If you’re inventorying products for your eCommerce site, finding a good solution to ship and store your products can always be a challenge. Most stock items yourself and spend a lot of time “touching” their products. So what is “play” and how does it cost you money? The Typical Scenario You bring in goods from overseas and they are taken off a ship and trucked to your location. You (the receiver) unload them and move them to a warehouse. You’ll usually spend some time surveying your inventory and organizing it so you can pick your items and ship them effectively. Sometimes if the packaging is not complete, you may need to repackage or repackage items for final shipment. This is how the “touch” is applied

• Download it from the truck, you have to do this
• in the store
• Organization in the warehouse.
• Possible repackaging
• Final selection for shipment to the customer who ordered it

This is five times the item is touched, moved, processed, or handled. If you’re smart, an employee will most likely do this job, which means you pay the employee and manage the process. The management of items that come from the port and arrive at your warehouse, which is a separate discussion, is not included here. The cost of the warehouse is also not included in the cost at this particular point.
Compliance So how do you touch your items less and spend less money? Fulfillment is a different way of looking at the physical process of moving your items and touching them less. Here’s a breakdown of the things you DON’T do, but someone else still does.

• Items unloaded from the ship, transported by truck to the warehouse near the port
• Shipping container disassembled (unloaded) and put on pallets
• Items tagged and shipped to your customers when they are ordered.

So how do you save money? Most of the money you save is over time. Most online business owners today are sucked into a vortex of time-wasting activities, not realizing how much time they spend working “on” their business when they should be working “on” their business. Here’s a sample breakdown of how the fulfillment process can save you money. Substitute your own amounts of money in the examples.

• Unloading of the truck and transfer to the warehouse. Most likely a full day’s job plus hiring or employing some help. In general, you can estimate 3 people to unload the typical twenty foot container. (the reason you need help is that typical truck providers allow you two hours to unload, you can’t unload all of this in just two hours)
• You will need a forklift and pallet jack unless you have a loading dock. (most don’t)
• Items should be stacked in a particular order according to stock numbers to keep inventory organized. This can take a fair amount of time depending on what you’re getting. We personally remove all items from the truck and spread it out before moving it inside. When foreign manufacturers load their containers, they don’t do it in any particular order, so things can be mixed and matched to load the maximum volume in the container.
• Product may need to be repackaged or recombined for final product assembly.
• The product must then be “picked” or selected, when the customer orders it. The shipping label, packing slips are printed and then somehow make their way to UPS or Fed Ex for shipment. All of this takes time. If you hire someone or employ someone, this can mean many hours of your job duties.

time management

• So when your product is shipped from overseas, you basically don’t touch or handle it when you use fulfillment. You pay a monthly fee per pallet that covers storage and a freight charge for shipping the product. Most fulfillment companies ship a lot of packages and are willing to pass some of the savings on to you.
• So basically you don’t handle your product at all from the time it leaves the manufacturer to the time it reaches the customer. This in itself is much better for most business owners in the long run.
• You have to individually process your own numbers to see if it will work for you. You should also keep in mind that your product must be a complete unit for the fulfillment scenario to work best. If you have to combine products or do any kind of assembly, it takes away the profit scenario and increases costs.
• Typical storage charges can range from $8 to $20 per pallet, depending on where they are stored.

shipping costs Another factor is shipping costs. You don’t want to pay full retail shipping to your fulfillment company, that’s just wrong. A 20% discount for new customers is not unheard of with decent shipping volume. If you have a distribution center located in the center of the country, you can ship to the West or East Coast at reasonable costs. If your center is on either of the two coasts, you have higher costs when sending to the opposite coast. For example, if your fulfillment is in California and you ship to New York, then it will cost more to ship a box than to Arizona. Having a centrally located office is a good advantage over time. Summary I have personally made the two types of shipment discussed in this article. I may have switched to compliance sooner, had I known some of the details discussed here. Depending on the type of eCommerce store you have, it may be necessary to use a combination of both types. Larger operations use more than one fulfillment center to handle shipments. They usually have one on each coast to take advantage of shipping cost savings. Finding the right system for you takes a bit of homework and brainstorming. This is a small price to pay for not being held hostage to all the details of shipping your product to your customer.