We’re quickly approaching what, for the bulk of retailers, is the most important and most profitable time of year as a percentage of overall sales: the holiday season. This period features Thanksgiving/Black Friday at the end of November and, of course, the Christmas season. While sales are certainly predicted to increase for the vast majority of retailers, preparing for successful e-commerce fulfillment is one way to boost your holiday profits. Experts Predict Higher Than Normal Jump in E-Commerce Sales According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), overall retail sales are expected to increase from 2.5% to as much as 3.7%,...Boost Your E-Commerce This Holiday
We’re quickly approaching what, for the bulk of retailers, is the most important and most profitable time of year as a percentage of overall sales: the holiday season. This period features Thanksgiving/Black Friday at the end of November and, of course, the Christmas season. While sales are certainly predicted to increase for the vast majority of retailers, preparing for successful e-commerce fulfillment is one way to boost your holiday profits. Experts Predict Higher Than Normal Jump in E-Commerce Sales According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), overall retail sales are expected to increase from 2.5% to as much as 3.7%,...Your Options in E-commerce Fulfillment
Order fulfillment is the act of getting an order into the customer's hands. For e-commerce retailers, especially those that are purely online, fulfilling sales orders is one of the most important parts of your business. A company skilled in order fulfillment will stand out as they can get packages to customers with less time and fewer complications. Being unskilled only increases customer dissatisfaction and raises the chance they'll want a refund. In a sense, the quality of the order fulfillment can even rival the quality of the product itself. There are multiple forms of fulfillment options available to your business....
An Overview of Order Fulfillment
Generally speaking, order fulfillment refers to the process and steps involved in receiving, processing, and delivering product orders to customers. It is a form of logistics that takes place across every business, with some being more complicated than others. A waiter taking your order, the chef cooking the food, and another waiter delivering it is an example of a simple form of order fulfillment. For most companies, especially e-commerce ones, order fulfillment is a more involved process. In these instances, fulfillment logistics involve tracking and relaying information and goods over large distances. This creates some additional elements that exist beneath...Managing the Load of Bulk Mail
Direct mail marketing is still one of the most effective means of engaging consumers and leading them to take further action. Of the many benefits of direct mail, like converting targets, one aspect that some marketers see as an obstacle is cost. If you are correctly running your campaign strategy, there are many ways in which costs can be significantly reduced while still reaching a high volume of targets. One of the ways businesses can take advantage of mailing cost savings is by using standard mail, more formally known as bulk mail. Using bulk mail as opposed to first-class postage,...
Maximizing Inventory Management
Inventory management is the system you use to oversee the movement of products in and out of your business. For an e-commerce company, this mostly relates to the flow of products through your warehouse rather than a physical store, but the same principles apply. Numerous inventory management strategies exist that serve to track stock, manage invoices and orders, govern inventory-related accounting, and other elements. Here are some tips for maximizing the capabilities of your inventory management system. Approach From a Supply Standpoint Business owners can usually identify roughly how much inventory they have available. Not all can say how many...
The Importance of Improving Retail Operations Management
Here’s a fact that many retail companies already know or will soon figure out: the success of your order management and fulfillment process is a key to determining the success of your company. A bit bold? Not when you consider the complexity of omnichannel delivery paired with the expectations of customers in markets which are largely global. Getting an order from point A to point B seems as straightforward as you can get, but with outdated systems, a lack of transparency throughout the process, and an overall delivery operation that doesn’t utilize the tools and technology available to effectively track...
Key Points to Remember When Managing Seasonal Inventory
Seasonal inventory is a familiar task for many retailers. Having special items that only sell by season, by year, or even during a certain holiday, is a product fulfillment duty that is crucial to the overhead of any business. Whatever the case, the most important aspect to managing seasonal inventory is proper planning. That can be done in several ways, from identifying merchandise all the way to reordering. Marking Seasonal Merchandise It seems like such a simple step, and it really is. Marking your seasonal inventory doesn’t take much effort, but it goes a long way to ensuring ideal inventory...
10 Tips for Choosing an E-Commerce Fulfillment Provider for Your Business
Finding the right e-commerce fulfillment provider for your business is important—it could be the difference between growing a business to the next level and leaving it stagnant. Good e-commerce fulfillment can increase your sales, reduce your costs, and increase satisfaction for your customers. Here are the top 10 things to look for when choosing your e-commerce fulfillment provider: 1. Location: The location of an e-commerce fulfillment provider can have a big impact on your margins. The closer a provider is to your customers, the cheaper your shipping rates will likely be. For instance, if many of your customers are located in...
Different Options for Shipping from Your Online Store
One of the elements common to any e-commerce web site is situations when customers will place products in their virtual shopping cart but never follow through with the transaction. There are a multitude of reasons for this behavior, but one of the largest is because they felt the shipping and handling costs were too high. Shipping and handling costs can not only cause potential purchases to be abandoned, but they can leave customers disheartened and more likely to look elsewhere in the future. This is why a key part of any successful e-commerce logistics operation is an affordable freight shipping...
How to Improve the Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Supply Chain
One of the most complicated types of supply chains is those meant for pharmaceutical and/or medical device fulfillment. These complex products have highly-regulated quality controls, varied and precise lifecycles, numerous safety and security concerns, and warehousing needs, and feature a quickly increasing number of stock-keeping units (SKUs). Despite, or sometimes because of, these challenges, supply chains for healthcare fulfillment need to constantly work to improve their cost, speed, and accuracy or else risk getting left behind as their fields advance. Managing to create a properly integrated global supply chain is a multi-faceted effort that affects everything from strategy to fulfillment...
