Time is your most valuable commodity. It is just about the only thing you cannot buy. How you spend your time determines your productivity and, ultimately, your business’ profitability.
So, how much of your precious time do you or your people spend doing things that would be better, and more quickly handled by a 3PL?
How many hours, how many thousands of pounds, have you spent storing, sorting, packing and shipping goods when you could have been innovation, marketing, and just plain selling them? How much work could you have done to improve your profit margins if you hadn’t been moving actual units around, sending invoices, and processing payments and returns?Worse, customers are demanding more and more attention to order fulfilment and shipping. They demand rapid turn around and complete accuracy. They demand the best shipping rates and the fastest delivery times.
It is difficult to specialise in both your business and in order fulfilment
Luckily, you don’t have to. If you find that you are losing time and productivity with warehousing, shipping and other logistics matters, you may well need a fulfilment partner. Using a 3PL, or third party logistics partner provides two primary advantages.First, you can spend your time where it is needed most: growing your business. Improving your processes, increasing sales, and doing everything you got into business to do in the first place. This is a competitive time. Every minute you’re not pulling ahead, you’re falling farther behind.
Second, a good fulfilment house is a back-end specialist. They excel at it the same way you excel at the front end. A good 3PL can handle everything from stock warehousing, supply chain management, response handling, rework of products, pick and pack, hand finishing, enclosing, order fulfilment and distribution. Logistics is what they do, and they do it exceedingly well. Because they work with so many different sellers, they can run a full featured, large, modern facility and still save you money over doing your own order fulfilment.
We all know how tough the market is for ecommerce sellers today. For your business to become everything it has the potential to be, you need to be as efficient as possible. To do that, you need to find the right partners and work with them to meet your customers’ needs better than your competitors can. A good fulfilment house can make it all work for you.
