Top Ecommerce Fulfillment Services for your business

Whether you're thinking about starting an e-commerce business or have been selling products for a while, you've probably thought about warehousing, shipping and fulfillment.

Sure, making sales is the exciting part. But what happens after the order is placed? Somehow your product has to end up in the hands of customers.

 

What is eCommerce Fulfillment?

E-commerce fulfillment is the entire process of picking, packing and shipping products to customers. It includes maintaining inventory, locating products within storage, packaging products and managing delivery logistics.

3 Order Fulfillment Methods

1. You sell a product from a dropshipper who will fulfill orders for you.

2. Execute your own orders, either independently or with a team.

3. You partner with a logistics company that will handle your warehousing and fulfillment.

There are clear benefits to packing and shipping your own orders: it's flexible and cheap. For these reasons, startups and businesses that have unique e-commerce packaging needs often handle their own logistics.

And regardless of age or industry, any business struggling with cash flow would be better off handling things in-house. Sometimes you have more time to spend than money.

But if your business is growing quickly and you have the cash on hand to outsource, you may be interested in exploring third-party warehousing and fulfillment.

There are many logistics companies that will store your product and take care of packing and shipping your orders.

Working with logistics companies can be intimidating if you've never done it before. In this piece, we'll walk you through every step of the process.

 

Simplify your fulfillment strategy

Shopify's full-service fulfillment network guarantees fast, affordable shipping and keeps your brand the hero from checkout to delivery.

What is a fulfillment service?

A fulfillment service is a third-party warehouse that picks, packs, and ships your orders for you. It does this from the physical fulfillment center. Fulfillment services are great for businesses that don't want to deal with shipping or have outgrown their existing storage capacity to the point where they can no longer ship orders themselves.

There are many larger third-party fulfillment providers, such as Shopify Fulfillment Network, as well as smaller local options, such as Colorado Fulfillment Co. and the Go Sunship. If you're scaling quickly and want to optimize your fulfillment strategy, working with a provider that offers a centralized view of your data and smart inventory allocation across multiple warehouses will give you the most flexibility.

What does a fulfillment center do?

While each fulfillment center works slightly differently, they all accomplish the same thing: act as a command center for all of your order preparation and shipping needs. Fulfillment centers also double as warehouse spaces to store inventory, allowing you to hold product.

Some Warehouse fulfillment services providers have multiple fulfillment centers, allowing them to serve different geographic locations faster than if they had just one. This creates a scalable way for e-commerce companies to offer fast and affordable shipping to a diverse customer base.

How much do fulfillment services cost?

Fulfillment services are typically billed by the hour or per unit per pallet. Providers add the costs of receiving, storage, receiving and packing, shipping, packing or packaging, returns, custom packaging, gift services and setup. They then apply one-time (eg pickup, shipping) and recurring charges (eg storage).