5 Expert Ways to Build a Better Business With Fulfillment & Shipping Services
You understand the benefits of outsourcing fulfillment & shipping to an established and highly-rated third party. Your business can decrease processing times, which increases the number of orders sent out each day. With less to do onsite, you free up employees to provide better customer service. The number of order errors decreases, as a company such as Complete Mailing & Printing works with the latest technology to ensure order accuracy. Finally, a reduction in operating costs combined with generating more revenue improves your bottom line.
Understanding the benefits of outsourcing fulfillment & shipping is one thing. It is quite another thing to implement strategies to reap the financial rewards of those benefits. Let’s take a look at five expert ways to build a better business with fulfillment and shipping services.
Warehouse
The warehouse model for fulfillment and shipping has been around as long as motorized vehicles. However, Amazon defined the long-term warehousing model by handling orders that help customers avoid paying costly fees. Fulfillment and shipping services provided by a third party can include long-term warehousing, which saves your company money, especially if it sells high-end products such as furniture and appliances.
Retail
One of the most common ways to build a better business with fulfillment and shipping services involves going through traditional retail outlets like Target and Walmart. Even the COVID pandemic could not destroy the traditional sales channel for businesses operating across every niche. Retail giants also provide other services, such as digital printing services and custom mailing services. A company such as Complete & Printing enforces strict shipping guidelines to ensure your products arrive at retail outlets on time and in the correct quantity.
eCommerce
When a consumer orders a product online, the consumer receives an estimated date of arrival. The estimated date of arrival is often accurate down to the day and even the time. Due to the explosive growth of online sales, many businesses rely on fulfillment and shipping services to deliver products in a timely manner. A shopping cart created online immediately processes a customer’s order by engaging with a warehouse management system (WMS). The WMS then manages the distribution of the product through every delivery point.
Multi-Channel
By working with a fulfillment and shipping business, you can access every sales channel that is available to consumers. Your business meets product demand through traditional channels like retail, as well as more cutting-edge sales channels like a subscription service. The ability to broaden your sales options helps your company grow sales by reaching consumers that you otherwise would not attract.
Subscription
This sales strategy also goes by the name of auto shipping service. Subscription box fulfillment ships out products on a regular schedule. For example, the subscription fulfillment and shipping model is how the Dollar Shave Club sends razors to signed-up customers once a month. Businesses that handle this type of fulfillment and shipping model must be experts at processing batch shipping orders.
Reclaim Valuable Employee Time With Fulfillment & Shipping Services
Did you know that by outsourcing your fulfillment & shipping responsibilities, you help your employees reclaim valuable time? A business like Complete Mailing and Printing takes care of time-consuming fulfillment & shipping tasks, such as resolving shipping issues and confirming the accuracy of every product order. This allows your employees to work on other business-related tasks, which means you get more out of your team in less time. Higher productivity translates into an improved bottom line.
Reclaiming valuable employee time with fulfillment & shipping is just one of several benefits delivered when you partner with Complete Mailing & Printing. Here are a few other benefits of outsourcing your fulfillment & shipping responsibilities.
Increase Sales
What do you do with all the time reclaimed by your team? The first item on your to-do list should be to focus on increasing sales. Outsourcing fulfillment & shipping to a highly-rated business such as Complete Mailing & Printing gives your employees more time to implement sales growth initiatives like answering customer questions and running proven digital marketing campaigns. Your staff also can spend the time required explaining the benefits and features of your products to prospective customers.
Reduce Costs
Outsourcing fulfillment & shipping adds another expense to your profit and loss statement. However, by outsourcing fulfillment & shipping, your business saves money in the long run. Your team does not have to address costly shipping delays. Your business is not on the financial hook for shipping mistakes and the costs associated with paying for damaged products. At Complete Mailing & Printing, we know where the closest warehouses are located to reduce shipping times, and thus, reduce the cost of shipping.
No More Errors
What typically happens when overwhelmed employees handle fulfillment & shipping responsibilities? The answer is your business has to deal with a growing number of errors, especially when it involves shipping the wrong products. At Complete Mailing & Printing, we have established a system that ensures every one of your customers receives the products that they ordered. Our multi-step product confirmation process checks and double-checks the accuracy of each order placed by your customers.
Faster Product Processing Times
Does your business have to deal with long product processing times because your employees have too much on their plates? Instead of allocating labor resources to packing and shipping your product, you partner with the team at Complete Mailing & Printing to deliver much faster product processing times. We incorporate the most advanced product tracking system into our business model to speed up processing times dramatically.
Much Improved Customer Service
You understand one of the most important facts that determines the success of your business: Twenty percent of your customers generate 80 percent of your revenue. In other words, your loyal customers take up the largest slice of the revenue pie. How do you grow your loyal customer base, and in the process, also grow sales? The answer is to improve customer service by outsourcing fulfillment & shipping responsibilities.
Research shows that American businesses lose more than $60 billion in revenue each year due to poor customer service.
An Expert Fulfillment & Shipping Service Lets You Focus On Sales
Business owners and operators could use a few extra hours to increase the 24-hour day. Responsibilities such as recruiting, hiring, and training employees take a huge chunk out of every workday. Then you have scheduling employees, ordering products, and meeting with inspectors, and there is barely enough time to review the books to see if your business has increased sales over the past week.
