Free up your time to grow your business rather than pack your order. Picture this: your eCommerce business is booming and thanks to your efforts, you’re getting more customer orders than you can manage. When business was relatively modest, you managed your own fulfilment, finding whatever relevant item was in your in-house inventory and packing it carefully to ensure a delightful unboxing experience. Now, you have way more orders than you could possibly manage and you’re thinking about outsourcing your fulfilment.
Once you decide to get your fulfilment outsourced, you’ll notice that some of these specialists provide integrated order fulfilment for Shopify. But why is this important? And how exactly can it benefit your business? This is why we’ve written this blog, so you can understand all there is to know regarding this topic.
First things first, what is Shopify?
Most likely, you already have or are about to launch a Shopify store to sell products online. But for those who aren’t aware, the Shopify platform allows you to set up your online storefront how you want it with easy product organisation, order management as well as accepting online payments. It is a robust, fully hosted cloud-based solution to help you sell your products out to the world online.
Integrated order fulfilment for Shopify – the basics
When we talk about ‘integrated’ order fulfilment for Shopify, it means that Shopify can integrate seamlessly with a third-party fulfilment provider’s system to automate fulfilment and inventory management. You won’t have to worry about orders as this method allows you to maintain real-time visibility over your orders.
In some cases, multi-channel fulfilment is an option, so if you have several Shopify stores, they can also be integrated. You may also want to plug in your other online stores such as Amazon, eBay and Woo Commerce as well.
Why outsource?
In a lot of circumstances, companies will only think about outsourcing fulfilment as they scale up. But the problem here is that it can still leave them unsure about when to make the switch.
It can be hard to pinpoint that timeframe to move to a third party fulfilment centre, especially if the business is booming and you’re working in a high intensity, fast-paced environment. With this, here are some clear signs indicating that it’s time to outsource order fulfilment for Shopify.
Fluctuating sales
If your online orders come irregularly or you’re mostly earning during peak times (like during Christmas or Black Friday) outsourcing will always be the best solution. Why? Because it is
simply not viable to be manually fulfiling orders and managing staff. If you’re stuck all day in a warehouse management software going through product inventory, this takes a great amount of time and can reduce your overall productivity.
Lack of framework/infrastructure
As we’ve previously mentioned, rapid business growth can result in Shopify merchants outgrowing their current infrastructure before being able to adjust. As these issues build up over time, it can add a lot of stress and slow down online retail growth. Having a third-party handle your order fulfilment for Shopify is essential, as it takes away these stressors, allowing you to focus your resources on more important areas of the business. Merchants are, therefore, better equipped to adapt and are more agile in a competitive marketplace (depending on the industry of course).
Not enough hours in a day
A lack of infrastructure and fluctuating sales can leave you with not enough hours in a day to deal with your business needs. And sometimes, you may not even have enough staff to support your business. As you lead your Shopify store, it is important to have the time to be able to grow and develop your marketing strategies to enhance your brand.
If your day is saturated with tracking information about your orders, manually fulfilling stock, monitoring inventory levels or even just picking and packing – you won’t have the time to achieve your business goals.
Shopify fulfilment with TSP
At The Storage Place, we pride ourselves as leading specialists when it comes to ordering fulfilment for Shopify. Getting started with us is easy, so why not contact us? We’re always happy to provide you with a reasonable quote, suitable to all of your requirements. It’s as simple as that.
Alternatively, you can check out our blog, for the latest industry (and company) news and insights.
