If you have an ecommerce store, you know how complicated it is to personally manage the inventory and distribution of your products, while ensuring fast and precise shipments. If packing orders and running to the post office every day to keep up with the growing volume of orders has become unsustainable, it is time to reach out to an ecommerce fulfillment service.
What is a fulfillment centre?
People often wonder what the difference is between a warehouse and a fulfillment center. Let’s clarify it: the warehouse is an area where you can keep your products until they are shipped. Whereas all logistics, inventory management, order processing, picking and packing, delivery options, and shipping processes are handled by someone else (or maybe you!).
A fulfillment center, on the other hand, in addition to managing the warehouse, plays a key role especially in ecommerce shipments because it takes care of all the phases of the order fulfillment process: from checking the supply chain, incoming orders, to the shipping and returns.
This takes the major burden of packing supplies and ordering products off the business’ shoulders, as well as the stress of keeping track of units and queues to ship packages. Focusing on marketing and growing your business, instead of going crazy to fulfill orders, benefits all online stores, allowing them to be more strategic and less operational.
Relying on a 3Pl fulfillment center allows you to always be competitive in parcel shipments and order management, to keep prices low and guarantee fast deliveries but also to avoid unpleasant surprises deriving from items being out of stock.
In the light of these observations, it is easy to identify some typical behaviors of online buyers. In fact, by analyzing the habits of our customers, we can also understand how to implement our services, avoiding abandoned carts, unsatisfied customers and bad reviews.
Abandoned carts: the two main reasons and solutions
By now we know that online shopping has made customers more demanding. Abandoned shopping carts are increasingly frequent. Research by the Baymard Institute shows that 69.82% of online shopping carts are abandoned without ever completing a purchase. This means that for every 10 users who add an item to their cart, 7 of them leave at checkout. Furthermore, a quarter of them buy the same product later from a competitor. Online stores lose billions in revenue every year due to this behavior. The good news is almost all abandoned carts can be avoided if you use a fulfillment center that is right for your business. Let’s discover together the two main reasons that make your potential customers abandon the cart and how to solve them by adopting some simple strategies.
1. Delivery times longer than expected
Among the reasons that make people abandon their cart, we have delivery speed. Did you know that 66% of users abandon their cart if the delivery time is too long? Truth is that, with the popularity of online shopping increasing, the desire to buy an item rises and dies in seconds. If you want someone to buy from you, you must be able to satisfy that desire immediately, by adopting a reliable shipping service that guarantees fast shipments, taking advantage of the seconds during which the person browsing your site is willing to buy your product.
2. Lack of transparency
Many e-commerce sites do not immediately show the actual shipping times, especially in case of international shipments. Always remember that the average user of your online store has expectations that will most likely be disappointed if you are not transparent. In fact, people expect fast shipments, traceability and delivery within a maximum of 2 days. Clarity needs to be the foundation of your business if you want to convert your store visitors into real buyers.
How to speed up deliveries?
If you haven’t outsourced your tasks yet, relying on an order fulfillment center, your processes will inevitably be slower, you will be less transparent, you will have an increased margin for error and you will be less efficient in operations.
The support of an outsourcing model like eLogy’s means automating all the fulfillment processes necessary for your online store in the digital age: from a single platform you can view the various logistics services, such storage, order collection, packaging, labeling, shipping and tracking packages. You will have strategically located warehouses at your disposal and therefore you will no longer have to ship at high costs from a single location. You will finally be able to highlight clear and fast delivery options on your site, including shipping within 24/48 hours. From the platform you can easily check orders, shipments and stocks, availability of goods, products for up-sell and cross-sell, bundles, offers and promotions, lead management, abandoned carts and customer service. Finally, we provide you with real-time data, reports and analytics regarding every aspect of your ecommerce, allowing you to keep track of everything, always.
Advice
In terms of the success of an e-commerce business, time is money but the to-do list is always endless. This is why it is important to rely on a fulfillment center supported by a technology capable of offering impeccable solutions and services, leaving you with the physical and mental energy to concentrate on your expansion.
