s all. They don’t make or market anything. They just ship it. A fulfillment center processes orders from retailers all over the world and sends the products directly to the retailers’ customers. These are some of the top reasons that businesses transition to using a fulfillment center:
To Improve Customer Satisfaction
By managing inventory in a systematic and computerized fashion, orders are fulfilled quickly, and nothing slips through the cracks. In this way, fulfillment centers help improve customer satisfaction rates—when customers get exactly what they ordered quicker than they expected, your star ratings will go through the roof. This leads to greater customer loyalty and longer-term customer retention rates.
To Boost Sales
By filling orders quickly and efficiently, a fulfillment center can help you sell more products. You can focus on production and advertising, allowing your customers to have a wider choice and more access to more products than before.
To Save Time
Since fulfillment centers handle all the shipping and handling, your company can reduce the amount of time spent on packaging and labeling. Additionally, fulfillment centers will have more sophisticated sorting and packing processes, such as Fluent Conveyors, so products can potentially arrive to your customers speedier. Because a fulfillment center is specifically designed to handle large quantities of products quickly and efficiently, it can often reduce the amount of time it takes to get products to customers by as much as 75%. This means that your customers will receive their orders quicker and be less likely to experience delays or delivery issues.
By consolidating order processing and fulfilling orders from multiple channels, fulfillment centers reduce overall order processing time by as much as 40% or more. This can help you stay ahead of your competition and maintain customer loyalty.
To Save Money
In addition to lower shipping costs, a fulfillment center can help you avoid the associated waste and environmental damage caused by shipping methods such as cross-border shipments.
To Increase brand visibility
By stocking products from various brands, a fulfillment center can help businesses build a strong brand identity. In addition, this infrastructure can help businesses increase online traffic and reach new customers.
To Increase Revenue
By reducing the number of packing, distribution, and final handling steps, fulfillment centers achieve greater throughput rates than traditional warehouses. Faster sales mean smaller overheads in terms of warehousing and handling.
