Electronic or digital commerce nowadays have become new promising businesses along with the development of technology. This phenomenon emerges positive effects on business in general because there are many new business schemes born from digital commerce.
Warehouse and fulfillment are one of them, new business opportunities for those who are interested in digital commerce. In this article, we will discuss more about warehousing and fulfillment in electronic or digital commerce.
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Warehouse
When we talk about warehouses, we often think about big buildings for storing a lot of products, goods and materials. In the matter of electronic commerce, a warehouse is a building to store the seller’s products until they’re sold. Some sellers own their warehouse, but a lot of sellers rent the warehouse from other businessmen who own and provide warehouse services for rent.
Warehouse rental model is a common practice in commerce because it could help sellers who don’t have the ability or capital to buy their own warehouse. Besides that, sellers could save production, storage and distribution costs, also they could save their time because they don’t need to handle the product’s storage management.
The warehouse rental mechanism is not as complicated as we thought. The sellers only need to pay several settlement prices to the warehouse services owner, then the warehouse services management will handle the seller’s product. For example, the seller wants to rent space at certain warehouse services, so they must pay the rental for a minimum one-year period.
Once they have a deal, the seller can send their products to warehouse management along with the storing and product’s caring instructions. Then the management will handle the products, storing them in proper space and proper care. Warehouse buildings also have proper standards in the matter of building safety, room temperature, space allocation and standardized equipment to guarantee the products that store in it. The employee also comes from professionals to ensure that the seller’s product is always in good condition.
Fulfillment
In digital commerce, we are also familiar with the fulfillment services. These services often accompany warehouse services, so they call them the term of warehouse and fulfillment. The term fulfillment refers to all processes from storing, packaging and delivering products to customers.
These processes are usually done by the fulfillment services team in certain warehouses that are rented by the sellers. Fulfillment services could help the sellers manage their product from storage to distribution, so the sellers could save more time and focus on business development.
Stages of the Fulfillment Process
The fulfillment services involve several stages from storage to product delivery. The first stage is storage and product inventory. In this stage, sellers send their products to fulfillment services along with care and store instructions. Then the fulfillment services will store the products with proper care and also make product inventory, so they can track how many products are sold later.
The product will be stored at warehouses that are owned by the services; therefore, we often call them warehouse and fulfillment. The next stage is ordering receipts from the customer who buys the product through an online marketplace. Once the order is received, the services will continue to order picking and packaging. This process is performed carefully by a team to minimize the order error.
When packaging is done, the process is continued to label and prepare the product into the shipping process. Shipping and delivery processes could be done by fulfillment services itself or collaborating with other shipping services. After the customer received the product, fulfillment services provide a customer help center for return or exchange process if the product broke or maybe experienced wrong delivery.
Same as warehouse services, fulfillment services also charge some fee to sellers who use their services, these fees often include warehouse storage also fulfillment services. The sellers could choose the charge scheme that they need in their commerce business.
Empowering Sellers in the E-Commerce Era
Warehouse and fulfillment services have become a new promising business along with digital or electronic commerce emerging. Before electronic commerce era, sellers must have their own product, proper storing space and manage the fulfillment by themselves. But, in the electronic commerce era, anyone can become a seller even when they don’t have their own product and own warehouse, they could use dropship system and get benefit from fulfillment services.
In Closing
The sellers could grow their own business even without owning warehouse or transportation vehicle. Shipazon is one of fulfilment services provider strategically located between Port of Tacoma and Port of Seattle. Our warehousing and fulfillment services were established in 2015 and located at Kent, WA. Our services include comprehensive warehousing like e-commerce and traditional business fulfilment, transloading and cross-docking.
Other services from us include transportation such as drayage service and over the road. We provide standardized warehousing and fulfilment services with proper and spacious storage rooms. We also provide a professional team to handle the fulfillment services, so the sellers don’t need to worry about storing, packaging and delivering the order.