With your average consumer becoming more welcoming towards shopping online, e-commerce development has been higher than ever in terms of growth. This has also led to the rise of up-and-coming B2B services for e-commerce vendors. Be it warehouses, fulfillment centers, shipping providers or full-fledged e-commerce solutions with everything under one roof, e-commerce businesses are spoilt for choice when it comes to partnering up with a service to scale their business.
A reliable fulfillment partner can seriously decrease your daily workload!
With a ton of options at hand, it can be a bit daunting to ensure that your business is teaming up with the right one, especially if you are unsure of the deciding factors that go into play. Luckily, we have come up with a list of those factors that would be beneficial to consider whether a particular e-commerce solution provider is the right fit for your business.
1. Keeping control of your business
The reputation of your business within your industry and its position in the market didn’t just come by luck. It was the result of your hard work, dedication, and focus. From product development to marketing, you have left no stone unturned in providing a valuable product to your customer. However, many fulfillment centers do not appreciate the time and effort entrepreneurs put into their business and their willingness to get involved regardless of who their business partners up with. You might not want to relinquish control of such a crucial part of your business just because it has outgrown its current storage and fulfillment strategies. 
That being said, it is a well-known fact that e-commerce solution providers do have the right expertise and equipment to meet your requirements. Outsourcing your e-commerce logistics is still a good shout when it comes to scaling your business. Your concerns over losing control can be addressed while searching for a third-party e-commerce solutions provider. Firstly, you need to ensure your service provider allows you to be able to track your inventory in real time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This enables you to be on top of your operations and know exactly how your products are moving along the supply chain.
2. Start-Up Cost Expenses
Signing a contract with a fulfillment center does come with its initial costs to cover on-boarding, receiving inventory and storage. However, inefficiencies involved in this part lead to these fulfillment centers having higher costs, which are then transferred over to their clients. Hence, one of the red flags you might want to keep an eye out for is a ridiculously high initial fee. Efficient fulfillment centers have their entire on-boarding process streamlined so that every cog in the system performs to its maximum potential.
Additionally, if you end up going for a different service provider for every step of your fulfillment process, you are looking at a major dent to your budget. Every center will have their own setup costs at the start of the contract, and you still need to ensure that the communication between all these centers is as accurate and timely as possible to avoid any delays. Your chances of orders getting misplaced get significantly higher as well since your inventory might be transferred between various locations before finally reaching your customer. The bottom line? This will not save your business money. An ideal and reliable service provider for you would be the one which can manage your entire fulfillment under a single roof, and their efficient processes reflects on their lower costs they provide to you as well.
3. Order (mis)Management
Managing orders is more than just ensuring your orders reach on time. Your e-commerce business has taught you this for a long time. Order management needs to be accurate, efficient, and fast – all at the same time. Add returned orders on top of that and you’ve got yourself a real challenge. This is also your chance to assess your service providers competence.
Ask them questions about the kind of strategies they have implemented to ensure accurate processing, such as automation and different methods of verification. Next, ask them about how they handle returned orders with the aim to reuse items and minimizing waste while also ensuring that your business is adhering to all regulations.
4. Integration with your website
One of the main reasons you have probably realized you need to outsource your logistics and fulfillment is that your e-commerce website inventory needs to be synchronized with the actual status of your inventory. Real time synchronization is a vital tool to avoid any mishaps such as a customer ordering an out-of-stock item due to lack of inventory updates. 
An ideal fulfillment center will offer you seamless integration for your entire inventory, regardless of the platform your website is designed on. Whether you sell few niche ranges of products on Shopify or have a multi-vendor store which is custom-built, a reliable service provider will provide a flexible integration regardless of scale and responsive troubleshooting to address technical errors as well.
5. Flexibility
Not every product you sell must go through the same steps of order processing. Your fulfillment requirements may vary from particular methods of picking and packing, fragile items or precious goods. These requirements can be existing or new depending how you branch out your inventory and explore new additions to your e-commerce catalogue. Unfortunately, not many fulfillment centers understand this.
Before signing any contract with a third-party vendor, it’s best to ensure that the team actually understands and listens to the requirements and concerns you address to them. You should also ensure the solutions they present are flexible in terms of scalability and customization. Their plan to handle your inventory should be custom-tailored to cater to the success and growth of your e-commerce business. It is probably a good idea to see if the center has worked with a similar product as yours or with a diverse past clientele to give you the peace of mind that they will comfortably handle your products as well.
Choose a business partner that supports you at each step of the journey.
At the end of the day, any e-commerce fulfillment center you sign up with must ensure that they closely pay attention to your inventory and handle it with the same care as yourself. Consider the pros and cons and carefully lay out and set benchmarks to be your deciding factors. This will also allow you to understand how you could turn these potential hurdles into advantages. To find the right solution for your e-commerce business’s fulfillment needs, get in touch with us!