Ecommerce order fulfillment. Viable?

[Jesseemia]

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LucasArthur, post: 243402, member: 34537 wrote:

and may i add, outsourcing and as a solo entrepreneur, this word called ‘outsourcing’ can sometimes be difficult as the ‘letting go’ and trusting someone else with your baby can be hard to boot… As Mike inferred above, its important to ensure both parties are a good fit for each other..

On that, if you can’t feel that the relationship will blossom or that you cant rely on your partner (3pl or other) becoming a valuable extension of your business – its best to look elsewhere.

I do Agree with you.
It’s hard to trust another person or business extension as it feels like
‘How can they do as good as job as me?’
This is something that we realise to the start ups that we work with. Its a challenge to know if the people they are working with is going to be good enough to trust them on each fulfilment and inventory management count and so forth.

As a start up ourselves, it makes complete sense, but I do believe that if we can show this level of trust to people then it’s a win win for everyone.

[Jesseemia]

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Calcul8or, post: 246223, member: 29970 wrote:

Great discussion! And it would be very interesting to know what the “state of play” is now, 5 years after the original post.

Have many fulfillment businesses been set up to meet the obvious demand? If not, why not?

Integrating the WMS to individual platforms clients use to sell their goods on might be a challenge, but not insurmountable.

Given that larger FMCG organisations use EDI systems for all their inventory replenishment, a similar setup could be created to handle order processing.

Is the situation better these days as far as the availability of affordable fulfilment services go, than they used to be?

Calcul8or I would say that it is building towards it, there is a growing influx of businesses that are coming to the market and getting ready to help support the build up of services of smaller start ups and giving them the best chance at success.

We started http://www.keepspace.com.au to help ecommerce start ups and small business in this space so that they can have the opportunity of a high developed software system with physical warehouse presence without the jargon blocking them from achieving online sales and sales deliveries across Australia.

There are others who have caught on this and it really is just about who will give the best customer service experince and willing to go the extra mile in API intergration, customer support and operational processes.

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