If you’re a business owner that deals with e-commerce, then you have to fulfill orders from your customers. Over time, companies should grow and expand which means additional employees, more space, and so on. As your business is steadily growing, you might find it hard to fulfill customer’s orders. In order to maintain the steady growth of your business, you should find a solution for this aspect of your business. Usually, this means outsourcing time-consuming logistic processes and services. How to do this? You should start by finding shipping and logistic companies that will contribute to the growth of your company. However, when are 3PL’s necessary to hire? Find out if your company needs them.
Are 3PL’s necessary to hire?
First of all, what is 3PL’s? Third-party logistics refers to the outsourcing of e-commerce logistics to a separate party. This includes inventory management, warehouse, and fulfillment. These companies have started to become extremely popular during the 70s and 80s. How do most logistics companies in Dammam function? So, when you work with a 3PL company, this is how the entire process should look like.
- Receiving – 3PL’s Cannot ship orders without inventory. They receive this inventory in their warehouse and story there for some time. Every single company has its own processes and capacity for receiving and storing items.
- Warehousing – Once they receive the inventory, they are stored in one of the warehouses.
- Picking – The company picks items that your customers have ordered.
- Packing – They also take care of the packing.
- Shipping – they ship out the order.
- Returns – many offer return processing services.
Valuable services to use
Beyond what was mentioned above, and there are three valuable services that every 3PL offers. The first one would be inventory management. This means that this company allows you to sync inventory with your online store. Then, you can also see real-time inventory and you can reorder inventory to prevent any stockouts. You can check the quantity and items sold each day. In addition to this, these companies should offer two-day shipping. As you might know, customers expect fast and affordable shipping. For this reason, if you have a two-day shipping policy, you will attract more customers. It will also help you to trim shipping and delivery costs. Lastly, you can choose the option called distributed inventory. This means that the fulfillment centers closest to your customer will ship out their order. However, this is usually only affordable for companies with a high volume of shipments.
Are 3PL’s necessary to hire and what are the benefits?
There are other benefits of working with a 3PL company. First of all, it saves money and time. When you work with this type of company, you will not have to buy or rent the warehouse, think about logistics operation, labor, technology, and everything else related two in-house fulfillment. Then, you will work with industry experts. If you are not well familiar with every single detail of shipping a logistics, you can easily make a mistake. On the other hand, these companies are experts in this area so they will know how to handle everything. Lastly, you can easily expand your reach. You can expand your company globally instead of keeping it locally based. However, you should be careful when hiring one. There are certain tactics fraudulent 3PL companies use in order to attract their customers. Do not let them trick you.
Who should use third-party logistics providers?
How to know if you should use third-party logistic providers? There are certain types of online stores and businesses that should use outsource fulfillment. The first one would be if you are shipping over 100 orders per month. When you find it too difficult to keep up with your orders, you should find help. Asking your friends and family to help you pack is no longer enough to meet demand. In addition to this, you are slowly but steadily running out of space to store inventory. If you are using your home as storage space, soon your garage or living room will not be able to hold all the items. For this reason, you will need a more efficient way of storing your inventory. Lastly, if you want to offer a free two-day shipping option, you should use 3B L companies.
Are 3PL’s necessary to hire and signs that indicate it is?
Here are six signs that it is time to hire a 3PL company.
- Your costs are increasing steadily – if you hire 3P L companies, you will save time and money.
- You are overwhelmed with work – you alone or even with help from your friends and family cannot handle to fulfill all demands.
- Customers are complaining more and more – you should never let customers’ complaints pile up. They usually start to complain if you are slow to ship things out.
- Your inventory is in a bad state – this means low inventory accuracy, operational and efficiencies, poor visibility, obsolete items, and so on.
- You are expanding your company to a new region – and you do not know where to start.
- You need to reduce risks and costs – managing a warehouse can be extremely expensive if you don’t not know how to do it properly.
What to do?
When are 3PL’s necessary to hire? As you can see, if you cannot longer handle fulfilling goal demands by yourself, you need to find help. This does not mean asking your friends and family to help you. Just on contrary, you need professionals to help you with this problem. Before you contact one such company, you should figure out your pain points and outline your current state and desired future state of your company. then together with a 3PL company, you should make a plan. Make sure to verify both their experience and legitimacy before you hire them. Once you find a suitable company for your business, you should be able to expand your business even more and fulfill all the orders and demands from your customers.
