Is Self-Fulfillment Enough for Your Ecommerce Business

If you run an ecommerce business, you have a lot of responsibilities. And the bigger your business is, the more responsibilities you need to focus on, especially when you do the business by yourself.

With the bigger responsibilities you hold, you need to push yourself and scatter all your focus to all of them, and as a result, your performance will only decrease. One of the solutions to prevent it is to let another person carry some of the responsibilities for you, for example, the order fulfillment process.

Order fulfillment is a part of the supply chain, starting from an order being placed until the successful delivery. If you list them up, order fulfillment includes these processes: manage the inventory, process the order, decide and optimize the delivery route, communicate with customers, and make the proof of delivery.

The question is, is self-fulfillment still enough for you?

What is self-fulfillment

Self-fulfillment means that you do all the order fulfillment in-house, starting from the inventory to the shipping orders. Self-fulfillment is something you do when you start an ecommerce business.

The alternative to self-fulfillment is the outsourced fulfillment, when a third-party logistics (3PL) helps you with the order fulfillment.

You might can still use the self-fulfillment if:

• You can manage the inventory by yourself
• You have courier staff or drivers to do the delivery
• The demands on your product is not high and you can still manage them by yourself
• You don’t have the budget to outsource a 3PL company.

Meanwhile, these are the signs where you might want to use 3PL to do your order fulfillment:

• You don’t have enough storage for your inventory
• You have not enough staff to do the order fulfillment optimally
• You can’t invest in a warehouse facility
• You don’t have an app that help you on the delivery tracking

But remember, giving the best customer experience is your job. Choose it wisely.

Tips for self-fulfillment

Inventory

If you use a designated warehouse for managing your inventory, packing, and shipping the orders, place your storage near where most of your customers are, because the less the distance between your storage and the customer, the less the shipping fee.

Customer Communication

Time will not stop ticking. After an order is placed, you need to inform the customers when their order is received, dispatched, and shipped. Since all notifications are on your control, you can customize the timing of giving the notification yourself and make use of it to build the customers’ trust on your service.

Delivery

Find the fastest & the cheapest route in order to deliver all the orders per day. Our ecommerce platform modules, Genkidriver, can help provide the most efficient and optimal route for your drivers to deliver all orders you assigned to them. Moreover, you can track their performance in real time. You will know the number of orders left to be delivered by the drivers.

Don’t forget that the success of order fulfillment is graded by the customers. If you are able to fulfill all their demands, that will lead to your own success. 

We provide the ecommerce module, Genkidriver, for the optimization of delivery service, and it is directed for sellers who have their own drivers to do the delivery for them. Besides recommending the shortest route, the drivers can notify the customers when they are about to deliver their orders using the Genkidriver mobile application, and build their trust in your service.

If you want to know more about Genkidriver, you can check the previous post: What is Genkidriver?