More Than a Roof Overhead
As you’ve probably realized over the course of your product fulfillment travels, there are a lot of things involved in offering great product fulfillment services to today’s clients. Everything from printing services to brochure design to online promotions—there are a ton of services out there. It’s simple enough, though; you just need to decide which of these quality services you want to offer your clients, right?
Well, then there’s the warehousing thing.
A lot of product fulfillment pros look at the provision of warehousing services to the public as a walk in the park. The assumption about warehousing is that you just have to keep products and stock for other product fulfillment pros underneath a roof, turn a key in a lock, and bill them for the expense. It sounds so simple.
But there really is more to it than that. More care and mechanisms need to be at work if today’s product fulfillment pros are serious about properly offering warehousing solutions to other product fulfillment pros or clients needing the most basic warehousing solutions. There are clients out there with high quantities of stock; these clients need to know that their stock is being cared for following certain specifications, and they need a feeling of security that they—hopefully—can’t get elsewhere.
Once this is all understood, today’s product fulfillment pro can confidently offer product fulfillment services. Having a checklist of items that are necessary to offer to clients helps.
Fully Integrated
Warehousing and storage in product fulfillment is a fully integrated operation. You have to have everything on hand for the clients who want to keep their stock with you—this requires thinking about all angles of this one operation.
At the top of this list, you need good warehousing facilities—some place that is big and that can hold a lot of client product in separate, private units. Once you’ve scouted out the right locations, you have to set up “lock down” environments in these warehousing facilities—some sort of security system has to be in place, complete with cameras, entrance keys, and client registry services. Finally, it never hurts to offer specialty warehousing and storage amenities to clients. Temperature control and varied unit size offerings are among the extra special things you can offer clients when warehousing for them.
Warehousing and product fulfillment are, in a sense, two separate jobs, so it’s best to start small when venturing into warehousing. If you’re a rookie to offering warehousing services to clients in product fulfillment, you may wish to test the waters a bit with a smaller warehousing operation before graduating to bigger, perhaps multi-location facilities for product fulfillment warehousing. It’s a bit of a baby-steps approach, but your business can grow with time and you can soon find yourself in demand when you’ve conquered the smaller warehousing and fulfillment jobs first.
Offering More
Once you’ve mastered the smaller warehousing and fulfillment jobs, you might want to build a bigger enterprise as you go along if warehousing is something for which you have a real talent. You can offer locker storage near shipping areas such as dockyards or trucking depots. You can provide consultation on international shipping. As well, if you have some previous knowledge in product fulfillment with shipping or product delivery, you can offer these as extra services in addition to the warehousing and storage. Your product fulfillment clients will likely appreciate the convenience of having easy access to their products and being able to get them out quickly.
Warehousing in product fulfillment is really about offering high-quality service and offering more to your clients than your competitors. If you can give clients what they really need in terms of peace of mind for their product warehousing, they can rest assured that their goods are in a safe place. This reassurance is what your clients need, and they will be willing to compensate you for it in the long run.
Need solutions to your product fulfillment problems? APS Fulfillment, Inc has the knowledge and services to make your direct mail and product fulfillment ventures more successful. Contact APS Fulfillment, Inc by e-mail at [email protected], visit its web site at www.apsfulfillment.com, or call (954) 582-7450.