Order Fulfilment

Order fulfilment is the part of your online store transaction where the product that your customer has purchased is picked off the warehouse shelf, safely packed in a box or satchel, and then shipped out to the customer who has ordered it. Order fulfilment sounds deceptively simple and may also be referred to as eCommerce logistics . Although the process from start to finish is an easy one to follow, getting it right is not quite so easy or cost effective over the long term. Ideally, you want to be receiving a lot of customer orders but as soon as you start receiving a high volume of orders, you need a more efficient method for fulfilling and shipping them.

In the early days of a new online store, most business creators take responsibility for their own order fulfilment with simple pick and pack procedures that follow logical supply chain principles. Sometimes this will mean a few late nights ensuring that customer orders get out on time, but most of the time the pick, pack and ship process is small enough that business creators and their friends and immediate family can help out. When an eCommerce business begins to grow, however, the demands on that supply chain system also begin to grow.

As a business creator, you have conceived and established your online business. You have had to use enormous will power, persuasive power, creative power, all just to get up and running. e-business is a competitive market, so you have no doubt had to find innovative and inventive ways to attract and retain your customer base. That might have been launching a low cost internet advertising campaign or seeking out local relationships with other businesses operating in and around your area. Whatever it was, though, it took some serious time and brain power.

Now that your business is doing well, and you are getting more and more customer orders, your order management system is no longer enough. You simply don’t have the time to dedicate to your order processing that you used to have. You need to start concentrating on building your business and maintaining that growth. That’s when it’s time to seek out a new eCommerce order fulfillment plan and that’s where we can help.

We are fulfillment service professionals. As a third party logistics provider, we manage your fulfillment operations from the time your online orders are placed through your website to when they arrive at your customer’s door. We offer flexible warehousing and order fulfilment services that allow you to accurate price your inventory and the costs of managing it.

As a fulfillment company, we can concentrate on our warehouse management and develop inventory management systems that help to reduce costs and increase efficiency. As the owner and creator of an online store, your focus and attention should be on building and creating. You should be taking note of the products that work and which that don’t. You should be focusing your attention into the part of the business that you love: sales and developing new products. Customer order fulfillment, while satisfying, is not why you are an entrepreneur. We understand that. Because providing efficient order management and order fulfillment is why we got started. That’s the part of the business that we love, and we have developed a successful fulfillment company which continues to offer more and more efficient ways for small and medium sized businesses like yours to cut costs and increase efficiency.

As with all things, when you bulk buy you save money and our warehousing and order fulfilment services are a classic example of why that principle works.

For example, in order to rent or purchase enough space for all of your stock and inventory, for your picking and packing staff and your product development space, you are looking at quite expensive overheads, particularly if your business operates in a high-density city in Australia like Sydney. Sydney warehouse prices are very high. Your pricing model could be completely unrealistic if you were trying to recoup your overhead costs on the sale of your products. And, that doesn’t even include your own time and energy that you’re putting into the business, the cost of your management software or the cost of shipping individual orders.

A 3PL specialist like Invenco, however, already has access to a lot of warehousing space. That space includes plenty of shelves for stock and for the key steps in the order fulfillment process like picking and packing and shipping. When you engage Invenco, you pay for only what your business needs. So your part of our distribution centre may only be 3 metres by 3 metres and that’s all you will have to pay for. This helps you to not ony reduce overhead costs, but to also more accurately price your products and actually recoup your warehousing and distribution costs efficiently.

You also maintain clear and real time visibility on your current stock. Your customers access real stock levels when they shop online at your store. When they have filled their online shopping cart and checked out, that becomes an order awaiting fulfilment on our picking queues automatically. We fulfil that order using our management software and that order is then shipped direct to your customer.

To find out how Invenco can assist you with reducing your warehousing and order fulfillment costs and increasing your order fulfillment capacity, chat with a consultant today. We can take you through exactly what our service includes, how much you are looking to pay for safe and secure warehousing space, and how soon you can on-board your business.