With your days fully booked, you do not have any time left over for fulfillment and shipping. At Complete Mailing & Printing, we have a solution to your busy day woes that gives you much more time to spend on increasing sales. It’s called outsourcing your fulfillment and shipping responsibilities.
As a business owner or operator, you understand the importance of assigning tasks, which gives you more time to focus on other responsibilities. Delegating fulfillment and shipping to a highly-rated service provider such as Complete Mailing and Shipping gives you more time to increase sales for several reasons.
Improved Customer Service
The old saying still has plenty of merit: Twenty percent of your customers generate 80 percent of your sales. Although the percentages are not etched in stone, the saying means that developing a loyal customer base is the most effective way to grow sales. How do you develop a growing loyal customer base? The answer is by providing superior customer service, and outsourcing fulfillment and shipping represents the most effective strategy to accomplish your customer service goals.
Let’s say a customer walks into your store and you are the one to greet the customer. All of a sudden, you receive a text message that a glitch has developed during the shipping process to another customer. The customer standing in front of you has to wait until you resolve the shipping glitch, but not if you outsource fulfillment and shipping to a proven business like Complete Mailing & Shipping.
No More Order Errors
Customer service comes in many forms, and we tend to focus on interacting with customers in a prompt and friendly manner as customer service priority number one. However, the nuts and bolts of customer service is getting orders correct. Outsourcing fulfillment and shipping helps your business eliminate order errors.
A shipping and fulfillment service closely monitors every order to ensure your customers receive the right products, with the correct specifications. Nothing rattles the cage of a customer more than paying for an incorrect product. Get it right by hiring an expert fulfillment and shipping service.
Shorten Processing Times
A fulfillment and shipping service also ensures every product shipped arrives at the right time. At Complete Mailing & Printing, we use the most advanced logistics software to keep track of every product processed by our team. If we notice a delay in shipping, we first determine the cause of the delay and then we communicate the status of the product to your customer. Most consumers understand the occasional product delay, but they do not tolerate poor communication.
Complete Mailing & Printing keeps your customers informed concerning the status of their products.
Grow Your Top and Bottom Lines
You work too hard to sell the finest products, only to have the products not arrive on time to your customers, or worse, not arrive at all. The relationship between sales and profits is well-understood by business owners and operators. Increase sales and make more money for your business by outsourcing your fulfillment and shipping responsibilities.
Free Up Office Resources using Qualified Fulfillment & Shipping Service
As the owner or manager of a business, one of your most important goals is to get the most out of your resources. Optimizing what you have increases productivity, which typically fattens the bottom line of a business. However, devising ways to optimize resources can be difficult to do, especially for small business owners and operators who operate on razor-thin budgets. What if we told you that your business can free up resources by using a qualified fulfillment and shipping service?
At Complete Mailing and Printing, we offer fulfillment and shipping services that allow our partners to devote tight financial resources to other business objectives. Instead of using valuable labor resources on fulfillment and shipping, you can assign workers to other projects. You also do not have to invest in the materials required to complete fulfillment and shipping orders. If your business devotes warehouse space to fulfillment and shipping orders, you can free up the valuable dock space for other reasons.
Free Up Office Resources
Handling fulfillment and shipping orders requires a substantial investment in back-office resources. Just the investment required in logistical software can set a small business back tens of thousands of dollars. By outsourcing fulfillment and shipping, your business can reallocate the tight resources used for back-office technology to other areas of your operation. You no longer need to install computer programs that track inventory in real-time. Your business also does not have to install communication tools to stay in touch with customers concerning the status of their orders.
What Are the Other Benefits of Outsourcing Fulfillment and Shipping?
Freeing up office resources is just one of many benefits of outsourcing fulfillment and shipping. As a business owner or operator, you also free up more of your time to concentrate on other business matters. You get much more time to focus on increasing sales, such as attracting new customers and motivating loyal customers to buy more of your products and services. More time also allows business owners and operators to discover strategies to reduce costs, which includes doing a better job of monitoring the supply chain and carefully vetting potential distributors of your products.
Outside of freeing up office resources, no other benefit of outsourcing fulfillment and shipping is more valuable than building trust with your customers. A company that provides superior fulfillment and shipping services such as Complete Mailing and Printing ensures your customers receive the right products at the times designated on their orders. A fulfillment and shipping service also offers the transparency required to build trust with your customers. According to several studies, more than 50 percent of consumers do not buy again from a business that does not deliver fulfillment and shipping transparency.
How to Choose the Right Fulfillment and Shipping Partner
Now that you know why you should outsource fulfillment and shipping, how do you find the right partner to help you reap the many benefits? Start by looking for an experienced partner, preferably one that specializes in fulfilling and shipping orders of the products you have in stock. Reading online reviews is helpful as well. Tour the facilities of potential partners on your shortlist to confirm they meet technological and physical space criteria. The fulfillment and shipping company that you hire must have installed the most advanced logistical technology, as well as have enough space to store your products.